Dreiser also depicts another kind of bias faced by these workers. More than other lower-class menial workers, domestic employees were assumed to be sexual adventurers. Family members often treated servants as “a source of moral contagion,”26 and wives and mothers watched the female hired help with a sharp eye lest they initiate sexual liaisons with the family’s sons and husbands. In fact, the middle class as a whole held a “widespread hostility” toward working-class women, especially domestics, which according to Charles E. Rosenberg “might well have mirrored middle-class repression of the sexuality which the lower orders were presumed to enjoy.”27 In the nineteenth and into at least the early twentieth century, it was widely believed that anyone wishing to climb into the middle class must sublimate sexual energy and use it for other, more capitalistic pursuits. Race and social class (not just gender) were presumed to determine one’s sex drive. Lower-class women, especially women of foreign descent and women of color, so the hypothesis went, were more sexual than middle- and upper-class white women, who were increasingly expected by their very nature to be oblivious to sexual matters. A body of convincing evidence
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suggests that the historic distinction between “‘good’ and ‘bad’ women has … been coded in class and racial terms’’ — that is, that the moral lines have traditionally been drawn between the “pure” sexuality of middle-class white women and the promiscuity of ethnic and lower-class women.28
Given this late-nineteenth century conventional wisdom, the unwelcome sexual attention that Jennie receives in her new domestic job is not surprising. Dreiser makes it plain that male visitors to the Bracebridge mansion approach her routinely “with a view to luring her into some unlicensed relationship” (119). And Jennie, because of her family situation and the outcome of her encounter with Brander, is likely to fulfill the stereotype of the sexual underclass. At first she resists, but rather than continue to question these men’s prerogative to make demands of her or reject the stereotype, Jennie begins to reflect that perhaps she was “innately bad and wrong herself” (120). Thus, when Lester Kane shows up, she is ripe for the picking; although “she nod not bear any outward marks of her previous experience” and “there were no evidences of coquetry about her, … still he ‘felt that he might succeed’” (122). Some would assume that Lester magically intuits something about Jennie’s past or about her essential nature, but given his socialization, he probably merely assumes that a young female domestic servant is fair game for what he thinks of as the “browsing” of the upper-class male (122).
Jennie’s sexual dilemma confirms her place in the working class, but it also shows Dreiser pushing the boundaries of censorship. Even in the expurgated first edition, Jennie is a far more sexual woman than Carrie is, her sexuality a much more dangerous commodity than is Carrie’s. Like Brander before him, Lester is attracted at first sight by her sexuality alone; and, also like Brander, he claims her by saying, “You belong to me.” And, also like her first lover, he all but forces her into a dangerous liaison which offers no more ultimate security than did her first affair. Although Dreiser’s first novel does not explore fully the consequences of Carrie’s sexual choices, Jennie Gerhardt breaks new ground in daring to expose the controversy over women’s control of their own reproductive functions.
The issue is only implicit early in the novel, but in retrospect it is clear that Brander, who seems to love Jennie, sins by omission when he fails to provide her with birth control (to which he certainly must have had access) or to marry her before he dies. He thereby denies her the legal and financial status that would have protected her later on. Jennie’s subsequent experience raises the issue of birth control — still under the control of the Comstock
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law — more explicitly. When Lester, unaware of her previous affair or the existence of a child, decides that he, too, must “have” her, Jennie initiates a discussion of birth control with him. Jennie approaches the subject quite timidly, but the exchange is, nonetheless, remarkable, considering her personality as well as the prevailing standards of censorship. In the first edition, after hearing his proposal, Jennie realizes that a “relationship with him meant possible motherhood for her again. The tragedy of giving birth to a child — ah, she could not go through that a second time, at least under the same conditions.” Finally, she tells him, “I couldn’t have a baby.” Lester replies, cryptically, “You’re a great girl, Jennie. … You’re wonderful. But don’t worry about that. It can be arranged. You don’t need to have a child unless you want to, and I don’t want you to.’’ He reiterates a moment later: “It’s so. … You believe me, don’t you? You think I know, don’t you?” Although she “falter[s],” she answers “Yes.”29
A careful reader of even the first edition can grasp what Ripley Hitchcock, Dreiser’s editor at Harper and Brothers, tried to expunge: a dialogue which marks a crucial change in Dreiser’s treatment of sexual material. First, Dreiser is willing to move beyond Sister Carrie (where sexual exchanges are always handled covertly), this time signaling openly the sexual nature of Jennie and Lester’s illicit relationship and admitting that for both of them it is a calculated move. More importantly, both Dreiser and his protagonist seem to be newly cognizant of the perils of female sexuality, so much so that both are brazen enough to discuss it — Jennie with Lester, Dreiser with the reader, although his attempt is mediated by the editorial censor. Their conversation confirms that Jennie, who has had one affair and given birth to a child, knows little or nothing about birth control, while Lester, the single, wealthy, sophisticated man-about-town, knows a great deal.
It also suggests that Lester feels in control of the issue, because he does not offer to explain to Jennie what she desperately needs to know and because he makes it plain that he will probably use contraceptives as a matter of course — not from any desire to protect Jennie, but because he is reluctant to father a child. Later in the passage he adds: “But anyway, I wouldn’t let any trouble come to you. … Besides, I don’t want any children. There wouldn’t be any satisfaction in that proposition for me at this time. I’d rather wait. But there won’t be — don’t worry.” Jennie answers faintly, but “not for worlds could she have met his eyes” (Viking 165).
All these implications are clearer yet in the typescript version altered by Hitchcock, now restored in the Pennsylvania
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edition. There, after telling Jennie not to worry, Lester adds, “You don’t need to. I understand a number of things that you don’t yet” (158). Later on the narrator tells us that Jennie “half-wondered what it was he knew and how he could be so sure, but he did not trouble to explain” (159). These passages, deleted in the first edition, reinforce the impression that Lester is making sure that Jennie feels the chasm which age, gender, and social class place between them. To put it bluntly, his remarks (as Dreiser was surely well aware) are chauvinistic and paternalistic, sure to make Jennie uncomfortable. At the end of Lester’s remarks, Dreiser added, “He stopped and she opened her eyes in wonder and a kind of shame. She had never known that” (158). His editors excised these sentences,30 but they confirm that Dreiser wanted the reader to know that Jennie is ignorant about contraception and embarrassed about having to rely on Lester for vital information about her own body.
Since Jennie does not become pregnant again and the subject never resurfaces, Lester apparently does have access to effective contraceptives. With the exception of the birth control pill, most forms of contraception used today were already available in the late-nineteenth century, with similarly mixed results. Withdrawal and the “safe period” method — limiting intercourse to the time when a woman was ostensibly unable to conceive — were common practices carried over from earlier centuries. The latter, however, was even more unreliable then than now, for the “safe period’’ was calculated based on misguided information about when ovulation occurs. It was in fact the 1920s before the medical profession discovered precisely when women ovulated (Smith-Rosenberg 231; Degler 214). Thus medical guides and marriage manuals frequently instructed women in precisely how and when to get pregnant in the guise of teaching them how not to. Some marriage guides even claimed that a woman could not become pregnant unless she experienced sexual desire or orgasm (Smith-Rosenberg 138).
Domestically manufactured condoms were made possible by the invention of vulcanized rubber around the mid-nineteenth century. However, at a cost of approximately $3.00 per dozen, they may still have been too expensive for laborers, who earned an average annual wage of $500 in 1865.31 Their use, of course, depended on male compliance. However, condoms had one major advantage: a loophole in the law allowed them to be sold for the prevention of venereal diseases in men, but not to men or women who admitted wanting them for contraception.32