Read Online Sex and the Founding Fathers: The American Quest for a Relatable Past (Sexuality Studies) by Thomas A. Foster - Free Book Online Page B

directly address the issue of Washington
not having children. And for the first time, most accounts offer readers
what they now want-an explanation. This approach has been taken for at
least two reasons. First, the move to make Washington more ordinary and
accessible, as typified by all biographies today, includes saying more about
this aspect of his life. Second, the contemporary issues around childlessness
have become much more public today. If marriage was the central aspect of
becoming a man in the eighteenth century, having a child has become one of
the measures in contemporary society.
    Many contemporary biographers draw on the letter that Washington
sent to his nephew to assert that he was sterile. For example, "The conclusion
that he was sterile is inescapable," Brookhiser confidently declares. "The act
of generation... was one he could not perform.""' Given masculine standards of the day that negatively characterized sexually dysfunctional men
as, among other things, withdrawn and weakly, one wonders if Washington
were sterile, would he have shared this information with his nephew?
    Of course, some writers are more tentative than others but are nonetheless
explicit in their speculation. According to the ever-changing popular website Wikipedia, for example, "George and Martha never had any children
together-his earlier bout with smallpox followed, possibly, by tuberculosis
may have made him sterile.""' Another biographer notes that, given Martha's
children from a previous husband, George was "probably... sterile."130
    Notably, impotence is virtually never suggested, unless it is being
ruled out. Washington's award-winning biographer James Thomas Flexner
explains to the readers of popular history magazine American Heritage
that the "evidence presents a very strong presumption that Washington
was, although not impotent, sterile.""' "There is nothing in his behavior,"
writes another biographer, "to suggest that he was impotent, or that his
sexual nature caused him any deep uneasiness.""' Another portrays Washington as a man who was clearly performing his husbandly duty beyond
question and claims that Washington was "mystified why, year after year,
he and Martha could produce no Washington heir.""' Most recently, a
2009 biography also does not raise impotence as a possibility, declaring
that "reasonable speculation suggests two possibilities.... Martha may
have had difficult deliveries... that left her unable to conceive again,
or Washington's bout with smallpox... may have left him sterile." This account also seems to suggest that impotence was not at work, as Washington never expressed guilt or self-consciousness. Indeed, the author infers
that Martha was the problem in his explanation that George was filled
with "forbearance" and "understanding" as he "tried to help Martha deal
with her almost uncontrollable maternal anxiety." (This interpretation is
based, it seems, on the one brief surviving letter that we have from Martha to George in which she comments on a "rainey and wett" day during
which she expressed feeling "sorry" that he would "not be at home as soon
as" she had "expected.")134

    The inquiry into Washington's childlessness is not just limited to popular biography. In a medical journal, John K.Amory publishes his conclusion
that Washington could not likely have been impotent given what we know
about him as a "healthy, vigorous man." Tellingly, the author also rules out
sexual infertility as the result of a sexually transmitted disease (despite their
commonness in eighteenth-century America), noting Washington's "character and strong sense of moral propriety."135 We know that erectile dysfunction occurs far more frequently than sterility-although frequency today
may not match that of Washington's era. Nonetheless it is striking that writers resist raising the possibility."'
    A minority of biographers are invested in singling out Martha, mother
of two of her own