Leigh Ann Wheeler's new book, Against Obscenity, is a history of women's activism in the debate over pornography.

Wheeler book traces women's activism 'Against Obscenity'

As an undergraduate student during the 1980s, Leigh Ann Wheeler began to identify as a feminist, but quickly became disillusioned by the bitter and emotional disagreements over pornography. Did pornography liberate women’s sexuality? Or was it simply a form of sexist exploitation?

“Women were attacking each other because they felt betrayed by other women who didn’t agree with their position,” the history department faculty member said. Women’s sense of betrayal grew out of what Wheeler calls “essentialist identity politics,” on the assumption that all women share one essential nature and thus should all agree on key issues. In an effort to get a historical perspective on women’s bitter disputes over pornography, she researched women’s response to obscenity in America. The result is Against Obscenity: Reform and the Politics of Womanhood in America 1873-1935, published this month by Johns Hopkins University Press.

Against Obscenity is written for a scholarly audience but in an accessible and lively narrative style.

Wheeler found that women in the early part of the 20th century were often as divided as those during the 80s. And though there were anti-obscenity laws on the books in most states, women defined obscenity differently—both more narrowly and more broadly—than did the government, because their objections to pornography stemmed from a different set of concerns than those that guided the laws’ creation.

While anti-obscenity laws focused on such materials as medical texts and information about birth control and abortion, women of the time were more worried about children’s exposure to salacious burlesque shows, movies and magazines, which were available to people of any age. Indeed, segments of pornographic films might be included in the mix of comedies, newsreels and other shorts in a typical day at the movies, and burlesque shows often featured nude performers. Children as young as 5 years old attended these shows, Wheeler found.

Women’s activism evolved with the suffrage movement, Wheeler writes. Before women won the vote in 1920, they exerted social pressure and lobbied through their large organizations, prevailing upon legislators to clean up the movie and burlesque theaters and set a national obscenity standard. These organizations, purporting to represent the feelings of “womanhood,” achieved many of their reform goals.

Interestingly, as the movie studio system developed in the late 1920s, the studios also favored establishing a national decency standard, Wheeler writes, because the varying state standards made it difficult to distribute their films nationally.

The studios then cannily recruited a prominent leader of women’s organizations, Alice Ames Winter, to represent womanhood on their committee on standards. As it turned out, the studios probably acted disingenuously, co-opting this leader of organized women and turning her influence toward their own ends. While many female reformers supported Winter, others felt betrayed by her. The resulting disagreements tore women’s organizations apart.

Women employed other means to protect children. Finding that the appeal of pornography for children grew out of their unsatisfied curiosity about sex, women’s organizations decided to counter with detailed sex education information. In Minneapolis, for example, members of the Women’s Cooperative Alliance, led by Catheryne Cooke Gilman (a central figure in the movement and the book), conducted an effective door-to-door campaign disseminating their materials and talking with mothers and children about sex.

“The right to vote, in 1920, really opened up the conversation to individual women,” Wheeler said. No longer did women need to band together to make their voices heard, and many individual women came out in opposition to government regulation of sexual material. Shrewd movie studio executives, publishers and burlesque house operators capitalized on these differences among women to make their case against anti-obscenity regulations.

Wheeler found that for a short while after winning the vote, women’s groups still held considerable influence, but it began to weaken and dissipate by the early 1930s as groups splintered and no women’s voting bloc materialized.

By that time, however, the Catholic Church had established the Legion of Decency, which took up the anti-obscenity cause with a vengeance. Because the church could exert actual control over its members, threatening excommunication or other consequences for those who disagreed, the league was able to achieve its ends through such means as boycotts and directives to members.

Coming in the midst of the current public furor over the content of radio “shock jocks,” Super Bowl entertainment, music videos and pornographic spam, Against Obscenity provides a historical perspective on the issue of obscenity and women’s political and social engagement in the debate. In the end, it cautions against framing this debate narrowly in terms of harm to children even as it highlights the dangers of surrendering sexual discourse to the commercial realm.