Taming Passion for the Public Good: Policing Sex in the Early Republic by Mark E. Kann (review)

In this brief but ambitious book Mark Kann tackles complex questions: why and how did America’s civic leaders seek to police sex in the early republic? How did concerns about gender, race, and class shape their efforts? What factors undermined attempts to proscribe different kinds of sexual activity? In exploring these issues Kann discusses reform campaigns against prostitution, masturbation, and homosexuality. He stresses how middle-class Anglo Americans supported these campaigns when they targeted groups deemed threatening to the social order, such as people of color; urban white youth, especially working-class males; and “public” women who lived outside the power of family patriarchs.

The author expertly incorporates the recent historiography of antebellum sexuality into his analysis. In fact the major strength of Taming Passion for the Public Good is Kann’s cogent discussion of monographs by Clare Lyons, Richard Godbeer, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, and other scholars. But unfortunately Kann does not build on these historians’ works to offer new perspectives on antebellum Americans’ policing of sexuality. Ultimately he is content to summarize, synthesize, the rich scholarship already in existence.

The lack of significant archival research also limits Kann’s book. To be fair to this author, he does make use of some antebellum court cases, several reports of the New York Moral Reform Society, and the published writings of a few leading activists, such as Benjamin Rush. But to adequately investigate the issues he raises, Kann needed to rely more on primary documents. In the few instances where he does this Kann tells an interesting story and his book becomes engrossing. This occurs, for example, when the author briefly discusses how several female convicts, some imprisoned for sexual offenses, bemoaned separation from their children (123–124).

Throughout his text Kann refers to the nation’s “local elites” who sought to monitor the sexual activity of their fellow Americans. But he never adequately identifies who comprised these elites other than to note that they were middle-class men professing a commitment to monogamous marriage and domesticity. Kann is similarly vague in identifying the leading reformers who attempted to prohibit illicit sexual activity in the early republic. Predictably he recounts the often discussed efforts of the Reverend John Mc Dowall to end prostitution in New York City but there is little else on other reformers.

Kann also fails to examine, even if briefly, the significant minority of Americans who challenged the dominant culture’s beliefs on sexuality and marriage. Discussion of the Mormons, of different communal experiments such as those by the Shakers and Oneidans, and of radicals like Thomas and Mary Gove Nichols and Frances Wright would have offered a fascinating counterpoint to Kann’s major concern: how Victorian men sought to control the sexuality of antebellum Americans. Exploring the above mentioned mavericks would have highlighted that attitudes about sexuality were increasingly contested in the early republic. Such analysis would also have enriched our understanding of why reformers and law officials so often failed in their efforts to regulate, let alone prohibit, different types of sexual behavior.

For a work that focuses on the antebellum era, Kann’s book curiously skirts a crucial issue: the impact that evangelical Protestantism had on Americans’ ideas about sexuality. As numerous scholars have shown, the Second Great Awakening promoted myriad reforms that sought to liberate human beings by restraining their “animal passions” and inculcating a highly self-disciplined ethic. This complex development merited detailed investigation in a work that examines Americans’ policing of sex during the first half of the nineteenth century.

As my comments suggest, Kann does a much better job at raising major issues than at discussing them. Ironically the one time where he does offer a sustained, detailed analysis of a particular theme is when his book veers off topic. His first two chapters, which comprise almost fifty pages of his brief text, investigate the persistence of...