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Private Acts/Public Policy: Alfred Kinsey, the American Law Institute and the Privatization of American Sexual Morality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

David Allyn
David Allyn
Affiliation:
lecturer in the Department of History, Princeton University, Dickinson Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544, U.S.A.
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Extract

Alfred Kinsey has long been recognized for his crucial role in the history of American sexual science. Kinsey's massive studies of American sexual behavior changed the way social scientists studied sexuality by breaking from the accepted social hygienic, psychoanalytic, psychiatric and physiological approaches. Scholars have noted that Kinsey's efforts paved the way for the work of Masters and Johnson and contributed to a postwar climate of “openness” about sexual behavior. In effect, Kinsey's studies signaled the final triumph of scientific candor over the nineteenth century “conspiracy of silence.” Furthermore, Kinsey's quantitative approach advanced what Paul Robinson has called the “modernization of sex,” and Kinsey's discussion of homosexuality inspired both the homophile movement of the 1950's and the anti-homosexual moral panic of the same decade. Yet for all of Kinsey's significance, his part in shaping the social policies of the 1950's and the “sexual revolution” of the 1960's has received surprisingly little historical analysis.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 30 , Issue 3 , December 1996 , pp. 405 - 428
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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References

1 I would like to thank Donald Fleming, Allan Brandt, Stephan Thernstrom, Henry Abelove, Peter Kuznick and Jennifer Allyn for their comments on this paper. I would also like to thank the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University and the Rockefeller Archive Center for providing grants that made much of this research possible. An early draft of this paper was presented at the 1995 Cheiron Conference on the History of the Behavioral and Social Sciences as part of a special symposium on Alfred Kinsey.

2 For discussions of Kinsey, see Robinson, Paul, The Modernization of Sex (New York: Harper, 1977), 42–119Google Scholar; Irvine, Janice, Disorders of Desire: Sex and Gender in Modern American Sexology (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 31–66Google Scholar; Pomeroy, Wardell, Dr. Kinsey and the Institute for Sex Research (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972)Google Scholar; Morantz, Regina Markell, “The Scientist as Sex Crusader: Alfred C. Kinsey and American Culture,” American Quarterly 29 (1977), 563–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Freedman, Estelle and D'Emilio, John, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 285–95Google Scholar; Weeks, Jeffrey, Sexuality and Its Discontents: Meanings, Myths and Modern Sexualities (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; D'Emilio, John, Sexual Politics/Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 33–37, 42–43, 93–95Google Scholar; Bullough, Vern, Science in the Bedroom: A History of Sex Research (New York: Basic, 1994), 168–85Google Scholar.

3 Even the largely successful social hygiene campaign of the early twentieth century, committed to informing the citizenry about the dangers of syphilis, had held onto a notion of public morality, which made it impossible to promote the use of prophylactics in the prevention of veneral disease. See Brandt, Allan, No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States Since 1880 (New York: Oxford, 1987)Google Scholar. The papers of Ben Reitman at the University of Illinois at Chicago Center vividly illustrate the resistance of social hygienists to prophylactic measures. Reitman, Emma Goldman's lover, tirelessly promoted prophylaxis as a means of venereal disease prevention, but he was rebuffed and rebuked by social hygiene and government agencies.

4 I think that the term “mercantilist” serves as a useful description of the moral economy of the United States from the 1870's to World War II, a period in which the state actively encouraged certain forms of sexual exchange and discouraged others.

5 See Robinson, 42–119 for the most thorough analysis of Kinsey's work. In particular, Robinson points out Kinsey's democratic impulse.

6 Eventually intellectuals and experts would abandon this effort to distinguish between the two; for a brief moment in the early 1970's they would embrace all forms of sexual expression, public and private alike. But this enthusiasm was quickly challenged by both the right and the left. The right demanded a return to private sexuality and public morals. The left, on the other hand, greeted the laissez-faire enthusiasm of the seventies with suspicion, noting the monopolization of the moral economy by heterosexual interests. Radical feminists offered a “socialist” alternative to the laissez-faire model: in which public sexual expression would be promoted, but carefully regulated by public opinion. For examples of socialist moral and sexual economics see Firestone, Shulamith, The Dialectic of Sex (New York: William Morrow, 1970)Google Scholar and Dworkin, Andrea, WomanHating (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1974)Google Scholar. Disagreement over what constitutes the private and public continue to shape American debates over “ outing,” sex clubs, and the Internet.

