Sexual Revolution in Early America

Gender Relations in the American Experience

by Richard Godbeer

In 1695, John Miller, a clergyman traveling through New York, found it appalling that so many couples lived together without ever being married and that no one viewed "ante-nuptial fornication" as anything scandalous or sinful. Charles Woodmason, an Anglican minister in South Carolina in 1766, described the region as a "stage of debauchery" in which polygamy was "very common," "concubinage general," and "bastardy no disrepute." These depictions of colonial North America's sexual culture sharply contradict the stereotype of Puritanical abstinence that persists in the popular imagination. In Sexual Revolution in Early America , Richard Godbeer boldly overturns conventional wisdom about the sexual values and customs of colonial Americans. His eye-opening historical account spans two centuries and most of British North America, from New England to the Caribbean, exploring the social, political, and legal dynamics that shaped a diverse sexual culture. Drawing on exhaustive research into diaries, letters, and other private papers, as well as legal records and official documents, Godbeer's absorbing narrative uncovers a persistent struggle between the moral authorities and the widespread expression of popular customs and individual urges. Godbeer begins with a discussion of the complex attitude that the Puritans had toward sexuality. For example, although believing that sex could be morally corrupting, they also considered it to be such an essential element of a healthy marriage that they excommunicated those who denied "conjugal fellowship" to their spouses. He next examines the ways in which race and class affected the debate about sexual mores, from anxieties about Anglo-Indian sexual relations to the sense of sexual entitlement that planters held over their African slaves. He concludes by detailing the fundamental shift in sexual culture during the eighteenth century towards the acceptance of a more individualistic concept of sexual desire and fulfillment. Today's moral critics, in their attempts to convince Americans of the social and spiritual consequences of unregulated sexual behavior, often harken back to a more innocent age; as this groundbreaking work makes clear, America's sexual culture has always been rich, vibrant, and contentious.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Sexuality, American History, Feminism, 18th Century, United States

448 pages, Hardcover

First published April 5, 2002

About the author

Richard Godbeer received his B.A. from Oxford University in 1984 and his Ph.D. from Brandeis University in 1989. He specializes in colonial and revolutionary America, with an emphasis on religious culture, gender studies, and the history of sexuality. Godbeer was born in Essex, England, and grew up in Shropshire and Gloucestershire. He then lived in Oxford for three years as an undergraduate before crossing the Atlantic to Boston, Massachusetts, in 1984. He moved to southern California in 1989, where he taught for fifteen years at the University of California, Riverside. He moved to southern Florida in the summer of 2004 to join the Department of History at the University of Miami. He offers courses on a broad range of topics, including sex and gender in early America, witchcraft in colonial New England, religious culture in early America, and the American Revolution.

Godbeer is author of The Devil’s Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England (published in 1992 by Cambridge University Press and winner of the American Historical Association Pacific Coast Branch Award for the Best First Book), Sexual Revolution in Early America (published in 2002 by Johns Hopkins University Press and a featured selection of the History Book Club), Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692 (published in 2004 by Oxford University Press), The Overflowing of Friendship: Love Between Men and the Creation of the American Republic (published in 2009 by Johns Hopkins University Press) and The Salem Witch Hunt: A Brief History with Documents (published in 2011 as a volume in the Bedford Series in History and Culture). Godbeer is currently working on a joint biography of Elizabeth and Henry Drinker, a Quaker couple who lived in Philadelphia during the second half of the eighteenth century. He is grateful to have received research fellowships from a range of institutions, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, and the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.

Reviews

[Grady · Rating 5 out of 5]

A delightful and illuminating survey of competing and evolving views of sexuality in British colonial North America. In a series of chapters that could easily stand alone (and, in some cases, probably did, as journal articles), Godbeer maps outs the efforts of religious and civil leaders in New England to control sexual behaviors; the attitudes towards interracial marriage in the mid-Atlantic and southern colonies; the ways families tried to protect their daughters in an era of increasing freedom, by inviting courting into the house; the ways various colonial communities policed deviant behaviors; and the way the gentry and common colonists began to construct and describe women's responsibilities in the mid-1700s. There's a lot of information in this book, both specific examples drawn from courts records and diaries, and overarching analysis by Godbeer, so it's not a fast read. But the subject - sex - is intrinsically interesting, and Godbeer keeps the discussion moving. The title is a misnomer; what Godbeer describes isn't a 'revolution', it's a cultural diversity across space, and a slow evolution of views in the same places over time.

[sofie jacobsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked his writing style. The majority of the book was quoted from court cases and diaries. It was all very interesting and it did demonstrate that the colonial era had consistent exposure to couples that cohabitated, or had premarital sex, as well being either polygamous, or homosexual, or interracial.

