Sexual Revolution in Early America (review)

Godbeer aims both to undermine arguments of present-day moral pundits that American society has experienced declension in sexual mores since the colonial period and to distinguish current notions of sexuality from the early American past. Using the copious (though unbalanced, in terms of subject coverage) secondary literature and additional primary research, the author offers a broad survey of contested sexual attitudes and practice. The study is organized largely according to topics for which considerable information already exists, with consideration to type of primary source.

Sexual Revolution in Early America consists of three parts: "Passionate Pilgrims," "Sex and Civility," and "The Sexual Revolution." Each part contains three chapters. In "Passionate Pilgrims," Godbeer taps seventeenth-century court records, sermons, diaries, correspondence, and the work of such historians as Morgan, Ulrich, Norton, Dayton, Zuckerman, and Murrin. ¹ Godbeer's thesis is unsurprising to scholars familiar with this work—that conflict concerning sexual morality existed between orthodox Puritan leaders and ordinary New Englanders, both Puritan and not. The author reviews legal and prescriptive-literary efforts to restrict sex to formal heterosexual marriages. He argues, "The sexual agenda contained within Puritan ideology remained nonetheless quixotic: it demanded of colonists not only an extraordinary degree of self-control but also strict observance of a sexual and marital protocol that ran counter to longstanding popular traditions, including and especially the widespread condoning of premarital sex" (115).

In Part II, "Sex and Civility," Godbeer focuses primarily on the eighteenth-century mainland South and Caribbean to describe sexual relations among Euro-Americans, between whites and Native Americans, and between whites and enslaved Africans. He depends heavily upon diaries and correspondence, which provide a mostly elite Euro-American male perspective. Here the moral conflict seems to have existed mainly within planters' minds, though court cases and irate ministers also documented the discrepancy between official legal/religious requirements and daily behavior. Although planters worried that sexual relations with black women would lead to "cultural debasement," they considered intercourse a prerogative of slave masters (14).

In Part III, "The Sexual Revolution," Godbeer considers evolving sexual behavior during the eighteenth century, particularly the popularity in rural New England of bundling, by which couples got to know each other intimately by sleeping together, "at least partly clothed," in their parents' houses (246). He also describes evolving attitudes concerning the sexual nature of women, and the existence of a lively seaport culture in early national Philadelphia. This last chapter on Philadelphia depends heavily upon the work of Lyons, Klepp, and Smith. ²

Readers unfamiliar with the conflicted history of sexual relations in early America will find Sexual Revolution in Early America an interesting, clearly written survey. Scholars will miss a needed overarching analytical framework; Godbeer moves forward chronologically while skipping from seventeenth-century New England to the plantation colonies to rural eighteenth-century New England and then finally to Philadelphia. A study of seaport culture in late eighteenth-century Boston, allowing comparison with Philadelphia and evaluation of long-term change (or continuity) in Massachusetts, would have provided balance. Godbeer argues (as have others) that Americans did not conceptualize sexuality until the modern era, that early Americans viewed sex "not as a product of sexuality but as a component of spirituality, cultural identity, and social status" (11). Although that conclusion may be true, the perspectives of many colonists are missing from this work, including the traditional sexual attitudes and practices of groups such as Africans, Native Americans, French, Dutch, and Germans.