7 Aberle, Sophie and Corner, George Washington, Twenty-Five Years of Sex Research: History of the National Research Council for Research in Problems of Sex 1922–1947 (Philadelphia: Saunders, 1953), 3Google Scholar. On Oneida, see Guarneri, Carl J., The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth Century America (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1991)Google Scholar and Carden, Maren Lockwood, Oneida: Utopian Community to Modern Corporation (New York: Harper, 1971)Google Scholar.

8 Burnham, John, “The Progressive Era Revolution in American Attitudes Towards Sex,” Journal of American History 59 (03 1973), 886CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 An earlier study was conducted by Stanford University professor Clelia Duel Mosher but was never published. On the social hygiene movement, see Brandt, Allan, No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States since 1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

10 Aberle and Corner, 92–101.

11 Gersham Legman to R. L. Dickinson, Summer, 1939, Dickinson Papers, Countway Medical Library.

12 Aberle and Corner, 121.

13 Pomeroy, Wardell, Dr. Kinsey, 25–38Google Scholar.

14 Pomeroy, 52–3. The titles of the textbooks are Introduction to Biology, Workshop in Biology and Methods in Biology.

15 Pomeroy, 54. For a discussion of mid-century marriage education courses, see Bailey, Beth, From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1989), 119–140Google Scholar.

16 Pomeroy, 57.

17 Although the authors of Sexual Behavior and the Human Male were Alfred Kinsey, Wardell Pomeroy and Clyde Martin, I will refer to Kinsey as the primary author of the text. This is customary practice and reflects the fact that Kinsey was the director of, and leading force behind, the project.

18 Kinsey was roundly criticized for employing the grandiose title Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, when he systematically excluded Negro subjects from his survey of North American sexual behavior. I believe Kinsey's goal of highlighting American hypocrisy would have been undermined by including a Negro sample, given contemporary beliefs about Negro promiscuity. By studying only white males, Kinsey could accentuate the apparent hypocrisy of white America.

19 Kinsey, Alfred, Pomeroy, Wardel and Martin, Clyde, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1948), 5Google Scholar. Hereafter referred to as SBHM.

20 Kinsey, Alfred, Pomeroy, Wardel, Martin, Clyde and Gebhard, Paul, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (Philadelphia: W. B.Saunders, 1953), 646Google Scholar. Hereafter referred to as SBHF.

21 Kinsey, SBHM, 659–665.

22 Kinsey, SBHM, 677.

23 There were contradictions within Kinsey's own logic that he did not recognize, or at least acknowledge. While Kinsey pitted his realism against American moralism, he used social constructionist arguments when it suited him. In order to chastise moralists for being self-righteous and lacking in proper humility, he argued, “the scientific data which are accumulating make it appear that, if circumstances had been propitious, most individuals might have become conditioned in any direction, even into those activities which they now consider quite unacceptable.” Kinsey did not acknowledge that such a social constructionist view of human nature may be used to justify moral idealism. Kinsey, SBHM, 678.

24 Kinsey, SBHM, 392. Connecticut even criminalized heterosexual coitus in marriage if it involved the use of contraception. For an extensive discussion of this subject, see Garrow, David, Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade (New York: Macmillan, 1994)Google Scholar.

25 Kinsey, SBHM, 584.

26 Comstock, Anthony, Traps for the Young (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967, reprint)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See Broun, Heywood, Anthony Comstock: Roundsman of the Lord (New York: 1927)Google Scholar; de Grazia, Edward, Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius (New York: Vintage, 1992)Google Scholar; Boyer, Paul S., Purity in Print: The Vice-Society Movement and Book Censorship in America (New York: Scribner's 1968)Google Scholar; Pindar, David, Purity Crusade: Sexual Morality and Social Control 1868–1900 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1973)Google Scholar. Pindar uses “regulation” in the narrow sense of regulating rather than criminalizing prostitution; whereas, I use the term in its broader sense of state control over sexual exchange.

27 Kinsey, SBHM, 678.

28 The Institute for Sex Research collections, in fact, contain examples of stag films dating from 1915. For a history of the stag film, see Lauro, Al Di and Rabkin, Gerald, Dirty Movies: An Illustrated History of the Stag Film 1915–1970 (New York: Chelsea House, 1976)Google Scholar.

29 Testimony of Peter N. Chumbris, Associate Counsel, Hearings before the Sub-committee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency of the Committee of the Judiciary of the United States Senate, 84th Congress, 1955, 57.

