Structuring the sexual revolution

ConclusionThe explosion of sexuality We have seen how ideas of the repression of sexual energies within a sex-economic framework, the revolt of sexuality incarnated in youth and the struggle to control/educate children's sexuality, the revolt of women due to greater independence, and the scientizing of the world of morals were brought together to produce the idea of the sexual revolution - a specific interpretation of undeniable changes in mores and behavior. While it might seem that the net has been cast rather widely in describing this complex of ideas, it is my contention that all these themes, seemingly contradictory though they may be, were present in the thought of those formulating the idea of the sexual revolution. (One statement by Calverton shows the synthesis: In the revolt of youth, connected as it is with the economic independence of modern woman, the bankruptcy of the old system of marriage, the decay of the bourgeoisie as a social class, we have the dynamic beginnings of a sexual revolution growing out of the economic background of social struggle.)But the idea of a sexual revolution had another element, touched upon at the beginning of this essay, namely the belief that a distinction could be made between revolutionary and non-revolutionary times in moral history. This belief was no doubt derived from the Marxist orientation toward revolutionary times that the writers we have studied shared. But can such a discontinuous change, a spurt in evolution in which quantity becomes quality, be supposed to have happened, when we have enough records of people suggesting that there was a sexual revolution - a startling and cataclysmic disruption, to use Schur's words - underway in 1925 (Lindsey), 1927 (Darmstadt et al.), 1929 (Schmalhausen), 1936 (Reich), 1930–1955 (Hirsch), 1956 (Sorokin), 1964 (Schur), and 1966 (Reiss; Kirkendall and Libby)? To some extent, yes. There is indication of great changes in sexual behavior at certain times (though it is hard to separate age, cohort, and period effects); there was an increase in at least educated females' incidence of premarital intercourse in the 1920s. Furthermore, there are clear differences in the amount of attention paid to sexuality, and to sexual mores, during different periods. At the very least, merely the belief that one is in the midst of a sexual revolution is an important datum, for it may point to changes in extremely ideologically sensitive portions of the population (e.g., middle-class women) or to the attempt to legitimize already existing patterns of behavior.However, the writers contributing to the idea of the sexual revolution never gave very plausible explanations as to why the change from normal to revolutionary times should have happened when it did. The suggested causes have generally been continuous, and not immediately preceding the times believed to be sexual revolutions. Women's entry into the labor force followed a roughly exponential curve from 1900 to the present, the orientation of the economy toward service-sector production, as well as the increase in disposable income was, aside from the depression-war period, basically uninterrupted, and the pace of technological change certainly never slackened.The oven-ready idea of the sexual revolution I have made it clear that I think that this idea of a sexual revolution was available for people in the 1960s and 1970s - both as commentators and as actors - to use in interpreting current changes or perceived changes, and that this idea suggested the relevance of certain explanatory factors and not others. Furthermore, this conceptual vocabulary was available to interpret previous changes (such as when Shorter writes of the increase of intimacy in the nineteenth century, The libido unfroze in the blast of the wish to be free, and attributes it to the effects of increased participation in the market).Why were the same causal factors we found given as explanations for the first sexual revolution (change in economic imperatives, emancipation of women due to labor-force participation, new knowledge and contraception, the emancipation of youth due to technological change and independence from adult authority) so often invoked to explain the second sexual revolution? It certainly might be, as Steven Seidman has argued, that there was one century-long revolution involving a constant set of causes. There is, I think, a great deal of truth to this, but we must bear in mind, as Beth Bailey said, that the term sexual revolution is not a mere scholarly classification, but a term used by contemporaries who experienced a period as being different, and there may still be significant discontinuity to explain. I suspect that rather than there being one long revolution (or better, evolution) that had these constant causes, during periods of public display of new sexual mores among the middle class - mores that might have been silently changing for some time - people tended to think in terms of a sexual revolution, and with the idea of the sexual revolution, these supposed causes were predisposed to reappear.The use of the idea of the sexual revolution led to two related confusions, one stemming from the Leninist-voluntarist understanding of what constituted a revolution, and the other from the orthodox-determinist understanding, each confusing sexual change with a model of revolution. The first confusion was between, on the one hand, the importance of widespread change in sexual ethics and behavior, and, on the other, the role of self-professed sexual revolutionaries and reformers. The second was between, on the one hand, the freeing of previously repressed sexuality (again, of women and adolescents), and, on the other, change in the economic substructure.Regarding the first, the term sexual revolution, as we have seen, was coined by self-professed revolutionaries of a distinctly Leninist stripe, self-styled modernists who believed that the force of history was on their side, but who also believed in the utility of