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      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Names: Davis, Rebecca L., editor. | Mitchell, Michele, 1965– editor.

      Title: Heterosexual histories / edited by Rebecca L. Davis and Michele Mitchell.

      Description: New York: New York University Press, 2021. | Series: Nyu series in social and cultural analysis | Includes bibliographical references and index.

      Identifiers: LCCN 2020015866 (print) | LCCN 2020015867 (ebook) | ISBN 9781479878079 (cloth) | ISBN 9781479802289 (paperback) | ISBN 9781479897902 (ebook) | ISBN 9781479852284 (ebook)

      Subjects: LCSH: Heterosexuality—History.

      Classification: LCC HQ23 .H538 2021 (print) | LCC HQ23 (ebook) | DDC 306.76/609—dc23

      LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020015866

      LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020015867

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      Contents

      Introduction, or, Why Do the History of Heterosexuality?

      Rebecca L. Davis and Michele Mitchell

      Part I: Difference and Desire since the Seventeenth Century

      1. Toward a Cultural Poetics of Desire in a World before Heterosexuality

      Richard Godbeer

      2. The Strange Career of Interracial Heterosexuality

      Renee Romano

      3. Age Disparity, Marriage, and the Gendering of Heterosexuality

      Nicholas L. Syrett

      4. “Deviant Heterosexuality” and Model-Minority Families: Asian American History and Racialized Heteronormativity

      Judy Tzu-Chun Wu

      Part II: Difference, Bodies, and Popular Culture

      5. Defining Sexes, Desire, and Heterosexuality in Colonial British America

      Sharon Block

      6. Spectacles of Restraint: Race, Excess, and Heterosexuality in Early American Print Culture

      Rashauna Johnson

      7. Heterosexual Inversions: Satire, Parody, and Comedy in the 1950s and 1960s

      Marc Stein

      Part III: Embracing and Contesting Legitimacy

      8. Holding the Line: Mexicans and Heterosexuality in the Nineteenth-Century West

      Zurisaday Gutiérrez Avila and Pablo Mitchell

      9. Suburban Swing: Heterosexual Marriage and Spouse Swapping in the 1950s and 1960s

      Carolyn Herbst Lewis

      10. Race, Sexual Citizenship, and the Constitution of Nonmarital Motherhood

      Serena Mayeri

      Part IV: Discourses of Desire

      11. Restoring “Virginal Conditions” and Reinstating the “Normal”: Episiotomy in 1920

      Sarah Rodriguez

      12. How Heterosexuality Became Religious: Judeo-Christian Morality and the Remaking of Sex in Twentieth-Century America

      Heather R. White

      13. The Price of Shame: Second-Wave Feminism and the Lewinsky-Clinton Scandal

      Andrea Friedman

      Acknowledgments

      About the Contributors

      Index

      Introduction, or, Why Do the History of Heterosexuality?

      Rebecca L. Davis and Michele Mitchell

Josephine A. Jackson (1865–1945) was an exceptional woman. Born in the last year of the American Civil War and raised on a farm in Iowa, she became a medical doctor and nationally renowned health expert. When Jackson was given a diagnosis of tuberculosis and told she had three days to live, she later recalled that she took a train from Chicago to Pasadena and thrived for another forty years. Her first book, Outwitting Our Nerves: A Primer of Psychotherapy (1922), a general interpretation of psychotherapy for lay readers, was widely praised as “the best book on psychotherapy.”1 It and her next book, Guiding Your Life with Psychology as a Key (1937), went through multiple printings. Jackson’s advice column ran in local newspapers from Nebraska to Texas during the 1920s and 1930s.

We might also remember Jackson for teaching Americans the meaning of heterosexuality. Loosely translating Freudian psychology for the masses, she instructed her readers both that different-sex sexual attraction was called “heterosexuality” and that heterosexuality was normal. This understanding marked a decisive shift; as Jonathan Ned Katz shows in his book on the origins and history of “heterosexuality,” early twentieth-century dictionaries defined heterosexuality as a “morbid” sexual interest in the opposite sex.2 In a column dated April 21, 1930, which ran adjacent to the comics, Jackson advised a young man who worried that he was more interested in boys than in girls. Jackson implored him to make sure that the “unfolding of the love instinct” was not arrested, as Freud would have it, in any of its immature early stages and thus susceptible to “become ensnared in the wild tangle of a perversion.” His sexual instincts, Jackson advised, should culminate in “heterosexual love or attraction between the sexes.”3 Jackson relayed not simply a new type of desiring subject but a class of desiring subjects.

When other contemporaneous physicians and mental health experts discussed sexual matters in their syndicated columns, however, they did not necessarily use the words “heterosexual” or “heterosexuality.” More specifically, the politics of respectability complicate any linear narrative of heterosexuality’s emergence and adoption.4 Black writers and the publishers of black-owned periodicals may have been especially keen to distance themselves from heterosexuality’s associations with deviance. For example, during the 1910s and 1920s, the Chicago Defender featured what was reportedly the first newspaper health column in the United States by a doctor of African descent. That doctor, A. Wilberforce Williams (1865–1940),