30 Kinsey, SBHM, 165–173, 501.

31 Kinsey, SBHM, 237.

32 Samuel Steward papers, Muger Memorial Library, Boston University and John Preston papers, John Hay Library, Brown University. Kinsey had his photographer film Seward having sex with another male. See Steward, Samuel, “Dr. Kinsey Takes a Peak at S/M: A Reminiscence,” in Leatherfolk (Boston: Alyson Publications, 1991), 81–90Google Scholar. It is, of course, interesting that Kinsey did not include a discussion of s/m in SBHM.

33 Pomeroy, , Dr. Kinsey, 232–233Google Scholar. Kinsey waited with Paul Gebhard outside the men's room at Grand Central Station and measured the amount of time men spent in the washroom. Kinsey wished to illustrate to Gebhard the extent of the gay male underworld in New York.

34 Chauncy, George, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 207–225Google Scholar.

35 Chauncy, 195–201.

36 Kinsey, SBHM, 595–609. Compare these fourteen pages on prostitution with the fifty-six pages on homosexuality.

37 Kinsey noted more specifically, “Many groups interested in controlling non-marital sexual activities have centered their attention upon prostitution when, in actuality, it accounts for less than a tenth of the non-marital outlet of the male population,” SBHM, 597.

38 Kinsey's logic here contradicts his logic in other places in the Report. Whereas Kinsey argues that the statistical prevalence of homosexuality should deter officials from trying to control it, here he argues that the statistical infrequency of prostitution should make authorities ignore it. Presumably, if prostitution were common, then social hygiene agencies would be justified in using a great deal of resources to attack it. But Kinsey explicitly states that it would be futile to attack the common phenomenon of homosexuality. Kinsey's logical contradiction indicates his commitment to the deregulation of all sexual activity.

39 When Kinsey published his second report, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, in 1953 he did address question of public sexual expression. But he did so only in order to illustrate the fact that American women were entirely uninterested in pornography, voyeurism, exhibitionism, sex with male or female prostitutes and other public activities. Kinsey, SBHF, 649–671.

40 See Brandt, , No Magic BulletGoogle Scholar.

41 Albert Deutsch, “Daring Pioneer Conducts First Mass Study of Human Sex Habits,” clipping, 7 Jan. 1947; “Epic Survey of American Sex Life Will Shock Nation's Morals” clipping, 6 Jan. 1947, Series 200, Box 40, RG 1.1 Projects, Folder 458, Rockefeller Archive Center.

42 Llyod Potter, VP and Editor W. B. Saunders to Alan Gregg, Director, Rockefeller Foundation 28 May 1947; Alan Gregg to Lloyd Potter, VP and Editor W. B. Saunders, 2 June 1947, Series 200, Box 40, RG 1.1 Projects, Folder 458, Rockefeller Archive Center.

43 Yerkes to Alan Gregg, 17 July 1945, National Research Council, Series 200, Box 40, RG 1.1 Projects, Folder 457, Rockefeller Archive Center.

44 Robert Yerkes to Dr. L. H. Weed, Division of Medical Sciences, 26 Jan. 1946, National Research Council, Series 200, Box 40, RG 1.1 Projects, Folder 457, Rockefeller Archive Center.

45 Pomeroy, 282.

46 Alfred Kinsey to Robert Latou Dickinson, 20 Jan. 1948; Institute for the Study of Sex, Gender and Reproduction, Indiana University. See also Pomeroy, 265.

47 Natl. Research Council Research in Problems of Sex Report, 4 April 1951, Series 200, Box 28, RG 1.1 Projects, Folder 436, Rockefeller Archive Center.

48 Pomeroy, 304.

49 Robert Latou Dickinson, 27 May 1948; Institute for Research on Sex, Gender and Reproduction, Indiana University.

50 “Excerpts from Reviews of Kinsey, Pomeroy and Martin's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Showing Sociological Impact of Book,” National Research Group, 1.1 Projects, Series 200, Rockefeller Archive Center.

51 Deutsch, Albert, “What Dr. Kinsey is Up to Now!” Look, 8 05 1957Google Scholar.

52 Goldston, Iago, “So Noble an Effort Corrupted,” in Geddes, Donald Porter, ed., An Analysis of the Kinsey Reports on Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Female, (New York: New American Library, 1954), 41–48Google Scholar. Goldston wrote his article review after the publication of the second volume, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, but his remarks apply equally to the first.

