My review for The Washington Independent Review of Books
Rebecca L. Davis’ Fierce Desires is impressively comprehensive in scope and depth, offering an account that spans four centuries of American views on sexuality. Building on John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman’s 1988 Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, Davis’ book examines the same history through the lens of the popular zeitgeist, dispatching the notion that the currently “fiercely contested” questions about sexuality and gender are, in fact, new.
The author’s thesis is that matters of gender nonconformity, non-heterosexual sex, permissible sexual behavior, and birth control have been around for ages, but that we’ve shifted away from “interpreting sexual behavior as a reflection of personal preferences or values to defining sexuality as something that makes a person who they are.”
While it’s debatable whether she proves her thesis, the book’s breadth is incontestable. Although Davis’ narrative device of devoting entire chapters to one obscure person — a colonial Virginia indentured servant named Thomas/Thomasine Hall, anyone? — is a little clunky, she nevertheless has a knack for choosing topics whose popular perception belies the historical reality. For example, she explores how Puritans were actually very fond of female pleasure within the context of marriage. And though they viewed sexual intercourse as necessary for procreation, they also believed sex was an important way to build a loving bond. Indeed, there’s precedent for long-ago husbands being censured for coming up short on their “duties of desire.”
The chapter on enslaved peoples’ relationships is particularly poignant and tackles that story in a trenchant way. Similarly, Davis always has an eye toward how race affected attitudes regarding sexuality, tracing, for instance, how defenders of slavery weaponized the specious claim that Black women were loose compared to allegedly chaste and faithful “respectable white women.”
Queer relations also receive excellent coverage here. “Suspicions about what went on in those beds might occasion gossip,” Davis writes, “but same sex and queer relationships of the 18th and 19th centuries were generally tolerated so long as they were not flaunted or disruptive to neighbors.”
The author makes the interesting point that in the 18th and 19th centuries, many queer people didn’t classify their desires or themselves as such. Neither law nor language included or excluded same-sex relationships. Furthermore, she argues, a person’s gender, not the object of their desire, determined social acceptability. This is why lesbianism was tolerated as long as the woman didn’t attempt to assert the privileges of manhood. (Patriarchy was strong back then, just as it is now.)
Davis has an especially fascinating chapter on groundbreaking sexologist Alfred Kinsey, as well as chapters on Gay Liberation Front cofounder Kiyoshi Kuromiya and pleasure activist Betty Dodson. She also engages with ideas of motherhood, delineating how, after the American Revolution, a new ideal emerged; women were encouraged to have fewer children, whom they could then better educate as “future citizens of the nation.”
Fierce Desires shines as a robust, well-researched, and expansive history of American sexuality, one written in non-academese. Its core argument — that our gender-centric system gave way, in the early 20th century, to one in which sexuality is considered fundamental to a person’s identity — gets a bit lost, but Davis’ ultimate assertion that sexuality has moved from being a reflection of social or religious status to being a marker of individuality still rings true.
