Riotous Flesh: Women, Physiology, and the Solitary Vice in Nineteenth-Century America

A 2015 academic monograph by historian April R. Haynes, published by the University of Chicago Press and co-winner of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic’s James H. Broussard Best First Book Prize. It documents the campaign against the “solitary vice” of masturbation in the antebellum northern United States, with Sylvester Graham’s women-only “Lecture to Mothers” as a central episode: delivered only three times, beginning in Portland, Maine in 1834, the lecture provoked a riot on every occasion it was given, driven chiefly by opposition to its explicit sexual content and its address to a female audience rather than by grievances over bread or meat. The archive cites it as the principal source for the case’s “exclusive access” stage. Bibliographic details (title, author, publisher, 2015, ISBN 978-0-226-28459-0) were confirmed via the OpenLibrary catalog record; the book’s existence and subject were independently cross-checked against a September 2016 interview with the author published by the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic.