Post World Wars Western Identity: Gender and Sexuality

By Genevieve Rose, First Year History

The World Wars were monumental events which impacted the globe. Politics, economy, and social standings were changed forever, but not necessarily for the better.  Women especially, were treated very differently.  While there was an element of more female freedom post World War One, the Second World War had almost the reverse effect.  Gender and sexuality were freely embedded within seemingly unrelated policy decisions, legal systems, medical opinions, and scientific theory.  These roles translated into more personal dynamics as well.  Femininity was not given autonomy, but only existed alongside masculinity, giving no space for separate female sexuality.

Female sexuality distinct from men was demonised due to masculine anxieties after the horrors of the war.  Men wanted traditional gender roles in place to feel a sense of security after the fighting, and as history goes, what men want, the world gets.  Femininity was restricted to domesticity, passivity, and submission, especially in the bedroom.

White male prowess was threatened by the hypersexuality and non-conformity of women before the Second World War.  Oppressive post-war ideals unexpectedly cultivated the roots of second wave feminism and the modern sexual liberation movement.

An age of fashionable, intellectual and sexual freedom was emerging for women.  With the men away fighting in the First World War, women had the social liberties to explore their repressed desires and wants.

At a time when there was new emphasis on the unconventional inspired by figures such as Sigmund Freud, who was hugely popular at the time, many women participated in what Lillian Faderman has called bisexual experimentation during this period.  One study, showed that over 50% of 2200 (mostly middle class and white) women surveyed, admitted to an intense emotional relationship with another woman, while half of that number said those experiences with other women were ‘either accompanied by sex or recognised as sexual in character.’

This radical assault on traditional, married, heterosexuality was met with ambivalence by many who dismissed it as mere stupidity as, of course, ‘real’ sex was defined as involving both a penis and a vagina.

Yet, there was not always a space for this expression and freedom of exploration, however limited it was.  After the Second World War and under the aegis of McCarthyism and its aftermath, any forms of gender and sexual expression that did not fit the post-war ideal of heterosexual nuclear familial lifestyle, were treated as domestic subversions that threatened the moral fibre of mid-century America.  Masculinity was fragile due to the trauma experienced by men as a collective and sought to enforce traditional gender roles onto newly liberated women.

With the increased wave of sexuality of women, traditionally patriarchal societies moved towards restriction.  Firstly, through the legislation against sex workers during the later 19th century. The United Kingdom passed the ‘Contagious Diseases’ Acts of 1864, 1866 and 1869 and aimed to oppress female prostitutes as they were blamed for the spread of venereal diseases, not the men who frequented them.  Aside from illogical basis, another issue with said acts were, the rules of enforcement by which many women were stopped, as grounds for violation of these acts were subjective.  Women could be stopped based on looks, even arrested.

Clearly reform was needed on these draconian acts.  There was outrage of the law’s place in violating women’s bodily autonomy especially when trial was not held.  The unorganised campaign also accused the law of tactically condoning the work but not the vice of transactional sex.  The third major outcry from the campaign was for the gender difference, the law mainly focused on women, while the problem was occurring in a specific group of armed forces officers.  The law put double standards into practice. While the first law was repealed, much more stringent policy was in effect in 1869.  These acts interlink traditional ideals of sexuality and gender, that men’s sexuality is and always will be inevitable, that there was little purpose regulating natural instinct.

In many ways race is another big issue that intersects with the regulation of gender and sexuality.  The birth control movement in early 20th century America was only supported so widely because of its racial associations.  Birth control was a huge vehicle for female freedom and liberation but had sinister roots.  Margaret Sanger was the country’s figurehead for birth control, preaching its aid to ‘ethnic cleansing-like’ approaches.  Sanger was a known racist and wanted to offer the birth control pill to ‘problem families’ and women of a disadvantaged social standing.

With the socio-economic divide most of these families and women were non-white individuals.  Eugenic scientists of the time were worried that if contraception was offered to ‘superiors’, usually middle-class white women, there would be a rate difference between the ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ races.

The latter half of the 20th century saw a new interest in histories of sexuality and gender.  A time of political fervent, civil rights, student activism, women’s liberation movement and a rise of gay liberation politics.  A second wave of feminism began which catapulted the 20th century into modernity.  As part of second wave feminisms’ attempt to historicise the oppression of women, the movement was one of the first to turn its sights towards sex.  It focused on sex’s involvement in patriarchal oppression through questions of female bodily autonomy and unequal power dynamics that occur during sex.

Further on, the 80s and 90s brought about new sexuality politics. Postmodern scholars like Foucault fundamentally changed the questions historians ask about sex in the past.  Foucault concluded that ‘acceptable’ sexuality and gender were particular constructions to censure same sex desire and reaffirm the supposed supremacy of heterosexuality.  Foucault also spoke of the idea that women aren’t less sexual than men, aren’t more maternal than men and aren’t more material than men as society dictated.  Instead, these ideals were a construction of female sexuality designed to uphold patriarchy and to maintain status quo for men.

Foucault insists that as these ideals have ‘been made, they can be unmade’.  That essentially by breaking apart these big ideas we take for granted, showing that they have their roots in society and culture, that they’re not timeless or inevitable, we can not only better understand the past, but we can also try to undo or change their modern equivalents.  A new postmodernist approach to both gender and sexuality offered new tools to undermine and challenge systems of oppression in the present. 

Finally, while gender and sexuality politics are increasingly coming to light for good reason, there is still huge disparity in the modern world.  Although not always a smooth progression, Western society has consistently developed towards greater equality, whereas the developing world has been left in decline.  Many women do not have access to birth control due to political, economic, and cultural situations, dramatically effecting their daily lives.  Not to mention the widely unavailability of menstrual products while male contraceptives remain free.  Hopefully more insight into women’s sexual and gender history will highlighting the important mission still to continue.

Picture credit: Getty Images