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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), was a leading physician in Chicago, and he did not hesitate to broach intimate matters in print. Williams’s frank discussion of venereal disease even led to his expulsion from a medical society.5 The fact that Williams was willing to address masturbation, that he advocated teaching children “sex hygiene,” that he urged adult men who still had their foreskins to be circumcised, and that he pointedly associated venereal disease with those who had “sow[ed] wild oats” before marriage as well as “male profligates and female prostitutes” raised hackles among some readers of the Defender as well.6 Still, there was a silence of sorts within Williams’s columns: he did not explicitly name different-sex attraction, identity, pairing, or practice as “heterosexual.” In leading black newspapers such as the Chicago Defender—but also the New York Amsterdam News, the Pittsburgh Courier, and the Baltimore Afro-American—the word “heterosexual” did not, it seems, appear until after 1930.7 By 1925, Williams had received so many queries about venereal disease and the like that he was keen to “get away from the sex questions,” yet he was either unaware of the term “heterosexuality” or purposefully avoided using it when answering those questions. Why would this prominent black doctor not use a term for sexual desire, practice, and identity that we now accept as commonplace?8

The academic theories of sexual identity that historians often associate with sexual “modernity,” ideas that medical experts like Josephine A. Jackson adopted and taught in syndicated newspaper columns printed throughout the United States, shaped the broader culture gradually and unevenly.9 Indeed, as much as A. Wilberforce Williams prided himself on eschewing “mock modesty” when it came to discussing sexual matters, it is a figure such as Jackson who reveals the intentional efforts through which Americans came to recognize heterosexuality as a name for psychologically “normal” desires.10 Jackson’s story fundamentally disturbs narratives that mark a clean transition from a “Victorian” nineteenth-century sexual regime to a twentieth-century sexual modernity or sexual liberalism as well.11 Those narratives work only if we presume that the white, educated middle classes created a mainstream culture that others had not yet embraced, rather than a particular source of sexual identity making amid a far more varied array of desires, behaviors, and intimate bonds. Jackson’s career serves for us not as evidence of the inevitable ascendancy of a medical model of heterosexuality but rather as a demonstration of the effort required to convince Americans of that model’s existence and importance.

Locating a more complex and critical history of what we now think of as heterosexuality is the aim of this volume of original essays, which investigates what it means to trace a history of heterosexuality in North America across four centuries. Our aim is both historical and historiographical. Each chapter represents an investigation into ideas about gender, sexuality, and difference in North America. Such investigation challenges us to set aside presumptions of heterosexuality’s timelessness or familiarity.12 Instead, we concur with the historian Daniel Wickberg that heterosexuality “has been a historically specific creation,” even as we challenge his assertion that no history of heterosexuality exists prior to the word’s invention.13 Heterosexuality has a history, and that history is intrinsically bound up with the history of the relatively recent idea of the sexually normal. The social conditions of people’s lives, the gendered and raced class relations that determine the opportunities and obstacles for people understood as men and women, and the bodily experiences of sexual desires and fertility’s consequences, among other aspects of human existence, all profoundly shaped what it means to live a gendered life and engage in sundry sexual acts. The essays gathered in this volume seek to explore the history of the idea of heterosexuality as well as the lived experiences of different-sex desires, bodies, practices, reproductive capacities, relationships, and politics.14 We are keen to trouble easy, prevalent assumptions that the story of “heterosexuality” can be reduced to—or solely represented by—the experiences of majority population, suburban, male-female married reproductive couples. Such couples certainly came to embody heteronormativity, yet there are both social and political consequences of privileging narrow conceptions of sexually “normal” people.

We are aware that many readers might already wonder, “Hasn’t heterosexuality always existed in some fashion?” As a partial response, we underscore a question posed by Jeffrey Weeks in Sexuality and Its Discontents: “If the gay identity is of recent provenance, what of the heterosexual identity?”15 Our aim is to trace the emergence of a heterosexual identity as much as we are trying to trace a history of heterosexuality as a concept. We presume that heterosexuality is historical, as are all forms of sexuality, all gender roles, and all hierarchies of power—just as prevailing notions of race are historical and constructed. To be analytically useful, “heterosexuality” must refer not simply to social arrangements that presume women’s economic dependence on men, men’s prerogatives under patriarchy, reproductive sex, or ostensibly universal notions of a gender binary.16 These historical contingencies are why insisting on heterosexuality’s ubiquity can be problematic. The gender theorist Monique Wittig argued against historical nuance when she wrote in the early 1990s that heterosexuality has been embedded within the Western mind since Plato: “to live in society is to live in heterosexuality. . . . Heterosexuality is always already within all mental categories. It has sneaked into dialectical thought (or thought of differences) as its main category.”17 Randolph Trumbach’s study of changing gender norms in eighteenth-century London similarly insists that heterosexuality existed for centuries before it had a name: “How can the human race otherwise have continued to exist?” Trumbach conflates human reproduction with heterosexuality and mistakes gender-based communities (the “exclusive male heterosexual majority”) for heterosexual social or political identification.18 The male-female household unit remained an economic necessity for most people, but that class relation coexisted with an array of relationships among men and women.

