The following review crossposted on H-SAWH (Southern Association of
Women Historians) may prove of interest to readers of VA-Hist. 

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Sara B. Bearss
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Senior Editor, Dictionary of Virginia Biography
The Library of Virginia
800 E. Broad Street
Richmond, VA 23221-8000
 
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H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by [log in to unmask] (March, 2008)

Pippa Holloway. _Sexuality, Politics, and Social Control in Virginia,
1920-1945_. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. xi +
258 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $59.95 (cloth), ISBN
978-0-8078-3051-2; $19.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8078-5764-9.

Reviewed for H-Women by Julian B. Carter, Program in Critical Studies,
California College of the Arts

This is an aptly titled book. Pippa Holloway's deep research into
Virginia politics, at both state and city levels, allows her to
demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt that state regulation of sexual
behavior and reproduction was an important means of social control in
early twentieth-century Virginia. More specifically, she shows that a
small group of white elite males consistently and consequentially built
social policies that reflected their belief that African Americans and
poor whites posed sexual dangers to the state. Sexual regulation, she
argues, helped draw and enforce a line between the "governing class" and
the "class that was governed" (p. 6).

Holloway nuances this broad picture of social control by white elites in
two ways. She is careful to depict and explore disagreements within the
governing class to show "how it resolved differences within its ranks,"
and she is equally careful to describe the ways that changes in the
larger political context influenced which "visions of sexual regulation
prevailed" (p. 3). Holloway's deft handling of the relationship between
continuity and change makes for a convincing argument that the overall
function of sexual regulation remained constant, although its focus
changed considerably between 1920 and 1945. She notes that "white elites
raised the possibility of sexual threats in different ways to define
themselves as the class that could use the state to restrict others" (p.
6). Thus, the introduction of film censorship and the active pursuit of
eugenic sterilization in the 1920s gave way to blood testing for
venereal disease as a prerequisite for marriage in the 1930s and to the
regulation of prostitution as part of the fight against venereal disease
during the Second World War, but the core reality remained the same.
Across the decades, "white elites directed the authority of the state at
those with the least ability to fight back," the disenfranchised
majority whose putative lack of sexual self-control seemed to testify to
the folly of allowing them to participate in governing themselves (p.
2).

At this most general level, Holloway's story is a depressingly familiar
one. It is not news that the state has served to support the power of
the elite white men who compose it, and for historians of medicine,
sexuality, and race, there will be few surprises in the particulars of
Virginia's regulatory practices. And yet, _Sexuality, Politics, and
Social Control in Virginia_ offers a valuable perspective on this
material. It is unusual to find histories of state formation that treat
sexual regulation as a major strategy for the maintenance of social
order. Holloway's contribution lies in her presentation of sexual
regulation policies as _simultaneously_ about sex--including all the
complex beliefs about race and class with which it is connected--and
about the state. The implications of her project, thus, extend
considerably beyond the facts she offers. For instance, Holloway's
research establishes that the conventional description of southern
states as minimally intrusive on the lives of their citizens is
ideological; while it is true that Virginia's governing class generally
refused to enact, fund, or enforce policies likely to intrude on the
sexual expression of its elite peers, it is also the case that that same
class routinely regulated "in minute detail" the sexual expression of
non-elites (p. 16). Holloway further makes clear that such regulatory
projects were not detritus from the region's plantation past, but rather
were central to its economic and governmental modernization; Virginia
modernized its state apparatus, in part, by subjecting the
disenfranchised to increasingly stringent sexual discipline in the name
of greater efficiency and health for all. If Virginia's government was
small in its budget and its electorate throughout the period under
study, it was nonetheless increasingly invasive in its reach into the
homes and bodies of black and poor Virginians.

One of the strengths of Holloway's study is the clarity with which she
depicts this political situation as the result of disagreement,
negotiation, and activism among upper-class whites. The hierarchical and
undemocratic nature of Virginia's political life did not just happen,
and it was not simply a legacy from the past. It was actively crafted as
an essential part of the modern state apparatus. On the one hand,
Virginia was ruled by a small and "fairly homogeneous group of white
elite males [who] worked to advance a shared economic and political
agenda. They sought docile but productive workers, an economic system
that perpetuated vast disparities in wealth, and the subordination of
African Americans" (p. 7). Yet, on the other hand, these larger agendas
stimulated and authorized an expanded governmental regulation of
sexuality that elites refused to tolerate for themselves. "Laws
restricting civil liberties raised no red flags when they affected
'marginal' elements of the population.... But when the government
reached into the lives of a broader segment of the population, a segment
that included the state's elites, governmental authority was contested
and limited" (p. 48). Holloway argues that movie censorship was far more
controversial than eugenic sterilization, because middle- and
upper-class Virginians often went to cinemas but were rarely committed
to the institutions in which involuntary sterilizations took place;
blood testing before marriage became law only after the draft bill was
amended so as to lighten its touch "on the presumably well-behaved upper
classes"; and wartime plans to curb venereal infection by imposing
curfews for juveniles "met with suspicion and opposition," because the
curfew could not be aimed only at the poor and black youth who were
believed to be the ones "potentially getting into trouble" (pp. 125,
164).