53 Kubie, Lawrence S., “Psychiatric Implications of the Kinsey Report,” Psychosomatic Medicine 10, (03–04 1948)CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

54 Karl Menninger to Albert Deutsch, 12 May 1948; Institute for the Study of Sex, Gender and Reproduction, Indiana University.

55 “Psychiatrically Deviated Sex Offenders,” Committee on Forensic Psychiatry of the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, Report No. 9, May 1949, National Research Group, 1.1 Projects, Series 200, Rockefeller Archive Center.

56 Guttmacher, Manfred, “The Kinsey Report and Society,” Scientific Monthly 70, (05 1950), 291–294Google Scholar.

57 Ellis, Albert, Sex Life of the American Woman and the Kinsey Report (New York: Greenberg, 1954), 14Google Scholar.

58 Ellis, , Sex Life, 19Google Scholar. When Alan Gregg, director of the Rockefeller Foundation, read Ellis's first review of SBHM in the Journal of General Psychology, he wrote to Ellis, “Of all the reviews I have read it is the most discriminating, judicious, fair-minded and intelligent — indeed the quality of your review makes it extremely likely that no subsequent criticism will surpass it.” Alan Gregg to Albert Ellis, 3 Jan. 1949, Series 200, Box 40, RG 1.1 Projects, Folder 461, Rockefeller Archive Center.

59 The backing of the Rockefeller Foundation may have had much to do with the way in which Sexual Behavior in the Human Male was received. As one person wrote to the director of the Foundation, “Its formidable sponsorship seems to have intimidated the reviewers of the book. It were as if any adverse criticism would immediately brand one as Victorian.” Herbert Ratner, MD to Alan Gregg, 10 Feb. 1948, National Research Council, Series 200, Box 40, RG 1.1 Projects, Folder 459, Rockefeller Archive Center.

60 Ploscowe, Morris, Sex and the Law (NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1951)Google Scholar.

61 Reinhold Neibuhr, “Kinsey and the Moral Problem of Man's Sexual Life,” in Geddes, 62–70.

62 Pomeroy, , Dr. Kinsey, 283–306Google Scholar.

63 Ellis, Albert, “From the First to the Second Kinsey Report,” International Journal of Sexology 7, 64–72Google Scholar.

64 Ibid.

65 Irvine, Janice, Disorders of Desire, 64Google Scholar.

66 Natl. Research Council Research in Problems of Sex Report, 7 April 1954, Series 200, Box 38, RG 1.1 Projects, Folder 436, Rockefeller Archieve Center.

67 Pomeroy, 380; Irvine, 66.

68 Memorandum for the ALI Advisory Committee, Re: Material on Sex and Family Offenses, unpub., 16 Jan. 1955, Rare Books and Manuscripts, Harvard Law School Library.

69 For a discussion of British attempts to elaborate public and private distinctions in the Wolfenden Report, see Weeks, Jeffrey, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800 (New York: Longman, 1981), 239–244Google Scholar.

70 American Law Institute, Model Penal Code, 1985Google Scholar. The following quotations are taken from a transcript of the draft committee's meetings, compiled by the American Law Institute annually. References to the 1955 transcript are to be found in pages 86–133.

71 The transcription of the proceedings reads “marriate,” but I assume this to be a misprint.

72 Arguably Kinsey himself would have called for the decriminalization of both public and private sexual expression, but through a process of omission, his texts nevertheless established an implicit opposition between the two.

73 The state did not decriminalize abortion.

74 Roth v. United States, 352 US 964, footnote 20. In his concurrence, Justice Harlan challenged Brennan's interpretation of the model penal code, but this is not relevant to our discussion.

75 Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 US 479.

76 Hearings Before the Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials, House of Representatives, 82nd Congress, 1952; Report of the Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials, House of Representatives, 82nd Congress, 1952; Hearings before the Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency of the Committee of the Judiciary of the United States Senate, 84th Congress, 1955; Report of the Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency of the Committee of the Judiciary of the United States Senate, 84th Congress, 1955.

77 Humphreys, Laud, Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places (New York: Aldine, 1970)Google Scholar. It won the 1970 C. Wright Mills award for “the best published book on a critical issue” in sociology.

78 The Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography (New York: New York Times Books, 1970)Google Scholar. The conclusions of the Report were rejected by President Richard Nixon, but the Report itself signified the influence of deregulatory views.