Women's History Month: "Sex Talk" Speaks Volumes Amy Hungerford --------------------------- Special to The Gazette While a cold drizzle persisted into Thursday evening, an audience of about 60 people gathered in the musty warmth of the Merrick Barn Theater at Homewood to hear Princeton historian Christine Stansell weave a tale of free-love m‚nage, progressive labor politics and epistolary sex-talk in turn of the century Greenwich Village. Stansell's lecture, "Talking about Sex: Feminists and Radicals in Early Modernist Culture," kicked off a series of events celebrating March as Women's History Month. The talk was co-sponsored by the Women's Center, the Graduate Representative Organization and the departments of History, English, and Hispanic and Italian Studies. Speaking from a stage set for the performance of Ibsen's The Lady From the Sea, Stansell told the stories of two "cele-brants" of free love: Hutchins Hapgood, a journalist, and Emma Goldman, a writer and champion of women's freedom. Through the stories of these two free lovers Stansell showed how the radical intellectuals of Greenwich Village saw free love as a political tool that could dissolve boundaries of sex and class. Stansell also traced how free lovers' voluminous "sex talk" produced a new anti-feminist discourse alongside a language expressive of women's sexuality. Stansell's lecture followed Hapgood and Goldman through the mazes of their respective free love relationships. Hapgood had married his free lover, Neith Boyce, but enjoyed relationships with other women--in particular, with "Marie," the subject of his book An Anarchist Woman--while he was away in Chicago writing about the labor movement. The letters which pass back and forth between Hapgood and Boyce detail Hapgood's escapades and create an erotic language that, Stansell explained, casts wife as mistress. Stansell foregrounded the importance of "talk" in "thickening" the erotic atmosphere of the relationship: Hapgood wrote to Boyce not only of his desire for transgressive sex--"I am naughty tonight..."--but also of his "desire to talk and to hear you talk." In Emma Goldman's case, Stansell explained, letters "careen" between four people: Goldman, her lover Ben Reitman, our friend Hutchins Hapgood--eventually Reitman's lover--and Almeda Sperry, a lesbian acquaintance of Reitman's who hoped to sleep with Goldman. Goldman's love letters to Reitman reveal both a fascination with his plebeian aura and an exuberant language of sexual expression. Addressing Reitman as "Hobo," Goldman rhapsodizes about the longings of her "treasure box" and complains that Hobo has neglected "Mount Blanc" and "Mount Jura" (producing delighted laughter, of course, from the audience in Merrick Barn). According to Stansell, Sperry sent her own love letters to Goldman, who then sent them to Reitman who then showed them to Hapgood, thus generating a web of sexual talk within which the free love diad--in this case Goldman and Reitman--remained suspended. Stansell suggests that these free lovers thus created a "space of reciprocity" where hurt and jealousy were considered part of a bygone era. In the final section of her lecture Stansell showed how the psychological dramas Goldman and Hapgood played out through "talk" became precisely the kind of material brought to the stage in the first Modernist avant-garde one-act plays. But Stansell also showed how "sex talk"--in this case Hapgood's novel, Story of a Lover, about his wife's free-love affair--also instituted a new anti-feminist language which, she suggested, is still dominant today. Though Hapgood champions the sexually emancipated woman, Stansell argued that the story nevertheless casts the man in the role of victim, psychologically wounded by the refusal of his emancipated wife to talk about her affair. This leaves us, Stansell concluded, with a new genre: "male feminism with a vengeance." In the post-talk buzz over baked goat cheese and glasses of wine, Nadja Durbach, a second-year graduate student in history, reflected on Stansell's distinctive scholarship. "She's a powerful cultural historian with an eye for the way sexuality and class impact and inform each other," she said. Stansell's lecture was taken from her forthcoming book on the American moderns. She is also the author of the acclaimed City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860, and co-editor of a collection of essays entitled Powers of Desire. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Professor Stansell's lecture will be followed this month by a variety of Women's History events, including a panel on "Career Options for Feminists," organized by two Hopkins undergraduates, and an all-day symposium on race and sexuality in the Americas. For more information about events consult the Calendar, or call Women's Studies at (410) 516-6166. Please note that events sponsored by Women's Studies are renowned among students for their sublime munchies. -----------------------------------------------------------------