252 BOOK REVIEWS

discipline, for example, what help can Faller’s method give to detecting the mythologiz-
ing of prominent figures in a political campaign; to comparing the mythology of crime
in congressionalenquiries and in detective novels; to finding the rationalizations in policies
that maintain perpetual conflicts, say, in hospital administration compared to business
corporations; to justifying the death penalty for some crimes and not others; to detect-
ing the self-serving themes in arguments for patently unethical medical research? On
such topics sociopoetics should open old arguments, wounds, and cans of worms, in
a way that the modern techniques of social investigation cannot. And then, perhaps,
sociopoetics may help close down some truth-distortion factories in our myth-making
industry; and retrieve the wit, gracious expression, and civilizing charm of well-
intentioned thinkers, like Faller, who seek more substantial truth than myths allow.

Journal of fhe History of fhe Behavioral Sciences

Volume 25, July 1989

John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman. Intimate Matters: A History of SexuaZity in

America. New York: Harper and Row, 1987. xx + 428 pp. $24.95 (cloth) (Reviewed
by Roy Porter)
Over the last generation, far more scholars have warned us of the conceptual com-
plexities of construing the history of sexuality (a very different project, Michel Foucault
emphasized, from the history of sex), than have actually accomplished such a history.
Even had Foucault lived to complete his own magnum opus, it would at best have been
a flawed masterpiece, since there is little sign that he was willing to go beyond sexual
discourse as contained in sexological manuals and explore sexuality as attitude and ac-
tivity in society at large. John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman have attempted this
larger ambition for no less than 350 years of American history, and the outcome is a
magnificent success. They draw heavily (and generously) upon existing scholarship, while
constructing a seamless narrative and a consistent analysis. They show admirable judg-
ment in their astute allocation of space to mainline attitudes, to critical currents, and
to numerically small, but ideologically significant, minority cults (such as the Oneida
community). And, above all, they recognize the overall synthetic interpretation of the
dynamics of change that they are advocating is best established not by abstract asser-
tion but by creating a rich tissue of significant detail.
The base point for this study is the sexual ideology- one simultaneously religious,
moral, social, legal, and pragmatic- which made sense to the seventeenth-century col-
onists of the New World. A tiny community at the Divine mercy, in an alien land, the
colonists’ attitudes towards sex were predominantly godly and pronatalist . Sex ought
to take place within marriage for the purpose of extending the multiplying families. It
was part of the divine plan that procreative sex within established socio-legal bonds should
be pleasurable. It was equally obvious that sex outside marriage, and especially non-
procreative sex (masturbation, sodomy, and so on) was wrong; the moral communities
of New England saw it was their duty to punish sexual lapses (the more “aristocratic”
mores of the Chesapeake colonies were less strict, at least with the lapses of males).
Traditional attitudes of this nature still, of course, attract a powerful “moral ma-
jority” following, as being the true, “American” way of life. The strength of D’Emilio
and Freedman’s analysis lies in demonstrating how socio-economic developments have
progressively undermined and marginalized procreation as definitive of American sex-
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ual practice, if not of ideals, principles, prejudices, and hypocrisy. The key lies in the
dynamics of market capitalism.
Economic transformation-especially the rise of the big city and of the frontier-
steadily undermined the family as the unit of economic production. Wherever and
whenever this happened, the individual wage-earning producer was bound to seek
commodity-gratification in sex, within a framework of consumer values that increas-
ingly promoted the pleasures which money could command. Prostitution was the most
conspicuous late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century manifestation of this steady divorce
between the recreational and procreational dimensions of sex. But such shifts can also
be seen in the growth of premarital sex amongst the working classes in the nineteenth
century, in the increasing resort to birth control and abortion amongst the middle classes,
and (in the present century) in the “coming out” of minority groups, such as gays.
All such developments embody similar forces. In each case, the decline in initial
social homogeneity and the emergence of market stimuli -dance halls, automobiles, and
so on- have jointly provided the opportunities for sexual diversification. And, in each
case, sexual change, rebellion even, has been justified in terms of the cherished ideals
of self-realization and self-improvement. Nineteenth-century middleclass New Englanders
who practiced birth control still valued family life, but they valued quality over quan-
tity, and spiritualized sex, as the true expression of love, above the traditional “family
duties” of the matrimonial tie. This century, as sexological reports since Kinsey have
increasingly stressed, the emphasis lies upon the right and duty of the individual- rather
than the married couple-to find sexual fulfillment wherever he, or she, may. As D’Emilio
and Freedman demonstrate, there is a radical discordance between cherished traditional
sexual morality, and consumer sexual behavior, as demanded by the market. The sale
of contraceptives and of pornography afford important instances. “Liberal” solutions
to these dilemmas, such as the individual sexual autonomy of the “sexual revolution”
of the 1960s, bred their own contradictions and forms of false consciousness, in ways
the women’s movement is now beginning to explore and experience.
Every reader will wish to take issue with certain facets of the interpretation or the
balance of the materials presented here. This reviewer was surprised to find rather little
attention devoted to the impact of Freudian ideas and the spread of popular psychology
and psychiatry in the present century. I would equally have liked to see more analysis
of the sexual teachings of the different religious denominations, and discussion of the
degree to which immigrant populations retained their Old World sexual attitudes. And
here comparison with contemporary developments in Britain, France, Germany, or Scan-
dinavia would have been welcome.
Still, this book is remarkable not for its omissions but for all that is successfully
digested and luminously analyzed. Full of choice quotations and often poignant detail,
and written in a lucid prose, this work is bound to become the definitive survey of
American sexual history for years to come.