Made In America - Bill Bryson [198]
So there you have it, my child – they come from eminent inventors. But no, Stall then abruptly switches tack and launches into a discussion of corn-stalks and their tassels, with oblique references to Papa and Mama Shad, birds and eggs, oaks and acorns, and other such natural processes, but without so much as a hint as to how any of them manage to regenerate. Then, as a kind of cooling-down exercise after all this heady candour, he provides a brief sermon.
For young men, the great anxiety was masturbation, a term coined in a British medical journal in 1766 in an article entitled ‘Onanism: A Treatise on the Disorders Produced by Masturbation’. The origins of the term are puzzling. The Oxford English Dictionary says that it comes from the Latin masturbārī, but then calls that a term of ‘unkn. origin’. The verb form masturbate didn’t arise until 1857, but by that time the world had come up with any number of worrisome-sounding alternatives – selfish celibacy, solitary licentiousness, solitary vice, self-abuse, personal uncleanliness, self-pollution and the thunderous crime against nature. By whatever name it went, there was no question that indulgence in it would leave you a juddering wreck. According to Dr William Alcott’s A Young Man’s Guide (1840) those who succumbed to temptation could confidently expect to experience, in succession, epilepsy, St Vitus’s dance, palsy, blindness, consumption, apoplexy, ‘a sensation of ants crawling from the head down along the spine’ and finally death.18
As late as 1913 the American Medical Association published a book that explained that spermin, a constituent of semen, was necessary for the building of strong muscles and a well-ordered brain, and that boys who wasted this precious biological elixir would turn from ‘hard-muscled, fiery-eyed, resourceful young men’ into ‘narrow-chested, flabby-muscled mollycoddles’.19
For women, ignorance was not just confined to matters sexual. Conventional wisdom had it that members of the fair sex should not be exposed to matters that might tax their fragile and flighty minds. Even as enlightened an observer as Thomas Jefferson believed that females should not ‘wrinkle their foreheads with politics’ or excite their susceptible passions overmuch with books and poetry, but rather should confine themselves to ‘dancing, drawing, and music.’20
Recounting the difficulties of trying to bring a liberal education to young women, Emma Willard, founder of the Troy Female Seminary, the first true American girls’ school, noted how parents had covered their faces and fled a classroom ‘in shame and dismay’ when they found one of the pupils drawing a picture of the human circulatory system on a blackboard.21
If by some miracle a woman managed to acquire a little learning, she was not expected to share it with the world. An influential manual, A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters, cautioned its young readers, ‘If you happen to have any learning, keep it a profound secret, especially from the men.’22 When in 1828 Fannie Wright gave a series of public lectures, the nation’s press was at first shocked and then outraged. A newspaper in Louisville accused her of committing ‘an act against nature’. The New York Free Enquirer declared that she had ‘with ruthless violence broken loose from the restraints of decorum’. The New York American decided that she had ‘ceased to be a woman’ by her actions.23 No one objected to the content of the lectures, you understand, merely that it was issuing