Chapter 3: Sex Instruction and the Sanctity of Marriage

He takes female sexuality as he sees it and accepts it as a norm. That he interprets women's sufferings, their symptoms, their dissatisfactions, in terms of their individual histories, without questioning the relationship of their "pathology" to a certain state of society, of culture. As a result, he generally ends up resubmitting women to the dominant discourse of the father, to the law of the father, while silencing their demands. 1

-- Luce Irigaray


Robert L. Dickinson believed sex education was crucial to preserving the institution of marriage in America. Throughout his works, he would point to sex instruction as a way to avoid problems in marriage and prevent "perversity." Toward the end of his life, he became more assured that the doctor had an essential role to play in preserving proper sexual relations and monogamous love. Dickinson wanted physicians to become marriage counselors. As in his inaugural address to the American Gynecological Society, Dickinson upheld that marital maladjustment was the business of a preventive gynecology.2

In order for marriage to be "saved," Dickinson believed scientific study was necessary. He looked not only to sexual deviance as a way to find the limits of normal sexuality. Studies of homosexuality, autoeroticism, and genital morphology were insufficient. Dickinson studied marital sexuality directly to generate data which would serve as the basis for his version of sex education. Dickinson acted as a marriage counselor himself through much of his medical career; as with his other studies he drew on his clinical experience.3 However, the bulk of Dickinson's knowledge came from observing what he called the pathological. He wrote, "What I teach is based, each clause of it, on the wreck of some marriage or some mind."4 Dickinson tried to find the meaning of marital harmony through the analysis of its difficulties; he found health through pathology.

Dickinson's sexological information would be carefully disseminated by medical experts according to his strategy. Dickinson wanted the doctor to take care in presenting information to his patient, especially if the patient was a woman. He wrote,"our high function as confessors and advisers to the saintly half of the race. . . is impossible without intimate speech, gentle, reverent, direct."5 He wanted marriage counselors to fill this role. They would not only present the "truths" of sexology to the couple, but intervene directly to ensure Dickinson's vision of sexual health.6

Marriage counselors would play three important roles for Dickinson: to train perspective couples to have a proper sexuality, to prevent the marriage of "degenerates," and promote fertility and fidelity in "genetically fit" couples. To accomplish these goals, Dickinson felt it was also necessary to ensure that neither partner had engaged in deviant sexual practices. He would give the woman the sexual advice she apparently needed in a fashion that would only allow her to be heterosexual. Heterosexuality was the only healthy path for women according to Dickinson.7 He thought the doctor, acting as a marriage counselor, should oversee all of these matters and could give objective advice to couples.8

The lack of basic sex knowledge in the general populace was at the root of most marital difficulties according to Dickinson. This was a problem for him primarily because he believed that marital discontent was the result of sex problems. He believed that women, much more than men, were uninformed about sex. Yet, this gave him an opening to offer his medical services to prevent marital difficulties. Dickinson wrote early on in his career that gynecology could be useful in the sexual arena. He espoused a preventive gynecology whose most powerful tool was the dissemination of knowledge.

If very many mothers subject their daughters to the shock of a first genital hemorrhage, unannounced; if there is rarely any warning concerning self-abuse; if normal curiosity, at proper times, concerning marriage and maternity is evaded; if engaged couples are not guarded; if lack of very simple knowledge on nearly every wedding night leaves blind fear to blundering ignorance; if no single cause of mental strain in married women is as widespread as sex fears and maladjustments, and if the court records show that in most divorces the initial source of friction lies in a real or fancied physical incompatibility - if some of these things are so, then the proper agency for oversight has failed of its duty.9

It was the woman that he primarily saw as the source of marital discontent. Dickinson believed he could save the bourgeois family from its ignorance with his sex education. Apparently, women lacked the knowledge that he could provide. Dickinson claimed to be able to relieve women's mental strain that were a result of "sex fears and maladjustments" through cautious conversations about sex. This ignorance was not necessarily her fault, Dickinson thought, she just needed to be made aware of the "facts" of sexuality.10 (see figure 1)11


--Figure 1: Eugenic diagram promoting sex education

Dickinson would relieve women's supposed anxieties about sexuality by telling them how to feel about their desires. Dickinson would relay the "simple" facts of the sex act. He believed he was an objective observer, a scientist. The implementation of sexological theory in this context was used to provide more than just a knowledge base. Drawing from his clinical data, Dickinson thought he had the tools to train women to perform heterosexuality. Although Dickinson thought it was better to instruct women before marriage, he would offer medical assistance after the nuptials had long since been said.

The clergyman unites man and wife. It is for [gynecologists] to help to keep them united, inasmuch as the very perfection of union cannot exist without physical harmony. 12

Dickinson positioned sexuality as the physical source of love and fidelity. For him, sexuality allowed the "very perfection of union." Incompatibilities in sexual relations were the true source of marital difficulties in Dickinson's mind. Other influences, such complaints about money, work, or children, were secondary.13 Reducing marital life to merely its sex, allowed Dickinson to make his case that gynecologists were needed to protect the family. As successful managers of female bodies, Dickinson believed, they should be especially able to preserve failing marriages. This linkage relied on the assumptions that gynecologists actually understood sexuality and that sex was primarily physiological in nature.

Dickinson positioned gynecology as the arbiter of sexual knowledge. He wanted American gynecology to be an "agency of oversight"; this panoptic perspective of the medical speciality allowed for a specialized regulation of sexuality without restrictions. Dickinson saw himself as the guardian of young couples. He wanted to ensure their unfettered assent into the heterosexual status quo. Armed with a new understanding of erotics and reproduction brought by the espousers of sexology and his own investigations, Dickinson believed he had the information to ensure the development of marital sexuality. If need be, he assured himself that he could restore the "fallen" woman to her rightful place as sacrosanct mother and wife through reeducation.14

As in his writings concerning sexual deviance, heterosexuality was precarious. Dickinson revealed a crisis of misinformation in the bedroom. A doctor's oversight was needed. Sex should not be a secret according to Dickinson. Sex needed to be understood and named by the scientific mind. By defining sexuality in such a manner, he sought to find an objective solution to marital difficulties. Dickinson's sexual knowledge became a medical technology that would inform and conform sexual praxis.15