Between 1870 and 1930, a new system of describing the ostensible differences between men and women took hold in Europe and North America. As the historian Angus McLaren notes, “older notions of masculinity and femininity” no longer seemed adequate to explain “the changing nature of men’s work, the rise of the white collar service sector, the reduction of the birth rate, and women’s entry into higher education and the professions.”33 The solution was heterosexuality, which was never simply a descriptive term for sexual desire of men for women or of women for men. Jonathan Ned Katz has coined the phrase “different-sex erotic ideal” to refer to the new systems of meaning that surrounded relationships between people understood to be men and women by the late nineteenth century. As he explains in The Invention of Heterosexuality (1995), “An official, dominant, different-sex erotic ideal—a heterosexual ethic—is not ancient at all, but a modern invention.”34
Historians of heterosexuality illuminate the risks of asserting heteronormativity as a universal constant within human history. The scholar Hanne Blank describes the “surprisingly short history of heterosexuality” since the late nineteenth century in her engaging study of the science of different-sex desires and their cultural reverberations.35 She highlights what scholars such as Anne Fausto-Sterling have long demonstrated: that the idea of the sexual binary is itself a cultural production rooted in historical circumstances.36 Although much of this scholarship has attended to the ways in which sexology and psychiatry produced modern categories of homosexuality and lesbianism,37 it has also taught us a great deal about how sexology shaped emergent ideas of “the heterosexual.”38 The profusion of published advice columns that continued to include definitions of these terms into the 1940s suggests that it took many more decades for these terms to circulate widely in the vernacular. Popular print culture of the 1920s through 1940s often included minilessons about the meaning and importance of heterosexuality, a fact that demonstrates both that health professionals thought this knowledge was crucial for Americans’ overall well-being and that some readers presumably learned something they did not already know.
The science of sexuality unquestionably shaped the history of heterosexuality, but we join other historians in seeking a history of heterosexuality that incorporates nonexperts, researches the grassroots, and considers multiple sources of power and authority. We, along with other historians, acknowledge that critical demographic shifts during the early twentieth century—including both urbanization and higher college attendance rates—resulted in increased mixed-sex socializing, not to mention a sexual revolution.39 We additionally share a conviction stressed by the historian John D’Emilio: that “capitalism has led to the separation of sexuality from procreation.” Indeed, if capitalism “created the material conditions for homosexual desire to express itself as a central component of some individuals’ lives,” we contend that material conditions and relations inform sexual desires as well as identities.40 Sexology alone cannot explain the history of heterosexuality or its importance.
In many respects, the category of the heterosexual emerged in the early twentieth century as a necessary complement to “the homosexual,” a figure of more immediate interest to queer men and, problematically, to law enforcement. As George Chauncey has argued, during the 1920s and 1930s both middle-class “queer” men and “normal” middle-class men in New York City began to reject the performative effeminacy of working-class “fairies.” Queer men embraced the label of homosexuality, a name that centered “sexual desire, not gender inversion,” as the name “that distinguished them from other men.” “Normal” middle-class men likewise began to identify as heterosexuals and put their sexual-object choice, not simply their gender performance, at the center of their masculine identity.41 This association between heterosexuality and the “normal” found support from the federal government and its bureaucracies. Significantly, in The Straight State, Margot Canaday demonstrates that the expanding federal bureaucracy “produce[d] the category of homosexuality through regulation,” such that “a homosexual-heterosexual binary . . . was being inscribed in federal citizenship policy.”42 As a result of this epistemological privilege, “heterosexuality” emerged as a category of sexual identity associated with citizenship, often through programs and discourses that validated heterosexual marriage as a fundamental unit of governance, rights, and benefits.
What historians increasingly find is that heterosexuality emerged as a category and identity not simply through top-down impositions of the state but rather from multiple sources and with sometimes ambivalent results. Definitions of race and racialized class relations, not to mention notions about gendered hierarchies, shaped the meaning that people gave to their different-sex desires and the values they associated with their sexual intimacies; those intimacies might occur between two people of the same sex but be infused with opposite-sex meaning based on so-called racial difference. Certainly, a burgeoning administrative state and growing penal system in the United States played a powerful role in producing raced and classed ideas of (hetero)sexual respectability. To take one example, encounters between African American girls and women with the police, courts, and other forms of state power produced ideas about heterosexuality as a privileged status of “respectable” woman, usually but not always coded as white and often assumed to be middle class. Cheryl Hicks demonstrates the ways that juvenile courts, the policing of urban neighborhoods, and the prison system attempted to inculcate norms of middle-class heterosexuality among working-class African American girls and women in the early twentieth century. She finds that the working-class women who encountered agents of the state held distinct, if no less morally trenchant, ideas about the importance of different-sex relationships and heterosexual respectability. Rather than a top-down, middle-class imposition on a reluctantly regulated working class, heterosexuality emerged from multiple experiences of class and racial formation.43 Hicks’s work additionally reveals that, when incarcerated black and white women had sexual liaisons, administrators worried that “black women [were] function[ing] as masculine substitutes who fulfilled white women’s heterosexual desire.”44 What it meant to be heterosexual, then, evolved not simply through the measured advice of medical experts like Josephine Jackson but also in the sensational reporting of crimes, in the representations of racial otherness that pervaded accounts of interracial male-female sex, and within the very prison systems intended to discipline women who violated the norms of sexual respectability.
Ideas about racial otherness and gendered power, moreover, shaped the ways in which people experienced different-sex desire and/or constructed ideas of the sexually normal. For example, as Pablo Mitchell has compellingly revealed, the perception of an individual who “pushed the boundaries of ‘normal,’ early twentieth-century (hetero)sexual behavior” in territorial New Mexico could be all the more complicated if that person had indigenous, Hispano, and Anglo heritage. Work by Victor Jew and Mary Ting Yi Lui underscores that social anxieties regarding relationships between white women and men of color during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries could result in Chinese and black men being demonized in ways that at once overlapped and diverged.45 As much as cross-cultural and interracial sex could facilitate degrees of mobility or even consolidations of power, interracial and cross-cultural sexual encounters could also generate pervasive notions about sexual deviance.
The historians