The unexpected American origins of sexology and sexual science: Elizabeth Osgood Goodrich Willard,Orson Squire Fowler,and the scientification of sex

Transcendentalist geology and astronomy

While scholars occasionally mention that Willard’s Sexology as the Philosophy of Life is the origin of the term sexology, Willard’s text has never received a full scholarly treatment. ⁶ Very little is known about Willard herself outside her text. She was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts in 1815 and moved to St. Louis in 1837 (Eleventh Report, 1919: 287). On 4 April 1844, she married Peter Haskell Willard, with whom she had several sons and a daughter (ibid.; Willard, 1867: 293). She was described by one of her sons as ‘a woman of unusual literary attainments’ and as ‘an authoress of repute’ (Eleventh Report, 1919: 287). She moved to Chicago in 1861 and was very active there and elsewhere in the cause of women’s suffrage (ibid.: 288; Daily Interocean, 1870; ‘New Woman Suffrage Movement’, 1870). Before dying of heart disease in 1873, she published Sexology as the Philosophy of Life, the rare sexological text written by a woman, in 1867 (‘Died’, 1873). ⁷ While there exists at least one usage of the term sexology in the United States before 1867, Willard’s text first popularized the term as a form of science. ⁸ It roots its theory of sexuality in natural science—especially geology and astronomy. For Willard, the attraction of the planets serves as a model for human attraction, and thus constitutes part of what Travis M. Foster (2015: 169) and Greta LaFleur (2018: i) have called the ‘natural history of sexuality’.

Sexology as the Philosophy of Life was widely and polarizingly reviewed at the time of its publication. One reviewer, for example, stated, ‘We are glad that an American woman of such deep and pure insight has taken her place among those pioneers of reform—true philosophers’ (‘New Books’, 1868: 69). Another reviewer concurred, proclaiming magisterially, ‘In this work Mrs Willard has rendered important service to her race. We are glad to see the press giving it not only favorable but widespread notice’ (‘Sexology as the Philosophy of Life’, 1868). Many reviews, however, decried its politics and condemned its arguments. One critic objected that Willard’s book ‘is a singular, and in many matters to us an incomprehensible book. Its theories seem very crude and wild, and are, so far as we can discover, mostly supported by assertions in place of arguments’ (‘New Publications’, 1868a). While Susan Lanser (2003: 36) points out that the word singular has been ‘used frequently [since the late 18th century] to describe women suspected of homoerotic desires’, here the review seems to be charging Willard with gender non-normativity in its references to ‘crude[ness] and wild[ness]’. Another negative review described it as ‘a book which a woman ought not have written, and which none of her sex ought read’ (‘New Publications’, 1868b). The same review closed by aiming to censor it: ‘As we notice this gross work to put the seal of condemnation on it, we decline stating through what publisher in this city it reached us’ (ibid.).

Willard’s text fell off our critical radar, remaining largely unread for more than a century as its harshest critics had hoped, partly because of her quirky sexual cosmology. In spite of its idiosyncrasy, Willard’s book is well worth examining, since it heralds American sexology’s emphasis on normality and demonstrates sexology’s hitherto unexamined connections to Transcendentalism, particularly the thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Willard’s book argues that the laws governing the universe and those governing human bodies perfectly resemble each other, noting in the preface, ‘The nature of the work [Willard’s book] is an explanation of the laws of sex, generation, organization and control in the solar and human systems, showing their perfect correspondence with each other and with the laws of social organization and government’ (Willard, 1867: 3, original emphasis). Elaborating this view that ‘the human system is an organization of all the powers and forces of the universe’, Willard explains that ‘to understand the laws of our own being, we must comprehend the laws of our ancestors—the earth, the sun, the planetary spheres, and the gaseous ethereal elements that surround us’ (ibid.: 47). Here, she suggests that we can deduce the ‘laws of our own being’ from the cosmos, since the laws governing it also govern humans. With this correspondence in view, she charts the way that masculine and feminine forces shape the universe (‘Equilibration and harmony in the solar system are the result of the nearly equal tendencies of the masculine and feminine’; ibid.: 61) to suggest that men and women must have an equal impact on the government of humanity:

Man is to woman what the right side is to the left of the human system. To the right side belongs the right arm, which is the most natural and skillful external laborer, because it is the strongest; but to the left side belongs the heart, the great arteries and digestive power of the system.…It is a natural division of forces and a necessary balance of power between them. (ibid.: 281)

