Made In America - Bill Bryson [200]
Pressing the fight for woman’s suffrage, Woodhull ran for President in 1872 as the candidate of the Equal Rights Party. (Her running mate was the freed slave Frederick Douglass.) Soon afterwards, she moved to England, married an aristocrat, got religion and recanted almost everything. She devoted much of the energies of her later years to trying to persuade newspapers to throw out their files of her earlier utterances.
By this time, however, others had rushed to fill the vacuum created by her departure. The forthrightness with which many of these early feminists put their views seems astonishingly out of keeping with our usual perception of the age. Angela Heywood launched a spirited campaign for free love in which she made the universal acceptance of the word fuck a central tenet. Why should she be compelled to use the term ‘generative sexual intercourse’ in her lectures? she repeatedly asked. ‘Three words, 27 letters, to define a given action ... commonly spoken in one word of four letters that everybody knows the meaning of.’26
No less unexpectedly, the most vociferous exponents of free love and other radical practices were to be found not in Boston or New York, but out on the prairies in places like Iowa, Kansas and Illinois. The most radical freethinking newspaper, Lucifer, was based in Valley Falls, Kansas. It is worth noting, however, that even among the most committed bastions of libertarianism sexual enlightenment was a sometimes elusive quality. Even here it was widely believed that masturbation dangerously ‘thinned the blood and destroyed vital energy’. Many in the free love movement supported uninhibited sexual intercourse between men and women not because of its inherent virtues, but simply because it prevented masturbation.27
Never before nor since, in short, has there been a more confused and bewildering age. To read on the one hand the New York Times castigating women for saying ‘what a cunning hat’ and on the other Angela Heywood publicly arguing for the right to say ‘fuck’, it is all but impossible to believe that we are dealing with the same people in the same country in the same century.
Much the same paradox obtained with sex. In no other time in history has sex been so rampantly suppressed or so widely available. In 1869 it was estimated that Philadelphia had 12,000 prostitutes, and Chicago 7,000. No estimates appear to have been made for New York, but it is known that the city had over 620 brothels. For the less adventurous there was a huge stockpile of pornography (from Greek terms meaning literally ‘harlot writing’ and coined in England in 1854) in both words and pictures.
Many terms associated with illicit sex are very old. Bordello (from an Old French word for a small hut), brothel (from the Old English brēothan, meaning derelict), whore (another Old English word), strumpet, harlot, bawdy house and street walker all comfortably predate the Pilgrims. Throughout the nineteenth century prostitutes were also commonly known as flappers, a term resurrected for fast girls in the 1920s and gay women or gays. How gay then became attached to homosexuals is uncertain. We know approximately when it happened – the late 1960s – but no one appears to know why or by what reasoning. No less mysterious is one of the more unattractive epithets for homosexuals, faggot. In its homophobic sense, the term is an Americanism first recorded in 1905, but beyond that almost nothing is known. In England, faggot and its diminutive fag have had a multiplicity of meanings, from a slang term for a cigarette, to feeling fatigued, to being burned at the stake. The American usage may