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Reviews in American History 31.4 (2003) 495-502



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Whose Sexual Revolutions?

Jennifer M. Spear


Richard Godbeer. Sexual Revolution in Early America. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. xii + 448 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $34.95.

On June 26, 2003, the United States Supreme Court handed down a decision in the case of Lawrence v. Texas, ruling that the state cannot interfere in the private and consensual sexual practices of consenting adults regardless of their gender. This case is just one more episode in the struggle over competing sexual moralities, particularly in defining the legitimacy of specifickinds of sexual behaviors, under what kinds ofcircumstances, a struggle that Richard Godbeer demonstrates has existed from the earliest years of British North America. Sexual Revolution in Early America identifies a series of sexual revolutions that took place in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries out of which emerged some of the elements of our modern sexual world. In Puritan New England, moralists and leaders sought to impose a revolution from above, establishing a hegemonic sexual order that was an integral part of the Puritan experiment. In the southern colonies, ordinary colonists enacted their own revolution, refusing similar attempts of southern leaders to reform popular sexual mores. In both regions, notions of proper sexual behavior were intimately linked to their proponents' identities as Christian, civilized, and English; thus alternative sexual arrangements were seen as threatening to the establishment of English societies in North America and even to colonists' very sense of self. Two additional revolutions took place in the eighteenth century: one fundamentally revised the image of (some) women as sexual beings while the other began the process of legitimating the individual pursuit of sexual happiness, a pursuit that the recent Supreme Court decision has deemed deserving of constitutional protection.

Sexual Revolution begins with New England, not because it was the first nor the most typical region of North America settled by English colonists but rather because Godbeer wants to confront popular stereotypes about Puritans and sex from the beginning. Building upon, but going beyond, Edmund Morgan's classic reinterpretation of Puritan sexual values, Godbeer reveals not only how Puritans spiritualized the (marital) erotic, considering it a fundamental component to a healthy marriage, but also how they eroticized [End Page 495] the spiritual in the ways in which they described believers' relationship to the church and to Christ. 1 Clearly Puritans sought to contain erotic expression within the singular form of an officially sanctioned relationship but, as Godbeer establishes, they were not seeking to repress it. In combating what they perceived as illicit sexual relationships, the goals of both secular and ecclesiastical officials were redemptive rather than punitive.

Puritan leaders did, however, have a battle on their hands. Although they had hoped to leave competing sexual mores—and the people who practiced them—behind, it didn't take long to discover that both had crossed the Atlantic with them. Godbeer makes it clear that, in New England as elsewhere, the disagreements were not between those who wanted to confine sex to marriage and those who advocated casual sex (although there may have been some practitioners of the latter); rather, the dispute was over what precisely defined a marriage and therefore under what circumstances sex was legitimate. Older, popular sexual mores held that once a couple was committed to each other, regardless of whether an official ceremony or registration had taken place, sexual intercourse was licit and there is plenty of evidence that local communities concurred in this assessment. Giving credence to these practices and the beliefs that sustained them, Godbeer calls these arrangements informal marriages rather than allowing the moralists' label of concubinage to influence our perception of these relationships. These mores allowed for more fluid beginnings and endings of marital relationships than most colonial leaders appreciated, and so reformers, Puritan and Anglican alike, sought to crack down on premarital fornication and informal marriage, as well as bigamy and serial monogamy.

In both New England and the Chesapeake, ordinary colonists often failed to heed reformers as the sheer number of prosecutions for fornication and other sexual misdemeanors...

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