Historical work about the newness of the idea of the “normal” further challenges us to revisit the history of “heteronormativity” and of presumptions that heterosexual desires or relationships have deep historical links to ideas of the normal. “Heteronormativity” describes ways of assuming, seeing, and knowing; it articulates something that is both an ideal and presumed to be natural. Yet heteronormativity is historical: the privileges of heterosexuality depended on the modern concept of heterosexuality as normal. The literary scholar Karma Lochrie explains that the late-medieval and early modern European people she studies would have found the concept of the sexually normal incomprehensible. She can locate ideas of neither “heterosexuality” nor “heteronormativity” in medieval sources.19 Ruth Mazo Karras similarly notes in her history of “unmarriages” in the Middle Ages that while “sexual unions between men and women were a dominant social form in medieval Europe,” those relationships existed alongside “a variety of pair bonds,” which included celibacy and same-sex unions. Karras’s intention to “analyze pair bonds without privileging marriage, while still recognizing that medieval people did, in fact, privilege marriage,” well captures our goal of studying the history of heterosexual privilege while attending to its historical specificity. If the essays herein do not, as Karras puts it, explicitly explore “elements that fell by the wayside” as opposite-sex pair bonds and activity assumed normalcy in North America, many of the authors do carefully consider how what we now think of as “race” informed that process.20 Often invisible to those who experience the privileges of the sexual practice, heteronormativity serves as a historically specific exclusionary boundary and form of discipline on the lives of those who fail to meet its particularistic guidelines and expectations.

The association between heterosexuality and “the normal” (and thus the deployment of heteronormativity’s incredible cultural and political power) may have occurred much later than historians have long assumed.21 In Normality: A Critical Genealogy (2017), the historian Peter Cryle and the cultural theorist Elizabeth Stephens demonstrate that the idea of “the normal” was not fully realized in Europe and North America until the conclusion of World War II.22 Much new scholarship questions the historicity of the very idea of norms and “the normal.”23 More controversially, in a special issue of the feminist journal differences, scholars interrogated the centrality of “antinormativity” to queer theory.24 This wave of provocative scholarship challenges us to question not only how normality shapes modern sexuality but also the extent to which queer theory relies on notions of deviance, normality’s binary opposite. We thus need to examine critically the histories of heterosexuality and the historiographical uses of heteronormativity.

The intertwined histories of heterosexuality and heteronormativity reveal systems of meaning-making and of privilege. Lochrie explains that scholars often conflate this concept of heteronormativity (heterosexuality as a regnant norm) with the more limited idea of heterosexuality (different-sex erotic ideal). As Lochrie writes, “Heterosexuality is rarely used in its strictly technical meaning of desire for the opposite sex without invoking all of its cultural appurtenances, including the sexual act of intercourse, the social and legal rights of marriage, ideas of domesticity, doctrines of procreation, concepts of parenting and child rearing, legal definitions of privacy, and even scientific concepts of animal behavior.”25 The theorists Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner define heteronormativity as “the institutions, structures of understanding, and practical orientations that make heterosexuality seem not only coherent—that is, organized as a sexuality—but also privileged.” Berlant and Warner associate heteronormativity with their concept of “national heterosexuality,” which they define as “the mechanism by which a core national culture can be imagined as a sanitized space of sentimental feeling and immaculate behavior, a space of pure citizenship.” Such a “familial” model hides the “structural racism and other systemic inequalities” that constitute its origins and that sustain it.26 This approach provides more of an opening for historically variable heterosexuality, a product of human actions and culture, not a preexisting condition.

Historically specific, heterosexuality has changed over time, and its meanings can shift according to context. The “modern” reconceptualization of sexuality as a discrete and particularly important aspect of individuality changed the stakes in possessing and benefiting from a heterosexual disposition or family organization. Even so, heterosexuality’s modes and effects are various. Heterosexuality in its modern form anxiously reiterates its asserted privilege within an array of legal and social rights, not to mention its associations with psychologically “normal” health. Yet many people who engage in practices and/or form relationships that meet all other basic criteria of “heterosexual” do not enjoy that privilege because of their race, class, ability, nationality, citizenship, or religion. To be sure, heterosexuality is a culturally understood idea about what is “natural,” “normal,” or some combination of the two concepts, but it is far from universally defined, applied, or valued.

Our goal is not to reify heterosexuality or claim a special place for it, intellectually or politically. As David Halperin has written about his history of homosexuality, “I wish to avoid the implication that by analyzing the triumphalism of a modern discursive category I am in any way participating in that triumphalism.”27 Rather, we have encouraged the authors in this anthology to subject heterosexuality to careful scrutiny as a means to reveal its inseparability from hierarchies of power; its intersections with ideals of race, class, and gender; and, as several of these essays demonstrate, its utility as a weapon against marginalized groups. In this introduction and in the essays that follow, we seek to explain how and why heterosexuality became a known thing in the United States—and to establish that seemingly long-standing terms emerged in our vernacular far later than many readers might realize. We do not take a heterosexual identity as a timeless given, then. We endeavor as well to interrogate the imprint of heteronormativity on same-sex desires both before and after the word “heterosexual” existed and the consequences of those definitions, norms, and values in North American history.

We hardly seek to entrench what Marjorie Garber terms “a binary opposition between homosexual and heterosexual” herein. As much as there is no exploration of the concepts and histories of asexuality or pansexuality in this anthology, we certainly recognize that individuals can go through the course of their lives without feeling (or acting on) sexual attraction to others and that sexuality can be fluid. It is worth noting that some scholars—Garber included—have maintained that bisexuality is “not just another sexual orientation but rather a sexuality that undoes sexual orientation as a category, a sexuality that threatens and challenges . . . easy binaries.”28 We do not necessarily seek to undo sexual categories, but we certainly seek to unsettle “heterosexuality” and its history. In the remaining pages of this introduction, we offer a brief overview of the ways that historians and theorists have defined both heterosexuality and heteronormativity, we consider how “race” has been invoked in terms of both heterosexuality and heterosexism, and we preview the essays in this volume to highlight how each one addresses these and other questions in uniquely salient ways.