Likewise, Willard’s idea of harmony is profoundly influenced by Emerson; her linkage of the universe, the solar system, man, family, society, and government to the soul are deeply influenced by an Emersonian metaphysics that sees a correspondence between nature and spirit (Buell, 1973: 149). In fact, Willard deploys the figure of the Emersonian ‘Over-Soul’ when she describes the consonance between cosmic forces and human life: ‘The great over-soul, or ethereal element, is so susceptible to motion that it may be called a sensitive element’ (Willard, 1867: 217). Motion for Willard is at the root of all attraction, perception, and life. She writes in the book’s opening sentence, ‘As sex runs through all forms of life, and as life depends upon motion, the laws of sex must necessarily belong to the laws of motion, underlying the powers and forces; all the evolutions and revolutions of the universe’ (ibid.: 1). The over-soul is thus for her highly receptive to everything around it, an instrument for perceiving all life, all sex, and the forces of the universe. We might read Willard’s text as answering Emerson’s famous call at the beginning of ‘Nature’, where he says that a ‘true theory…will be its own evidence’ and will ‘explain all phenomena’ (Emerson, 1982: 36). Immediately following that he writes, ‘Now many [phenomena] are thought not only unexplained but inexplicable as language, sleep, madness, dreams, beasts, sex’ (ibid.). Willard’s text explicates the so-called inexplicable phenomenon of sex, proposing sex as precisely such a true theory that explains all phenomena. Her method attempts to understand sex as a way to understand the world in its entirety, to perceive what Emerson describes as ‘the wholeness we admire in the order of the world’ (Emerson, 1996: 119).

In so doing, however, Willard disagrees with Emerson on a key point—namely, on the status of what she calls ‘womanly men’ and ‘masculine women’ (Willard, 1867: 357), who do not occupy sharply differentiated gender roles. For Emerson, in a prefiguration of Edward Carpenter’s ‘intermediate sex’, such figures without sharp gender distinction embody the highest ideal:

The finest people marry the two sexes in their own person. Hermaphrodite is then the symbol of the finished soul. It was agreed that in every act should appear the married pair: the two elements should mix in every act. (Emerson, 1970: 380)

While Willard, like many of her contemporaries, celebrates women as mothers of the white race, her idiosyncratic cosmology seems to have left her work something of an orphan, having had little direct influence on future developments in sexology. That said, its wide review and cultural import seem to have firmly established it as a way of understanding sex (in the many 19th-century senses of that term). For example, an editorial in 1872 demonstrates Willard’s reach without naming her: ‘In the estimation of many people there is a certain degree of odium, of unpopularity, a lacking of respectability, which attaches, for instance, to the agitation of woman’s rights, spiritualism, skepticism, free love, sexology, &c.’ (E. F. B., 1872). Here, the reference to ‘many people’ and the author’s inclusion of sexology beside other popular ‘reforms’ suggests sexology’s emerging stature. For this reason, it is imperative that we return to her work not so much because she represents a set of foreclosed avenues of development or lost threads, but rather because Willard symptomatically prefigured the parameters of an American sexology. That is, as the inaugural American sexological text, her work cast sexuality inside a marital, reproductive, and what we would now call a heterosexual frame that gave rise to the development of the statistically organized normal that characterizes much of American sexology and sexual science. ¹¹

Sexual science and phrenology

Interestingly, Willard’s volume was reviewed in the American Phrenological Journal, which Orson Squire Fowler founded (‘Literary Notices’, 1868). Like Willard’s sexology, phrenology, as many scholars have noted, was influenced by Transcendentalism’s ethos of ‘self-possibility and self-extension’, suggesting a common set of linkages between early sexology and sexual science (Porte, 1991: 164). ¹² The term sexual science was, as far as I can tell, used for the first time in print in 1852, when Orson Squire Fowler advertised a lecture entitled ‘Splendid Children, Or the Perfect Male and the Perfect Female, Their Functions, Mutual Relations and Re-invigoration, Involving the Heart’s Care of Sexual Science’ (‘Splendid Children’, 1852). A second lecture by Fowler ten months later also included the phrase ‘sexual science’ and was entitled ‘Masculinity and Its Restoration, Involving Sexual Science, and What in Men, Women Love and Hate, Exclusively to Men’ (‘Masculinity and Its Restoration’, 1853). While these lectures do not survive, perhaps something of their content can be gleaned from looking at Fowler’s published writings. In the last few pages of his The Practical Phrenologist, he describes how men and women should desire their opposites:

Those in either extreme in any respect love those best who are in an opposite extreme, while those who are medium in any quality affiliate best with those who are near themselves. Thus very large men love small women, and small men large women, while average men like average women best. (Fowler, 1869: 171)

Fowler was the leading phrenologist in America, and first became interested in phrenology after hearing a lecture by Johann Spurzheim, a disciple of Franz Joseph Gall, the founder of phrenology. In late 18th-century Vienna, Gall invented phrenology as both a ‘theory of [the] brain and a science of character’ (Cooter, 1984: 3). Gall’s phrenology is characterized by the following five tenets:

