Aurelia Plath gave Sylvia Plath a Reader’s Digest article titled “The Case for Chastity,” written by a married mother of four, cautioning young women against premarital sex. Sylvia bristled, and later trounced this article in her journal and in The Bell Jar, where it’s renamed “In Defense of Chastity.”
But for that article, Sylvia might have wished to model herself after its author, Margaret Culkin Banning [pictured]. Banning’s New York Times obituary says she published 40 books, and 400 stories in the slick high-paying magazines Sylvia ached to write for. [1] Yet this bestselling novelist—Vassar graduate, a lawyer, pro-women’s rights—might have been forgotten without Plath’s reference to the chastity article, Exhibit A among Sylvia’s reasons Sylvia (and we) should hate her mother.
Reader’s Digest published “The Case for Chastity” in
August 1937. It was so popular that in September, Harper (Margaret Banning’s
publisher) printed it as a pamphlet. Tightly argued and exhaustive, it explains to would-be female sexual rebels and those putting off marriage the many ways unchastity can ruin their lives: diseases, babies, abortions, regrets, and, a new twist, psychological breakdowns. The article quotes
statistics and experts. Read it for yourself, here.
Pamphlets were rife in the 1930s when folks were too poor to buy books. Aurelia Plath was into pamphlets. Her shorthand annotation on Sylvia’s letter of December 19, 1961, notes the Chicago address for a free pamphlet titled Adventures in Conversation. She hoped to forward this to Sylvia for little Frieda’s edification. Frieda was then 20 months old.
Exactly where Aurelia got “The Case for Chastity” and when she gave it to Sylvia is not known. [2] In autumn 1937, Sylvia was age four going on five, so not then. The pamphlet in its time was truly and insanely topical. In December 1936 the most reliable known birth control device, the pessary or diaphragm, became legal in the U.S.—if prescribed by a medical doctor for health reasons. This landmark case is called United States vs. One Package of Japanese Pessaries, and Margaret Sanger engineered it all. [3] Sylvia Plath in her “platinum summer” of 1954 had an illegal diaphragm; Massachusetts did not legalize birth control for singles until 1972. Yet diaphragms could be obtained from sympathetic doctors, or by stealth, or from overseas, or if you borrowed a wedding ring. In January 1954 Mary McCarthy published in Partisan Review a story opening with the shocking words “Get yourself a pessary,” later Chapter 3 in her novel The Group (1963).
Aurelia Plath’s original preface to Letters Home (1975) included five paragraphs about how she provided her children with a liberal sex education. When they were school age she gave them a book called Growing Up. Aurelia wrote that she read and discussed frankly with Sylvia numerous edgy books and plays. Here is part of the preface that Aurelia’s editor cut:
. . . In The Bell Jar an article from the Reader’s
Digest, titled “The Case for Chastity,” is handed the heroine as a manual
to be followed. Our shared reading, however, went far afield of this and went
on intermittently throughout high school years and the first three years of
college . . . We discussed the work and writings of Margaret Sanger, the
unfairness of the double standard . . . I did tell my children that I hoped
they would wait until they had completed their undergraduate education before
involving themselves in what I considered a serious commitment with another
life . . . The decision, however, had to be theirs. (47-48) [4]
“The Case for Chastity” as represented in The Bell Jar
was a thorn in Aurelia’s side, belittling her years of conscientious mothering; and the cuts to her Letters Home preface erased her noble efforts utterly. However, the Rosenstein papers, opened in 2020, record that in 1953 Aurelia told Dr. Ruth Beuscher that Sylvia
knew the facts of intercourse by age 15. Later additional mother-daughter discussions made Sylvia “extremely avid for
the most minute detail about sex, and this caused [her] mother some embarrassment. But
she answered all questions.” [5]
Also in the cut paragraphs, Aurelia tried to establish that she was not a prude. In New York in 1929 she saw a play banned in Boston, and in 1933 she delivered to the Boston University faculty wives’ book club a report about Brave New World—so full of drugs and sex the book is banned in some places today.
Aurelia’s status when at age 25 she married Otto Plath, 46, who was married the whole time they dated, is nobody’s business and no one should care. Yet the answer to “Was Aurelia a virgin?” could illuminate Aurelia’s character, the battleground Sylvia Plath tragically died on, dreading a life like her mother’s and seeing in her more bad than good. Whether yes or no, the culture is rigged so Aurelia cannot win. Had she been a man this would not be an issue.
[1] New York Times, January 6, 1982.
[2] Probably the pamphlet was mailed to Sylvia at college in 1954 when Aurelia was most worried about Sylvia’s chastity. Aurelia wrote biographer Linda Wagner-Martin in 1987 that along with the chastity article she gave Sylvia an article with an opposing viewpoint. (ASP to Wagner-Martin, October 29, 1987, p. 2.) I believe that is false.
[3] United States v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries, 86 F.2d 737. Read the decision here at Justia.com.
[4] Plath mss. II, Box 9, folder 3, Lilly Library.