VARIETIES OF PROGRESSIVISM ★^713The Rise of Personal Freedom
During the Progressive era, as journalist William M. Reedy jested, it struck “sex
o’clock” in America. The founder of psychiatry, Sigmund Freud, lectured at
Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1909, and discovered that his
writings on infantile sexuality, repression, and the irrational sources of human
behavior were widely known “even in prudish America.” Issues of intimate per-
sonal relations previously confined to private discussion blazed forth in popu-
lar magazines and public debates.
For the generation of women who adopted the word “feminism” to express
their demand for greater liberty, free sexual expression and reproductive
choice emerged as critical definitions of women’s emancipation. Greenwich
Village became a center of sexual experimentation. The aura of tolerance
attracted many homosexuals to the area, and although organized demands
for gay rights lay far in the future, the gay community became an important
element of the Village’s lifestyle. But new sexual attitudes spread far beyond
bohemia; they flourished among the young, unmarried, self- supporting
women who made sexual freedom a hallmark of their oft- proclaimed personal
independence.
The Birth- Control Movement
The growing presence of women in the labor market reinforced demands for
access to birth control, an issue that gave political expression to changing sex-
ual behavior. In the nineteenth century, the right to “control one’s body” gener-
ally meant the ability to refuse sexual advances, including those of a woman’s
husband. Now, it suggested the ability to enjoy an active sexual life without nec-
essarily bearing children. Emma Goldman, who had emigrated to the United
States from Lithuania at the age of sixteen, toured the country lecturing on sub-
jects from anarchism to the need for more enlightened attitudes toward homo-
sexuality. She regularly included the right to birth control in her speeches and
distributed pamphlets with detailed information about various contraceptive
devices. “I demand freedom for both sexes,” she proclaimed, “freedom of action,
freedom in love and freedom in motherhood.” Goldman constantly ran afoul of
the law. By one count, she was arrested more than forty times for dangerous or
“obscene” statements or simply to keep her from speaking.
By forthrightly challenging the laws banning contraceptive information
and devices, Margaret Sanger, one of eleven children of an Irish- American
working- class family, placed the birth control movement at the heart of the
new feminism. In 1911, she began a column on sex education, “What Every
Girl Should Know,” for The Call, a New York socialist newspaper. Postal officials
barred one issue, containing a column on venereal disease, from the mails. The
How did the labor and women’s movements challenge the nineteenth- century
meanings of American freedom?