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community. Where previously it had been the principle of respectability
for a man to control his native licentiousness in deference to his wife's
higher nature, and for a woman to maintain the illusion that she lived
on a naturally superior plane, it now became the tense pride of both
sexes to destroy this retrograde sectarianism.
But the faith in our sexual perfectibility of a Dr. Long or a Dr.
Stopes or a Dr. van der Velde soon wore thin. The expansive spirit of
the 'twenties, the freedom to experiment, to talk about sexual method
and to measure sexual gratification, had as its corollary a notable in–
crease in personal disquiet; for in relating and comparing our sexuality
with that of other men and women we became increasingly unsure that
we were capable of giving and receiving all the pleasure demanded of
us. It was with almost a kind of grim satisfaction that, in the 'thirties, we
surrendered our individual responsibility for our sexual, along with our
economic, fate to the larger social forces. The depression made de–
terminists of us, first Marxists, then Freudians, or both simultaneously.
We stopped believing that we had only ourselves to blame if we were
not sexually happy and learned, instead, to blame our parents, our
grandparents, all of society. Only a basic renovation of the whole social
order could accomplish what we had once thought could be achieved
by sexual craft-by more artful timing, by altering a position here or
a concentration there.
There was no sexology, in the specific sense that there had been
in the previous decades, to meet this new state of mind. The book-reading
public now divided itself between the literature of revolution, whose
doctrine it was that sexual stability could come only through a complete
overturn of the social organization, and the "reformism" of the
psychiatric or psychoanalytical clinic-with the Marxists for a while
well in the lead. But gradually, as the country was restored to prosperity
by the reforms of Rooseveltian paternalism, we began to prefer the
quiet dialectic of doctor-patient, parent-child, to the harsh mandates of
dialectical materialism. The writings of Freud, of his disciples and
revisers, became our literature of sexual theory. There was virtually no
literature of sexual practice. Practice had to take its chances in the
theoretical scramble.
But with a new world war, the cultural pendulum swung yet
again. The atmosphere of war provided a poor ambiance for the idea
that we were the passive victims of an uncontrollable process-which
was how the layman had generally interpreted the psychoanalytical
determination. Patriotism demanded that we revive the old American
virtues of enterprise and efficiency, that we show our mettle by con-