(i) The brain is the organ of the mind; (ii) the brain is not a homogeneous unity but an aggregate of mental organs; (iii) these mental organs or physical faculties are topographically localized into specific functions; (iv) other factors being equal, the relative size of any one of the mental organs can be taken as an index to that organ’s power of manifestation; and (v) since the skull ossifies over the brain during infant development, external craniological means can be used to diagnose the internal state of the mental faculties. (ibid.) ¹⁴

While Fowler and Wells published scores of books on phrenology and other subjects, the company is most famous today for publishing both the 1855 and the 1856 editions of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (Erkkila, 1996: 11). ¹⁵ This seemingly odd pairing of a phrenological publisher and arguably the most sexually expressive poet of his era is no accident. In ‘“Here Is Adhesiveness”: From Friendship to Homosexuality’ (1985), Michael Lynch argues that phrenology not only played an important role in Whitman’s conceptions of male/male erotics, but also had a constitutive impact on the formation of the hetero and homo binary and on sexology’s understanding of congenital homosexuality (Lynch, 1985: 90–6). ¹⁶ This underappreciated essay narrates how Whitman renovated the phrenological faculty of mind that Fowler and others called ‘adhesiveness’—an individual’s capacity for friendship, fellowship, sociability, and forging of affective bonds. For phrenologists, love was a compound of adhesiveness and another faculty, ‘amativeness’—the generative or sexual instinct. While both adhesiveness and amativeness could refer to feelings of one individual for either sex, Whitman recast adhesiveness so it referred only to people of the same sex:

Whitman’s restriction of Adhesiveness to male-male relationships opened the way for an understanding of same-sex expression of a sexual instinct that was polar to an opposite-sex expression of it.…Whitman’s male-male Adhesive love was alone able to ‘rival’ male-female Amative love. (ibid.: 91)

Building on Lynch’s work, I understand the linkages between phrenology and sexual science to be even tighter than historians of sexuality have contended: namely, that the leading figure of American phrenology—Orson Fowler—was also the first sexual scientist. To revise McGarry, then, phrenology is the first sexual science. ¹⁷ This is evident from the opening pages of Fowler’s Sexual Science, where he asserts that he has ‘for a half a century’ made ‘SEXUAL SCIENCE…a specialty, thinking and observing from its only scientific, and incomparably the best standpoint—Phrenology’ (Fowler, 1870b: viii; his emphasis). While Fowler’s claim possesses his characteristic bombast, his Sexual Science builds on and revises his earlier books on marriage, parenting, and heredity and includes sections on gender, love, mating, lovemaking, married life, reproduction, maternity, child-rearing, and sexual restoration. ¹⁸

As this sequence suggests, Fowler’s work unremittingly beats the drum of heteronormativity. In his introduction, Fowler declares, ‘Two men can never love each other; nor two women’ (Fowler, 1870b: 12). Additionally, he contends that ‘sodomy’ ‘if possible’ is ‘still worse’ than masturbation (ibid.: 366), and fears that ‘female sodomy is also undoubtedly practised to an alarming extent’ (ibid.: 370). Fowler instead proposes compulsory marriage, suggesting that ‘married life is a richer mine than California can proffer’ and that it is ‘the only legitimate sphere of love’, while warning against ‘all those withering or demoralizing consequences of dormant or sensual love by remaining single’ (ibid.: 366). Similarly, he stresses the imperative of reproduction—which he terms ‘a duty of all to create’ (ibid.: 273), writing, ‘Why is this parental capacity conferred thus universally, unless to be commensurately employed? Its very existence is its command to action’ (ibid.: 274). Fowler’s unrelentingly matrimonial boosterism and natalism are underwritten by a stringent division of men and women into different spheres with strictly gendered codes of conduct, in a way that rhymes with Willard’s articulation of sex roles: ‘Nature imperiously commands every male, by virtue of his gender, to comport himself in a specific manner towards the female sex in general, and towards his own conjugal partner in particular; and vice versa of all females’ (ibid.: 26; his emphasis). The deployment of nature here profoundly normalizes and normativizes Fowler’s claims. For Fowler, these codes of conduct—outlined at length in the text—govern every aspect of relations between the sexes, from courtship to matrimony to honeymooning and sexual intercourse.

