Sex Science Self

A Social History of Estrogen, Testosterone, and Identity

Bob Ostertag

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781625342133, 9781625342126
• eBook ISBN: 9781613764466
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

In Sex Science Self, Bob Ostertag cautions against accepting and defending any technology uncritically—even, maybe even especially, a technology that has become integrally related to identity. Specifically, he examines the development of estrogen and testosterone as pharmaceuticals.

Ostertag situates this history alongside the story of an increasingly visible and political lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender population. He persuasively argues that scholarship on the development of sex hormone chemicals does not take into account LGBT history and activism, nor has work in LGBT history fully considered the scientific research that has long attempted to declare a chemical essence of gender. In combining these histories, Ostertag reveals the complex motivations behind hormone research over generations and expresses concern about the growing profits from estrogen and testosterone, which now are marketed with savvy ad campaigns to increase their use across multiple demographics.

Ostertag does not argue against the use of pharmaceutical hormones. Instead he points out that at a time when they are increasingly available, it is more important than ever to understand the history and current use of these powerful chemicals so that everyone—within the LGBT community and beyond—can make informed choices.

In this short, thoughtful, and engaging book, Ostertag tells a fascinating story while opening up a wealth of new questions and debates about gender, sexuality, and medical treatments.

1

“The Best Side of a Case of Crime”

George Lippard, Walt Whitman, and Antebellum Police Reports

The penny paper crime report represents a suitable starting point, insofar as it documents the moment when an individual offender comes into contact with the criminal justice system, beginning the cycle of arrest, trial, incarceration, and discharge on which this book is structured. Because the penny paper was a new feature of the publishing landscape of the 1830s, its crime reports also mark an early point of convergence between the criminal justice system and the rapidly expanding print culture of the antebellum United States. The editors of penny papers successfully sought to attract an unprecedentedly wide readership with a combination of low prices and sensationalized content, including coverage of street crime: the arrests and trials of prostitutes, thieves, and drunks. The success of penny papers gave young men with literary ambitions the chance for employment in the publishing industry as reporters and editors; the form’s preoccupation with petty crime also meant that such writers often served an apprenticeship covering the local police station. In the cases of George Lippard and Walt Whitman, whose careers followed a similar trajectory from journalism to imaginative literature, this early immersion in the gritty underside of urban life was a formative experience that forced them to reflect on the social implications of representing criminality in print.

In the 1840s, both Lippard and Whitman were working journalists, Lippard writing for Philadelphia’s Spirit of the Times and Citizen Soldier and Whitman for a number of publications, most notably as editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Both men by necessity tackled the staple commodity of the penny paper, the local police report. While critics praise both Lippard and Whitman for sympathizing in their literary work with outcast elements of society, this is a position that would have been particularly hard to reconcile with the demands of daily crime reporting. In this chapter I examine Lippard’s and Whitman’s police reporting to see how they handled the form and where their journalism forecast the racially and socially progressive perspectives of their later work. Such an inquiry requires familiarity with the police report as it appeared in two of the pioneering penny papers of the period, the New York Sun and the New York Herald, since the content, purpose, and ideological import of such reporting had been firmly established by the time Lippard and Whitman came to the format.

A number of scholars have analyzed in broad terms newspaper crime reporting of the antebellum period. In Dan Schiller’s account, news about crime was the arena in which penny papers staked their claim as defenders of the interests of the common man. Appropriating the rhetoric of the labor press that died out after the Panic of 1837, penny papers appealed to a wide audience of mechanics and laborers by exposing corruption in a criminal justice system weighted in favor of the social elite: “Modified and adapted, crime news in the penny press focused not only on the integrity of the state but also on the unequal effect of social class on the political nation and, specifically, in the law.”1 Schiller devotes sustained attention to coverage of the murder of the prostitute Helen Jewett. The New York Sun regretted the acquittal of Jewett’s accused killer Richard Robinson, claiming that his wealth allowed him to purchase a favorable verdict, while New York Herald editor James Gordon Bennett saw revealed in the trial a conspiracy to cover up the misdeeds of the wealthy brothel patrons who set Robinson up as their fall guy. Either way, the editors wielded class-based rhetoric to impugn an anti-egalitarian legal system.2

Also focusing on the Jewett murder, among other cases, David Ray Papke hears in antebellum crime reporting a voice for the working and middle classes: “The crime journalism in The Sun and The Herald championed mechanics, artisans, clerks, and small merchants over the traditional landed and mercantile elites, which well into midcentury held power in the modernizing nation.”3 Adding to this consensus, Alexander Saxton observes that “crime and sex were not politically neutral” in the penny press, whose ideological origins he identifies in the urban workingmen’s movement of the period.4 Together, these commentators make a convincing case that certain kinds of sensationalized crime news allowed editors to deploy the language of artisan republicanism.5 Alongside the occasional coverage of spectacular crimes and ensuing trials, however, the antebellum paper featured a more prosaic variety of crime news in its daily anecdotes about the activities of city police. Analyzing the daily police report, one finds a set of reportorial conventions with different ideological implications, and this was the format in which Lippard’s and Whitman’s commitments to defending society’s least sympathetic elements would be shaped.