Holloway's reconstruction of contests over regulation in Virginia
demonstrates her considerable skill at uncovering, ordering, and
deriving meaning from the fine details buried in myriad archival
materials. She is slightly less deft at contextualizing her findings in
relation to existing historical literature and to larger theoretical
debates. Like many other talented political historians, Holloway
sometimes seems so committed to establishing who did what that she
forgets to ask herself challenging questions about what those acts
meant, what values they expressed, and how they instantiated deep
beliefs about the way the world works or should work. In principle, I
have no objection to purely political histories, but, in practice, I
think this particular project was hampered by Holloway's quite narrow
definition of her object and methods of study.

The limits of a conventional political analysis for the history of
sexuality are especially clear in terms of the meaning of whiteness to
Virginia's governing class. For example, Holloway demonstrates that
while most elite Virginians resisted any state encroachment on their
liberty, some were eager to enact just such encroachments. Walter
Plecker, of the state's Bureau of Vital Statistics, seems to have been
fanatically invested in white racial purity. Thus, in the mid-1920s, he
made considerable efforts to redefine Native Americans as "colored"
people to guarantee that no one with partial black ancestry could slip
through the legal loophole allowing a person with one Native American
great-great-grandparent to marry a white person. Even though his
proposal included a provision to ensure that elite Virginians descended
from John Rolphe and Pocahontas would be counted as white, this plan met
with vehement opposition from Plecker's peers. Holloway offers this as
an example of the state's attempt to regulate the sexuality of white
elites as well as of blacks and the poor, and concludes that resistance
to Plecker's proposal was resistance to the state's intrusion into elite
bedrooms.

But, why frame this conflict as being about "sexuality"? For Plecker,
documenting one's lineage was an exercise in racial definition; might it
not have been so for his interlocutors as well? Other elite Virginians
resisted his proposal; does that mean they were less committed to white
racial purity than to their collective class immunity from state
surveillance? Could some members of Virginia's ruling class have been
more interested in policing the distinction between classes than those
between races? If not, might the opposition to Plecker's proposal record
a belief that freedom from state surveillance was as fundamental to the
meaning of whiteness as pure Anglo ancestry? Because Holloway does not
push her data hard enough to ask and to answer such questions, her
admirably meticulous research yields less insight into the racial
dimension of sexual regulation than it might have.

Similarly, Holloway does not develop a critical understanding of
sexuality as a research subject. Thus, she tends to treat marriage law
as the equivalent of silent films; because her sources document that the
state regulated both, she treats both as instances of "sexuality." But,
surely, getting married is a different kind of experience than going to
a movie, just as regulating marriage represents a different kind of
state intervention than censoring film. One has a great deal to do with
the consolidation and transmission of property and privilege, while the
other engages the politics of representation and fantasy. Wider reading
and a more diverse interpretative toolkit could have assisted Holloway
in identifying and exploring such differences within "sexuality," and so
yielded a more nuanced, but still empirically grounded, account of state
intervention in the sexual field. For example, lesbian/gay history and
queer theory could have told Holloway that if Virginia's elites had
nothing to say about keeping perversion under control, that fact alone
is worth interrogating, as silence can be a powerful disciplinary
technique. The histories of medicine and sex education could have helped
her think about the larger cultural reasons specific forms of venereal
disease control were promoted at some times and defunded at others.
Disability studies might have pushed her to think about eugenics and
involuntary sterilization of the feebleminded in terms of their address
to the nonsexual body, and possibly, thereby, have moved her toward a
clearer exposition of the ways in which state regulation sutured sexual
reproduction to race and class.

In short, _Sexuality, Politics, and Social Control in Virginia_ offers a
beautifully detailed, clearly written political history of the state's
efforts to regulate sexual expression in the early twentieth-century
South. It also offers a cautionary example of the risk historians run
when they eschew interdisciplinary interpretation and commit themselves
unreservedly to empirical accounts of the past: if the data you find in
the archives tends to confirm what other historians have already
discovered, it is extremely difficult to present the fruits of your
labor in a way that moves readers to valuable insights. It is to
Holloway's credit that she has responded to this unfortunate reality by
emphasizing the significance of sexual regulation to state expansion and
social control. Her book makes a genuine contribution to our
understanding of state development in the modern South.


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