But what is most fascinating about these rules of behaviour is that for Fowler, they clearly create a hierarchy of what we today recognize as gender, with some men and women being ‘better sexed’ and ‘well-sexed’ and others who are gender failures, ‘unsexing themselves’ to become ‘neuter genders’ (Fowler, 1870b: 12, 15, 27, 38). Discussing these gender failures—’effeminate men’ and ‘strongly masculinized women’ (ibid.: 142)—Fowler writes, ‘A very few men, who are themselves two thirds feminine, require to marry these two thirds masculines; because opposite sexes must marry’. Here, Fowler’s theory of good marriages based on the inverse gender makeup of individuals prefigures some of Otto Weininger’s thinking in Sex and Character (1903).

Additionally, these passages from Sexual Science suggest that Fowler—rather than, say, John Money, who is credited with coining the term gender in the context of sexual roles—was the first explicit theorist of gender (Downing, Morland, and Sullivan, 2015: 1; Hausman, 1995: 7; Meyerowitz, 2002: 114). While the sexological concept of inversion tacitly operates as a kind of theory of gendered behaviour (for example, male inverts are feminine), Fowler’s idea of being ‘better sexed’—which is to say, closer to perfection as a man or a woman—suggests that phrenology may have supplied the seeds for the idea of gender (as separate from biological sex). Fowler’s gender theory is apparent not just in his understanding of gendered practice as a way to become a better man or woman, but in his separation of gender from biology altogether:

But is gender confined to the physique?…Indeed, gender has its origin in the mind, not body. The male is a male, and the female a female, in person primarily and mainly, because a male or a female in soul and spirit[.] [sic] In fact, it is the male mentality which creates the male organs of sex, and the female mentality, or spirit-nature, which determines and creates the female anatomy. (Fowler, 1870b: 63, original emphasis)

At bottom, this article has been arguing that the first American sexologists and sexual scientists deployed Transcendentalist metaphysics and phrenology to construct a deeply conservative understanding of proper sex (marital, reproductive) in order to expand the social and gender roles of women. In doing so, these thinkers separated the social and biological understandings of women to begin to forge what we would today recognize as a conception of gender. Transcendentalism provides fertile ground for the reconfiguration of gender and also of nascent sexuality (as it was emerging), since, as Dorri Beam writes about Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Oakes Smith,

the soul was infinitely more diverse than a dimorphic model of the sexed body. A woman’s or a man’s soul could take an infinite number of shapes; thus the unimpeded soul was the basis from which to argue a feminist agenda of expanded action and intellect rather than of separate sphere. (Beam, 2010: 94)

Reading this American tradition of sexology and sexual science beside the German tradition with which we began helps us to tell a different story of the emergence of these discourses. We see not a German origin or an American origin, but a transatlantic co-emergence, one that suggests that sexology and sexual science were more diversely organized, more fully realized, in the mid 19th century than has been recognized. My account also furnishes both a prehistory and an alternative history to Stein’s account of American sexual science, which finds its origins in the biological precincts of late 19th-century racial science. In so doing, it outlines the process by which the scientific writing about natural history that LaFleur sees as containing a ‘quiet narrative about human sexual diversity’ was transmuted into a full-blown science of sexuality that continued to bear some of the marks of natural history and its racial legacies (LaFleur, 2018: 197). My account then differs from Peter Coviello’s narrative of the ‘earliness’ of sexuality, which sees mid-19th century American sexuality as ‘in the crosshairs of a number of forms of knowledge and regulation but not yet wholly captivated or made coordinate by them’ (Coviello, 2013: 7, original emphasis). Rather than an unyarded pre-sexological imaginary of earliness, I see Fowler and Willard’s writing already inaugurating this process of sexological coordination and regulation. Their natalist sexual science foregrounded race and its production through conjugal sex, with the aim of continually improving white maternity and accelerating the reproduction of the white race. For example, Willard comments that ‘perhaps no intelligent candid man would deny that woman has as good a natural right as man to vote.…She does not come as near it as the negro did by the three-fifths rule’ (Willard, 1867: 356). Willard’s comparison here between women and negroes emphasizes racial difference in order to foreground differences of sex in precisely the ways that Stein maps. Similarly, Fowler declares that nature ‘forbids the intermixture of the different races, by depriving mulattoes of both the Negro stamina and the Caucasian intelligence’ (Fowler, 1870b: 477). Here, Fowler aims to preserve the whiteness of the white race in the service of producing better white offspring. And yet, whereas Stein persuasively charts race, sex, and gender as imbricated biologized concepts, my focus on the Transcendental soul as crucial to the construction of sex and gender offers an account that does not operate exclusively in the register of biology. This alternative genealogy suggests that early sexology, à la Whitman, is ‘a kosmos’ that ‘contain[s] multitudes’: nebulae of ideas rooted in biological and spiritual conceptions of the body and that are not confined to it, American and European, homophilic and homophobic, and ever stranger and less familiar than we have understood (Whitman, 2002: 45, 77).