There were a couple of things that made me curious- he didn't include (unless I somehow missed this) any stories of peoples living in New York or other Northern states. (Philadelphia was mentioned in the last 70 pages).
Most of the stories were 1. lower to middle class individuals 2. all located in the Southern states. 3. None of the statistics were listed with the population of that area (for example a statistic was listed claiming that 500 women were recorded to being pregnant in the 1790's in the area, but Godbeer failed to compare that to the population number.

I really feel like it was put together well and I did enjoy reading it. Some of the stories were very scandalous.

One thing that was interesting was that alteration of women and men's roles. In the years 1400-1650 women were stereotyped to being lustful, tempters, and sinners, etc. About 15 years before the American Revolution, their role changed to being defined as spiritual caretakers of men, women are at fault if men have lustful thoughts, and men were lustful and unchangeable. Court cases demonstrated that change as well as various letters and documents. It's interesting because that is still the belief held: that if a woman is a rape victim the thought is: "well, she was wearing skimpy clothes, or was asking for it in another form, etc."

[Jillian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good stuff, covers a whoooole lot of ground, divided into three sections--the first few chapters are about New England, the middle chapters about the south, and the last section focuses on the American Revolution. Very thorough but written clearly and accessibly. I'd imagine the length of the book and its density of scholarship would turn off a casual reader, but it's actually very readable. There are a lot of excerpts from primary sources to sink your teeth into, like a man who repeatedly attempted to engage other men in sex, to the point where the whole town knew about him; or William Byrd's misogynist adulteries; or a Philadelphia man who didn't let constant STIs slow down his rabid philandering.

[Andee Nero · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a really entertaining book and it also adds dimension to our conceptions of early America, but I felt like it was too heavily focused on New England and the Southern colonies. The chapter on Pennsylvania only looks at the 18th century. Also, when looking at 18th century English novels, Godbeer doesn't take into account works like Fanny Hill, Evelina or Love in Excess, which would complicate his narrative. It didn't feel like this was enough evidence to say that there was a "sexual revolution in early America."

[Anthony · Rating 4 out of 5]

A super dense book of social history, but fairly succinct considering the temporal and geographic space covered by the author. There is a huge reliance on anecdotal stories; court records, diaries, etc. This isn't surprising considering the topic, but does mean not all of the author's conclusions come across as entirely reliable. Sometimes the author will mention how such-and-such is the only recorded instance of something occurring in a territory for a given period of time, but extrapolate that it must have occurred more but just wasn't recorded for various reasons. Plausible, but still raises an eyebrow.

What the book does most of all is recreate a history of religiosity, conservatism, and patriarchy that is more interesting in its dynamism than we give it credit for. If communities were always trying to wrangle and suppress the sex lives of younger people, they did not always do it in the same ways. If men were always deflecting their own moral failings, the nature of those deflections changed. Women were lusting vultures in one era, maiden defenders of republican virtue in the next. Religion itself could be hyper-erotic and suggestive, even when used as a cudgel to punish consenting sexual relationships out of wedlock.

All of these were responses from existing authorities towards a cultural shift towards an insatiable appetite for individual liberation, of which sex played a central role.

[Kris · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hard to imagine a book about SEX being so dry and sleep inducing, but Godbeer pulls it off! In places, he actually does get rather interesting but his laundry lists of sexual misdemeanors really only serves to prove his scholarship in digging them out of mouldering records of the early colonies. If he provides any conjectures or conclusions of any sort it is in the last third of the book after the point I gave up in boredom. I'm not certain what I thought the book would be exactly but a 500 page listing of gossip, rumour, intermixed with actual instances of rape was certainly not it. I saw no evidence of any kind of revolution, sexual or otherwise.


And I have to say that the early Puritan fathers have officially squicked me out with all their raptures over being "ravished by Christ." Yeah no, just no...

[Nina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting. Our ancestors, especially the Puritans, were a whole lot sexier than we would have imagined. The book was a little repetitive, but it picked up speed as it went along. I was particularly fascinated by the chapter on sexuality and divinity, since the Puritans used the imagery of Christ as lover and bridegroom even to men, including Christ "impregnating" the soul, the offspring of which was "the babe of grace." Hadn't known that securing child support from fathers dated clear back to colonial times.

[Marc · Rating 5 out of 5]

An enlightening, thorough and substantial account that would otherwise go unexplored; Godbeer's interwoven analysis that frontier society must accommodate its margins to ensure survival makes this a model for academic literature

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved the Puritan part, didn't read the Southern part, but Kelly says it was crap.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book on why it's anachronistic for people to say that American's hesitancy to discuss sexual matters is not based on our "Puritan roots".

[Emily Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

incredibly interesting! there were chapters i wasn't interested in, so i can't vouch for those, but the ones i read were well researched and full of new ideas.