Sex among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender & Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730–1830 (review)

In this bold, wide-ranging, and deeply researched book, Lyons seeks the origin of "the modern American sexual system" in the lives and imaginations of urban men and women in the decades before, during, and after the War for Independence (4). To date, most work on Early American sexuality has focused either on the regulation of sex and marriage in the colonial period or on the emergence of urban sexual cultures in the antebellum period. Sex Among the Rabble is among the first large-scale studies to tackle the transition between these two eras. Refreshingly, it places at the center of analysis the issues of desire and pleasure. Lyons combines a wide reading in books, broadsides, and images printed on both sides of the Atlantic with the laborious work of the social historian—sifting through large sets of institutional records to flesh out patterns of premarital pregnancy, attitudes toward marriage, and the conflicting perspectives of "fallen women" and moral reformers. The analysis is informed by sympathy for early Philadelphia's "expansive" sexual culture and suspicion of the constraints of "traditional" marriage and middle-class respectability. The heroes of this book are lusty women shaping their own destinies, satisfying their desires, and pursuing sexual pleasure.

In the almanacs, newspapers, and broadsides that circulated in colonial Philadelphia, Lyons finds evidence of a sexual culture quick to embrace pleasure and slow to moralize. Popular imprints echoed European stereotypes of women as innately lusty and men as more self-controlled. Yet, as Lyons emphasizes, actual men and women often saw themselves differently. Men could see themselves as victims of women's sexual allure. Consider the author of a sex diary that began with the following New Year's resolution: "I promise me in the coming year to avoid lewd women—they are the bane of my life." Only a week later he reported, "Met a certain young woman—danced with her and aroused all my passion—She resisted much holding her limbs together, but my flame being up I thrust her vigorously and she opened with a scream—" (251). He spent the rest of the year not so much resisting temptation as trying to hide the consequences from his wife.

Women, too, frequently rejected the gender ideologies promoted in print. Those who declined to see themselves as dominated by uncontrollable lusts did not necessarily disavow sex altogether. Indeed, Lyons argues, women embraced the pursuit of sexual happiness as part of an "Enlightenment quest for self-discovery" (175). This argument is developed in an analysis of a long series of newspaper notices published by husbands to disclaim financial responsibility for wives who had left them, often for other men. Characteristically, Lyons views these notices as "self-divorce ads" (177). Around 1770, women began to write back, placing their own advertisements to defend themselves or accuse their husbands of abuse or adultery. Repudiating the patriarchal double standards of the popular press, women "asserted that personal satisfaction and individual choice in intimate relationships were indeed legitimate goals" (175).

Philadelphia's sexual pleasure culture expanded in the late eighteenth century as "Enlightenment thinking and Revolutionary republican philosophy lent legitimacy to the quest for personal autonomy and fulfillment" (188). Among the book's most significant contributions are its imaginative readings of institutional records for evidence of attitudes and expectations that defied respectable conventions. For example, Lyons uses the records of the Gloria Dei church to elucidate conflicts between lower-class couples and the minister who guarded the marriage gates. Prospective couples did not always share the minister's concern about obtaining parental consent, crossing color lines, obtaining legal divorces from previous spouses, or even showing up for the ritual remotely sober (217–225). The themes of class and cultural conflict are developed in a discussion of bastardy, which rose dramatically in the 1790s. Impoverished single...