ABSTRACT
Gardner attempted to sway his readers by contrasting the new woman’s sexual transgressions with the social norm of good female behavior. He said that once women had “recourse” to masturbation, “then farewell to female purity, to virtue, to anything worthy!” Female purity stood for all social worth: the social body’s purity was in woman’s hands. The complementary rhetoric was that men were acceptably base, appetitive creatures, engrossed in sordid traffic, the whirl and contact with the world. Woman’s symbolic aggrandizement as purity and man’s self-abasement as sordid and dirty was an exact reversal of another set of deeper and just as commonly expressed feelings, that man was above woman as head was above body.
