“Early America”

When John and Estelle published Intimate Matters twenty-five years ago, they hoped that it would spark new research in the then-emerging field of the history of sexuality. Their desire to contribute to the movement to develop a field, one that included early America, has certainly been fulfilled: as I’m sure you’re all aware, the study of sexuality in early America has been extraordinary in its breadth of coverage and in the sheer quantity and quality of the studies that have been produced since Intimate Matters was first published.

Intimate Matters approached the study of early America in a way that acknowledged its chronological and regional diversity. Scholarship on sexuality in early America has echoed this framework. As we might expect, studies have paid close attention to change over time in the early American period, delineating settler societies from established colonies and the colonial world from the Revolution and the early Republic. In the past twenty-five years scholars have produced articles and books on virtually every region, vastly expanding our understanding of sex and sexuality in early America. Class, gender, religion, race, and ethnicity have informed rich studies of sex and empire in the Atlantic world and the cultural variances and cross-cultural dynamics for Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans.

In addition to sparking new research, I think that Intimate Matters had a significant impact on elevating the standing of the study of sex and sexuality in colonial America—to the level enjoyed by studies focused on the modern era. It is perhaps not an overstatement to say that the book put the first centuries of American sexual history on the map. Virtually all major collections have done so in varying degrees since then. Scholarship on sexuality in early America has been published in virtually every major journal. It has not been restricted to venues that only focus on the early modern era.

It’s very easy for me to imagine a survey like Intimate Matters beginning its narrative in the new nation—or perhaps including a brief chapter and not a full section on early America. In the 1980s, after all, there was not an enormous amount of literature on early American sexuality when John and Estelle first wrote Intimate Matters. So when I think about what they accomplished, I keep in mind that they included early America before so much of the excellent work of the 1990s and the recent decade.¹ So much work has been produced on early American sexuality that I hesitate to even single out these few because of the number that I can’t mention.²

At the time that John and Estelle wrote Intimate Matters, groundbreaking work on women and family had certainly laid foundations, but this was largely before most books that focused almost exclusively on sex and sexuality in early America. Intimate Matters, therefore, pulled together the disparate aspects of sex and sexuality in other studies that had focused on larger topics.³ A small collection of articles and books focused on sex, but this is a relatively small body of work from which to synthesize a history of centuries of early American sexual history.⁴ In that regard Intimate Matters has stood the test of time and is testament to both the quality of that early work and to John and Estelle’s critical and insightful engagement with the emerging field.

Intimate Matters set an agenda for the broader chronological narrative that included the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries—and it did so in a way that immediately drew attention to the diversity of the early American setting; it did this by highlighting change over time, by noting broad regional differences, by emphasizing gender, and by including a multicultural approach.

Recently, I edited a volume of documents on the history of sexuality in the United States. With the assistance of John and Estelle, I decided to yoke it to Intimate Matters because its central argument is so important to my own thinking about historical change. Like Intimate Matters, my collection Documenting Intimate Matters: Primary Sources for a History of Sexuality in America (Chicago, 2012) makes clear that...