Penny Paper Crime Reports

When the penny paper first appeared in the United States, its coverage of local street crime distinguished it from the more expensive six-cent papers devoted to national and international events and items of commercial interest. The most important author of such reporting in the 1830s was George W. Wisner of the New York Sun, who (borrowing from reports of London’s Bow Street Police Court in English newspapers) made police court reporting a central feature of that newspaper in 1833–34. Wisner is credited with inventing a style of police reporting in America, as described by James Stanford Bradshaw: “At times, he was sardonic; at times, facetious and, frequently, archly prurient.”6 Wisner treated readers to sensational cases of street violence, theft, public drunkenness, and other crimes, all narrated in his signature breezy and condescending tone. In one article, for instance, he notes that “Jane Dunn, an incorrigible old vagrant and rum head was ordered to the penitentiary for six months. . . . Sally Kip, a black Amazon of the Five Points was tried for petit larceny, stealing from Charles Welch, a silver watch and appendages and money, amounting to $23.”7 The humor in Wisner’s reports usually came at the expense of his criminal subjects, as when he remarks that “Margaret Thomas was drunk in the street—said she never would get drunk again ‘upon her honor.’ Committed, ‘upon honor.’”8 One of Wisner’s contemporaries, Isaac Pray, condemned the callous tone of police reporting in the New York Transcript, another of the penny papers that emerged in the 1830s. “The imitations of the Bow Street Reports are palatable to the public taste,” he complains, “for the paper sells. Enough! That an innocent man, because he is poor and defenceless [sic], may be caricatured, and consigned to the infamy of a day, and even to the loss of employment, is of little consequence. The people must be amused.”9 Wisner had departed for the West by the mid-1830s, but the style of crime reporting he pioneered in the United States survived him in the pages of the Sun’s main competitor, Bennett’s New York Herald.

In the early 1840s, when Lippard and Whitman both worked for daily newspapers, the Herald was one of the most widely read and influential penny papers in the nation. Surveying its treatment of petty crime in this period provides a benchmark by which to gauge Lippard’s and Whitman’s responses to established journalistic conventions. The Herald printed accounts of street crimes, including petty theft, assaults, prostitution, and passing of counterfeit notes, under the heading “City Intelligence,” which usually appeared on the second page of the newspaper.10 In their language and tone, the Herald’s “City Intelligence” columns of the early 1840s reflect Wisner’s influence. The language describing criminal activity is usually direct and colloquial; the reporter operates under a presumption of guilt on the part of the perpetrators, who have for the most part been caught in the act by watchmen. Reporting on one crime, for example, the column remarks, “John Smith broke open the cellar door of Samuel Bradback, No. 55 Oliver street, by forcing off the padlock, and stole 20 pounds of butter, for which he will be tried and sent up among the others of his numerous and respectable family.”11 Mockery of individuals involved in criminal activity is common, as in this entry titled “A Lover Robbed”: “A man named John McCarthy, while in the act of paying vows of love and adoration to one Mary Ann Ward, known as the Queen of Walnut street, commonly termed ‘the Hook,’ had his pockets relieved of $16,50. Officer King took the Queen in custody, and had her committed to answer.”12 The purported humor in this report derives from the humiliation of both parties involved, the hapless McCarthy and the prostitute who robs him, identified by their full names. The brevity and satirical tone of these reports offered little room for the editorial crusading on behalf of the mechanic class that commentators have noted in other facets of penny paper crime treatment.

The “City Intelligence” reports in the Herald reflect the racial and social hierarchies that structured antebellum life in the United States. As Hans Bergmann describes the reportorial persona that Wisner originated, “The police court reporter takes it upon himself to see what is going on among the immigrant classes and presents the results of his encounter with the (initially) inexplicable and unrecognizable ‘other.’”13 Stereotypes associated with particular immigrant communities provided reporters with obvious sources of race-based humor and offered ways of sorting ethnic others, diminishing their threat to a narrowly defined (and shifting) category of whiteness. The headline “A Jew Jewed” prefaces a story about a Jewish merchant on whom silver-plated merchandise is passed off as the real thing, with the reporter marveling at “the ingenious rogue who could cheat a Jew.”14 An anecdote involving P. T. Barnum sums up widespread suspicion of New York’s immigrant Irish community. When Barnum observes “an Irish girl of suspicious character in his establishment,” he arrests and searches her, finding that she is indeed a pickpocket preying on his patrons.15 An underlying anxiety about the presence of immigrant servants in middle-class households is betrayed in two adjacent reports from a single day in 1842, when an Irish woman who had been employed as “a domestic” and a “German servant girl” are arrested in separate cases of theft.16