forceful agitation by the vanguard for reform. The most important effect of the adoption of the idea of revolution was to preserve this double-idea: a revolution implied both widespread or secular change (in contrast to the rebellion of a few pioneers) and also a radical overturning of previously existing order (along the lines of the programme of the rebels and pioneers). Because of this understanding of what a sexual revolution should be, sociologists and other social analysts could, on the one hand, dismiss claims that there had been a sexual revolution by pointing to the incomplete overthrow of monogamous, heterosexual marriage as the dominant pattern and norm. On the other hand, discussions of the sexual revolution tended to focus on the avant-garde of sexual nonconformism, assuming that there was some important connection between the struggles of far-sighted rebels and the secular change that undoubtedly occurred.But this voluntarist-Leninist understanding of what constitutes revolution was complimented by the other side of the concept of sexual revolution, namely revolution as inevitable secular change deeply rooted in changing economic imperatives. Like the modernists, analysts of the second sexual revolution have tended to assume that if anyone's sexuality was liberated, it was that of women and youth. Even among those who noted the equivocal nature of the freedom granted by increased permissiveness, the fundamental notion of (women's and youths') sexuality waiting to be freed (or even better, waiting for the right moment to free itself) narrowed the range of what substructural changes would be pointed to - they were those that would, it was believed, make it less costly for a pre-existing female or youthful desire for extramarital sex to be expressed. So once again, women's entry into the paid labor force was taken to explain the sexual revolution (for example, Ira Reiss: Economic autonomy reduces dependence on others and makes sexual assertiveness a much less risky procedure).However there was a catch - sociologists knew that female labor-force participation had been rising at a relatively stable (though exponential) rate since the first World War. While the 1960s did see an increase in the rate of change, it was not so large as to explain a revolution.. So explanations turned to the category of working women that seemed to be growing the fastest, namely working mothers. Unfortunately, there are some obvious problems with pointing to the significance of working mothers. The first is, of course, that it simply doesn't fit well with the idea that independent income leads to fearless sexual experimentation, which remained the dominant explanatory model. (For example, while D'Emilio and Freedman point to the importance of the rise in working mothers, recognizing that women without children had been steadily entering the labor force for some time, the influence of women's work that they speak of seems to assume singleness, not motherhood.) Ira Reiss tried to solve this problem by claiming that the employed mother played a key role in the sexual revolution that began in the late 1960s, because (1) her children had a greater variety of role models and were therefore more autonomous, and (2) they had a more expanded notion of female autonomy. This, however, undermines the argument connecting independence and assertiveness: if having a working mother expands a son's vision of women's autonomy, then why would assertiveness on women's part still be risky? But if having a working mother only expands a daughter's vision of women's autonomy, then her sexual autonomy would still be risky, and so this factor makes no difference.The second problem with emphasizing the increase in working mothers as opposed to single women is that even here careful scrutiny of the numbers belies the argument being made. If the significance of employed mothers comes from the role models they present to their young children who are learning gender roles, it is in the 1950s (at the latest) that this increase must have taken place (and thus the growth of labor-force participation of mothers with young children in the late 1960s is irrelevant). But the percentage of women with young children who were in the labor force only grew by one fourth over the decade. The bulk of the increased labor-force participation in this period came from women over forty-five - they may have been mothers, but their children were not so impressionable.The other deep change in the substructure that supposedly accounts for the sexual revolution has to do with a shift in the economy from production to consumption. This confused thesis generally and quite incorrectly maintains that there was an identifiable shift in the emphasis of the economy from savings to consumption, and that capitalism's need to find new markets explains bar culture and adult bookstores. This major shift seems to have occurred in the 1920s to cause the first sexual revolution, (D'Emilio and Freedman, Kevin White), reappeared in the 1950s to prop up the nuclear family with a new domesticity (Seidman), and then finished things off in the sixties and seventies as the completion of the turn towards consumerism (in Weeks's words), led to the increased permissiveness associated with the sexual revolution and the rise of the sexual marketplace (Weeks, Seidman). It is beyond the scope of this article to explain the genesis of this particular idea; suffice it to say that it comes from the basic dialectical materialist assumption that a revolution in sex must at least directly parallel changes in the requirements of the economic substructure.Of course, it wasn't simply changes in the economy that made sexual assertiveness less risky according to explanations of the second sexual revolution; it was also new contraceptive technology and knowledge. The sexual revolution probably could not have occurred without the pill, writes Linda Grant; the pill liberated women's desires, turning [women] into sexual beings. Were sexuality truly lurking under its