Colonial Sexual Cultures

Clare Lyons's important and comprehensive history of late-colonial hetero-sexuality is likely to become the major point of reference for anyone studying sexual practices and gender politics during the founding of the American republic. It is an ideal source to consult for anything to do specifically with early American women, and its very extensive footnotes (sometimes longer than the text on the page above them) reveal the current state of knowledge about eighteenth-century sexuality. Deftly employing a wide range of sources, from newspaper reports and advertisements, through divorce records, bastardy records, and diaries, to almanacs and broadsides, Lyons convincingly demonstrates that the sexual culture of late-colonial Philadelphia was permissive despite the predominance of Quakers in the city: "The seeds of patriarchal marriage had not taken firm root in colonial Philadelphia" (43).

During the 1760s and 1770s, Philadelphians openly recognized casual sexual relations (including their by-product in bastardy); divorce was becoming common; nonmarital sexual pleasure was generally accepted; an urban pleasure culture flourished; and sexual pleasure was pursued for its own sake. Virtually no attempt was made to curtail prostitution, and bawdy houses were located throughout the city, not just in the port area. People from all classes, women as well as men, regularly enjoyed casual sexual behavior, and a permissive attitude continued relatively unchecked until the nineteenth century, despite an explosion in venereal disease.

Philadelphia's sexual culture was distinctive, far more liberal than that of Boston, or Connecticut, or New York. For example, the overseers of the poor in Philadelphia actively supported mothers and their illegitimate children and did not compel them to submit to marriage. The authorities also winked at infanticide, which never became part of the discourse on either sex or crime, whereas New England produced numerous pamphlets about "murdering mothers."

Lyons explores what Philadelphians thought about sexuality by examining the popular print culture of almanacs, broadside ballads, pamphlets, domestically produced bawdy books, and openly erotic books imported from Europe. Sexual relations were perceived as natural and enjoyable, and pleasures sought outside of marriage were deemed desirable and guilt free—for women as well as men. Generous quotations from a literature that is overwhelmingly playful and positive make this section of the book particularly enjoyable. Real life paralleled fantasy life, as shown by advertisements about runaway wives and official records of divorces, which demonstrate that men were increasingly cuckolded by women in pursuit of casual trysts.

After the Revolution, domestically produced bawdy was increasingly suppressed, as society found it desirable to create the responsible citizens of a free republic. Such material, reconstructed as "erotica," rather than being available to the democratic masses, became restricted to gentlemen of means. The sexual culture nevertheless continued to flourish: the bastardy rate doubled, prostitution became pervasive, and adultery became commonplace, as demonstrated by evidence gathered from legal documents, divorce cases, and records from the guardians of the poor, as well as from almshouses.

Before the Revolution, there was virtually no reference to African-American sexuality, or to black/white sexual relations. During the 1790s, cross-racial sexual relations were tolerated, influenced by the French colonial refugees from Saint Domingue who maintained their African wives and mistresses. But racial anxiety increasingly led to stigmatization of cross-racial relations in the print culture and regulations to curtail their occurrence.

An abundance of scholarly evidence demonstrates dramatic shifts in public perceptions and private behavior between the 1760s and the 1790s, and then between the 1790s and the 1820s. The alleged shift between the early colonial period and the 1760s is more difficult to demonstrate, for there is a paucity of data for the earlier period (e.g., the print culture was very much smaller before 1760s, making direct comparisons difficult). Lyons suggestively analyzes chronological changes vis-à-vis class. Cross-class intimacy was relatively unimportant during the 1760s...