Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [427]
Avoiding spirits and highly seasoned “flesh-meat” was an aid to sexual abstinence as well, as Graham told an enthusiastic audience at New York’s American Lyceum (in a talk later published as a Lecture to Young Men [1834]). Male orgasms, he warned, were inherently destructive; the loss of vital semen lowered men’s life force, making them easy prey to diabetes, jaundice, consumption, and premature death. Sex was as bad for business as it was for health. Reckless “spending” of sperm could lead to financial as well as moral and physiological bankruptcy. Properly subdued, however, sexuality, like nature, could be made useful—its energies harnessed, accumulated, put to productive purposes.
Unfortunately a saturnalia of carnality was underway in the city. The locus of the problem was the all-male boardinghouses where growing numbers of country boys and immigrant youths were lodged, unsupervised by family, church, or community. These single young men, freed from constraints, drank in saloons, visited brothels, and practiced self-abuse (a “loathsome and beastly habit” that produced debility, weakness, dyspepsia, impotency, and “masturbatory insanity”). Such practices, moreover, were being picked up by children of the higher classes, transmitted via the debasing influence of servants or through the schools, where youths learned filthy habits from their peers.
Continence was the only answer. Sex was to be avoided before one got married—in one’s late twenties or thirties; interim masturbatory relief was strictly enjoined. Even with the conjugal state safely attained, sexuality was best proscribed.
The pursuit of sexual self-discipline became the subject of a flood of self-help books, tracts, manuals, and magazine articles addressed to males (passionlessness was presumed to come naturally to women). Abstinence, like temperance, was presented as a prescription for personal, social, and financial well-being. Alas, the theory availed its progenitor little: for all his careful rationing of intake and outflow, Sylvester Graham suffered a nervous breakdown in 1837 and spent the rest of his life a semi-invalid.
Grahamites evoked ridicule, some hostile but most affable: vegetarianism and coldwater cures, after all, were voluntary affairs. But reformers did not settle for reining in their own bodies, and when they set out to discipline the sex lives of other New Yorkers, they provoked an uproar.
As Charles Finney was winding down his first New York City revival in the spring of 1830, John Robert McDowall arrived in town. A twenty-nine-year-old Amherst graduate and Princeton divinity student, McDowall spent the summer as an American Tract Society missionary, with Arthur Tappan covering his expenses. Dispatched to the Five Points, he visited slum cellars, distributed Scripture, taught Sunday school classes, and gave temperance lectures. McDowall also began visiting brothels, where he led prayer meetings and remonstrated with the women and their customers.
McDowall also started a Sunday school and Bible class in New York’s almshouse and prisons, with access arranged by Finneyite supporter Anson Phelps. Pious genteel women, many recently converted by Finney, taught in these classes, led prayer meetings, and, like McDowall, developed a particular interest in the problems of female convicts, most of whom were prostitutes.
In 1831 McDowall and his female adherents launched the New-York Magdalen Society with funding provided by Arthur Tappan and his male evangelical associates. The society opened a house of refuge for penitent prostitutes in the Five Points, modeled on the famous Magdalen Asylum in London, with McDowall as curate and on-site superintendent to “the daughters of guilt and sorrow.”
The Magdalens quickly ran into trouble. In the summer of 1831 McDowall issued a shocking pamphlet declaring that New York City had been overrun with harlots—ten thousand of them. Nor was their clientele limited