The Herald reserved its most condescending language for African American criminals. Himself an immigrant from Scotland, Bennett had no particular investment in antagonizing the Irish or German communities. As a supporter of slavery and purveyor of racist sentiment, however, he missed no opportunity to emphasize the supposed criminality of blacks. The race of African American perpetrators was not only identified in reports but also trumpeted in headlines such as “Colored Burglar Caught” or “Negro Gambling Cellar Broken Up.”17 Carol Stabile has noted how the Herald and its competitors differentially treated immigrant and black criminals: “While the penny papers often represented the Irish in broad stereotypical strokes . . . [they] were not singled out for the specific vitriol and hatred reserved for blacks.”18 Bennett railed against abolitionists, whom he described as “amalgamationists” whose ostensible goal was to promote interracial marriages. Indeed, among all the petty crimes the Herald covered, the failure to observe racial boundaries may have been the transgression that Bennett most aggressively policed.

The Herald’s “City Intelligence” reports publicly shamed whites, particularly immigrants, who crossed the color line in pursuit of sexual indulgence. These reports invariably inspired Bennett’s most vicious racial invective. Under the sub-headline “Amalgamation,” one report vilifies “Susan Thompson, one of the ugliest specimens of Africa’s daughters extant,” for picking an unnamed Irishman’s pocket during a sexual encounter. Although “the Irishman got ashamed of his conduct at the police, and sloped away without making a complaint,” the paper nonetheless found the violation of a taboo against interracial sex newsworthy.19 In a similar case, “a well dressed and tight built sprig of Shillelah” was arrested for patronizing a black prostitute, “one of the flattest nosed, crooked legged, curly haired, blubber lipped, and aromatic wenches that the police has been honored with for ages past.”20 The next day’s Herald finds another Irish immigrant, Armstrong Riley, “in the arms of one of Afric’s descendants, whose perfume would have extinguished that of the musk in strength and vigor.”21 The venomous tone of these reports can be ascribed to a punitive impulse on Bennett’s part: he seeks to punish the presumptuousness of African American women who consort with whites as well as the heedlessness of Irish immigrant men who would jeopardize their own (tenuous) whiteness through liaisons across the color line.22

The telling headline “Amalgamation Exposed” downplays prostitution and theft, staple crimes of “City Intelligence” reportage, in order to highlight the presumably more scandalous aspect of this encounter, once again its interracial sexuality: “A spruce, greasy looking, square sterned negro wench, named Josephine Emry, was summoned to attend at the police yesterday, to answer the charge of James Meehan, who had been hugging the dark Josephine to his longing arms, while she with fingers light was relieving his pockets of their content, amounting to $13,50 in specie. She was fully committed.”23 The Herald reports consistently aim to titillate and horrify readers with stories that combine criminal behavior with the spectacle of interracial sex. A black transvestite shares column space with Josephine Emry on New Year’s Day 1842: “Pete was dressed about half male, the other female, and his voice, movements and action were most perfect imitations of a shy young she darkey.” The report goes on to note that Pete had plied his trade for some years, inducing men “to test the peculiarity of amalgamation by his persuasive powers, and when the retaining fee was obtained, Pete would hoist petticoats, show his breeches, and run. He was committed.” This piece appears under the subheading “A Cunning Darkey in the Dark.” Pete Smalley (or Sewally) reappears in the Herald a couple of months later with the reporter cataloging his “waddling, mincing gait” and other feminine characteristics before condemning him as a “beast in the shape of a man.”24 The fixation of the Herald police reports on prostitution, racial mixing, and (in Smalley’s case) nonconformity with traditional gender roles is consistent with what has been documented in the “flash press” of precisely the same era.25 In dealing with the racial composition of the American urban scene, the police reports of the period tended toward either condescending humor or, in regard to African ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Overlapping Spheres of Literature and Criminal Justice
• 1. “The Best Side of a Case of Crime”: George Lippard, Walt Whitman, and Antebellum Police Reports
• 2. Race, Vigilantism, and the Diffusion of Civic Authority: Measuring Justice in Novels by George Lippard and Richard Hildreth
• 3. Carceral Conversions: Redemption via Incarceration in Antebellum American Literature
• 4. The Angel in the Penitentiary: Women and Incarceration
• 5. “Branded with Infamy”: Discharged Convicts in Antebellum Crime Novels and The House of the Seven Gables
• 6. Voices from Prison: Antebellum Memoirs of Incarceration
• Conclusion: Christian Meadows, Edgar Allan Poe, and the “Magazine Prison-House”
• Notes
• Index