String of pearls Book

Karen Lystra’s Searching the Heart: Women, Men and Romantic Love in Nineteenth Century America (1989), offers another analysis of this domestic revolution. Relying on Victorian love letters, she illustrates how white, middle-class Americans felt about love, calling attention to the significance of romantic love within a complex sexual culture. Lystra argues that the letters provide as genuine a record as possible of the feelings, behaviors, and judgments as they occurred in relations between the sexes. Her analysis ultimately reveals that Victorians were far less timid – and more talkative – about matters of the heart than previously thought, while recognition of women’s sexual appetites and belief in the mutuality of sexual expression both served as the foundation of romantic love.
American middle-class youth began selecting their own partners by at least 1900, and by 1830, romantic love was becoming the necessary condition for marriage. Perhaps most significant for the history of gender, according to Lystra, is that the introduction of romantic love – and by extension, compassionate marriage – bridged a gap between women and men that gave each greater insight into the nature and experience of the opposite sex. Contrary to the image of misunderstanding and distance between nineteenth-century men and women, Lystra argues that both middle-class men and women shared romantic values that encouraged them to seek reciprocal understanding. “This effort was not a fictional artifact but a behavioral reality that had important consequences. In an age when middle-class women had limited economic power, romantic love – not sex – gave women some emotional power over men” (Lystra, p. 9).
Lystra found that nineteenth-century middle-class Americans held an extremely high estimation of, almost reverence for, sexual expression as a symbol of love and personal sharing. According to her analysis, Victorian women gave no private indication that they believed in an idea of female passionlessness, despite purity’s central theme in public life. Many married women actually embraced their sexuality. “Many indicated that they accepted themselves as sexual beings…it is clear that they did not consider themselves freaks, deviants, or even strange for having sexual needs or expressing sexual interest to men in private” (Lystra, p. 58). Likewise, their husbands showed no shock, horror, or even mild displeasure at their wives sexual interest, but instead seemed pleased by private expressions of desire.
The free expression of sexuality in romantic love, paired with declining birthrates that Lystra calls unprecedented and unmatched, means most couples must have separated sex from procreation. Yet, Lystra argues against the repressive hypothesis that abstinence was the Victorian choice of birth control, instead pointing to a number of other techniques, including diaphragms, condoms, the rhythm method, and coitus interruptus. Lystra illustrates the ways in which men cooperated in the family limitation process. In letters to his wife, Lincoln Clark inquired about her “lady conditions,” and appeared worried about the effectiveness of their birth control techniques. In subsequent letters, Lincoln also asked about his wife’s “special lady health,” and if she was in any “danger.” Albert and Violet Janin shared spirited correspondence about her reproductive health, with Violet expressing fear “because something was a few days late.” In another letter, she revealed that Albert was tracking her menstrual cycle himself as he “miscalculated a certain matter,” which ended up late, causing her anxiety. “Albert was not only an active and cooperative partner in the couple’s family limitation practices but also probably his wife’s chief source of birth control information” (Lystra, p. 83).
Lystra attempts to refine the relationship between public advice and private behavior, but instead reiterates previous notions about the sexual complexity of the era. Turing to medical and moral advice books, she divides them into three camps to describe a spectrum of Victorian attitudes toward sexuality. Enthusiasts viewed sex as the key to health and happiness, and encouraged full expression. The moderates separated sex from reproduction and generally only approved of expression as an act of love. The restrictionists called for sexual limitations and restraint, urging that activity be limited to procreation. Despite their stance, all three recognized the sexual appetites of women and emphasized the mutuality of sexual expression, the cornerstones of romantic love. Whether they condemned it, defended it, or exalted it, Victorians talked incessantly about sex. “Any century which had a lively public debate over whether women should be allowed to ride bicycles, with opponents arguing against women cyclists because the seat might become a source of intense female sexual pleasure, is to say the least, erotically sensitized” (Lystra, p. 119).