Prudishness, Prudery, Prudes Quotes
This is a very valuable historical quotation as it gives is a flavor of 19th century attitudes about birth control. Malthus was one of the first to warn about the danger of overpopulation. But even he repudiated birth control as a potential solution. Toynbee was giving a scholarly academic lecture and academics whenever they discussed birth control were expected by many to speak or write only in Latin—the “dead language.” Toynbee, a very young brilliant man—he died at only 31—was considered very daring as he actually discussed it in English. The assumption of all at the time, in that Protestant culture, was that birth control was immoral. The logic of it was that sex was pleasurable, but as children would likely result, the parents would have and accept responsibility. Pleasure without the concomitant responsibility might lead to sex for pure enjoyment and much time spent with pleasure. The production of children and the responsibility thereof was therefore a break and limitation on the amount of time that people would spend with sex. There was the Protestant work ethic and too much sex would detract from work, prayer, parenting, scholarship, and activities of social responsibility. In America there was a similar cultural view of birth control and even as late as 1963 the criminal law was used to restrict birth control. A Connecticut pharmacist was jailed for filling a doctors prescription for condoms for a married couple where the wife’s life was threatened if she bore another child. The Supreme Court overturned the conviction, but birth control and abortion were conflated. Even today, many of the so called “pro life” organizations not only oppose legal abortion, but they want the government to restrict birth control, though tactically they emphasize the abortion publicly. The English and American family planning advocates like Margaret Sanger were up against these attitudes on which there is stll some controversy into the 21st century.
The National Organization for Decent Literature was a pressure group made up mostly of Roman Catholic Priests. It was founded 1938, and ran until the late 1960s when changes in society had obsoleted their “values” and rigid concepts of “decency”.
There have usually been some members of Congress who want the government to regulate the private lives of people so that they conform to a particular view of morality. What is dramatic about this quotation is that it had only been 2 months since Pearl Harbor and the Philippines and Singapore had fallen to the Japanese. The nation was very confused shifting to a wartime economy and deal with rationing and stimulating war material production. Yet some members of Congress would see the morality of dancing as a problem worthy of the time and attention of our legislative branch.