cover, trying to get out, this would make sense, but as Bailey and Reiss remind us, Kinsey found that moral reservations, not fear of pregnancy, were the biggest factor in leading women not to have premarital sex. While there is no need to ignore the differences between the pill and previous forms of contraception, those previous forms seemed effective enough for analysts of the 1920s to attribute that sexual revolution to them, and effective enough to lead to a dramatic decrease in birth-rate before the invention of the pill.Finally, the conception of sexuality wanting to be let out led once more to the assumption that scientific information about the body and sexuality was inherently pro-sexual, and that this new information (now it became Masters and Johnson, or Kinsey, instead of Freud) increased sexual permissiveness. This emphasis on the effects of scientific knowledge also seems quite misplaced; it is more likely, as Gagnon and Smith have argued, that the significant knowledge was social knowledge, that is, knowledge of what people were already doing that destroyed the pluralistic ignorance (in Allport's term) that supported the idea of stability in sexual mores and behavior. (The emphasis on scientific knowledge as being inherently liberatory was a particularly interesting bit of cultural amnesia, for in the nineteenth-century European scene, those seeking sexual liberation did so not through a scientific discourse, but through a discourse of sin and the transcendence of morality. The significance of such non-scientific attention to sexuality on the history of behavior was erased by the modernist mind.)To summarize, the idea of a sexual revolution to some degree preserved a protean explanatory framework merely through its juxta-position of sexual and revolution, where revolution had vaguely Marxist-Leninist connotations. This framework naturally unfolded when people began to ask what had caused the revolution, and whether or not there truly was a revolution, and has since become the dominant framework for interpreting sexual change. A perfect example is the work of Steven Seidman, one of the foremost sociological analysts of sexual history, and someone who tends to be wary of simplistic materialist explanations. He discusses the entrance of women into the paid labor force, arguing that the contradiction between their growing economic empowerment and political subordination prompted women's demands for social and sexual autonomy including the legitimation of eroticism. Then he concludes, Capitalism, changing gender roles [due to the above], technological changes in contraception and birth control, and the broader processes of social and political liberalization contributed to the making of the twentieth century American intimate culture. Yet, social change is not the result of abstract social processes, but is merely made by people ... [and so] the roles of sex reformers and rebels were critical to sexual change in twentieth century America. Aside from the appended effects of general social liberalization (which might be seen as making the more materialistic causes redundant), we see the usual suspects despite any clear reasons why any of them are linked to their effects (why, for example, would economic empowerment lead women to call for the legitimation of eroticism?).This explanation is only comprehensible against the background of an understanding of what a sexual revolution is, i.e., one coming from the combination of Marxist-Leninist and Freudian-vitalist ideas leading to the expectation of witnessing a combination of deep, long-term, secular economic effects and the sudden discontinuous self-freeing of the repressed sexuality of youths and women. This is not simply the tendency of the sociological imagination to link any and all things to the development of capitalism, for the emphasis on discontinuity led analysts then to look for local causes (often those associated with sexual rebels - a prime example is the influence of the civil-rights movement or the second World War) to explain the timing. In both the case of the fundamental economic causes and that of the local sparks, there was a parochial attempt to explain changes that were clearly international with causes that were purely national in scope (the arguments based on economic change cannot be applied to Weimar Germany, for example).Finally, while substantiating such a claim would certainly be outside of the bounds of this article, I suggest that it is quite plausible that the preexisting idea of what a sexual revolution is affected not only how later analysts interpreted the second sexual revolution, but also how people as actors interpreted changes they lived through. While actors probably did not stress continuous economic factors as did later analysts, for both, when cultural elements were taken into account, it was the discovery of new scientific information that had (naturally) set sex free at last (many contemporary accounts by protagonists of the sexual revolution stress the illuminating information from Masters and Johnson - in contrast to the repressive effects of Freudianism!). The sexual revolution was about knowledge, liberation of the body, and economic change - not changing values or other cultural elements (even though, as we have seen above, it seems most likely that it was precisely cultural values that changed, since moral reservations were the biggest check to female premarital sex before the second sexual revolution). And sociological analysis has shared this blindness - only a few (Daniel Bell for one) argued that autonomous cultural developments were revolutionizing society. When we take a step back, sociologists have been satisfied with extremely vague and dubious explanations as to the relationship between economic development and sexual revolutions - explanations that seem to have a great deal of truth in them, but that are grounded in particular constructions of what a sexual revolution should look like.

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