Law and Sexual Misconduct in New England, 1650–1750: Steering Toward England by Abby Chandler (review)

Abby Chandler has written an impressively detailed study of law and sexual misconduct in early New England, one that crosses two colonies, three counties, and spans a hundred years. In her comparative study of sexuality and the law in Essex County, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and the province of Maine, which by 1658 had been incorporated into the Massachusetts Bay colony, Chandler argues that scholars must attend to particular and even local legal regimes in order to gain a complete picture of the prosecution of non-marital sexuality in the colonial period. English and British law was in flux in this period, but rather than acceding to a model of social change that locates London as its center, Chandler argues for the importance of attending to "the ways in which ordinary colonists responded to this change" (3). She notes that sexual misconduct, with its dense possibilities for transgression and the creation of bastards and biracial children, provides a rich source base for this project.

Law and Sexual Misconduct in New England is modeled primarily on John Murrin's "Anglicization thesis," in which he argued that the British colonies in America became more culturally and institutionally English over time rather than less so. Puritan colonies like Massachusetts Bay—one of the colonies Chandler includes in her study—were founded in direct opposition to English culture and institutions in the 1620s and 1630s. Only after the founding generation had passed did the Anglo-American colonies begin to look to England for institutions like the law to help them manage their growing and fractious populations. Largely agreeing with Murrin's thesis, Chandler complicates our views of the history of sexuality and of the law.

Chandler's study also addresses another important dovetailing thesis for understanding the growth and development of New England: that women as a group lost power to men over the course of the eighteenth century, power that they had enjoyed in the earliest stages of colonial development. Most forcefully articulated by the feminist legal historians Elaine Forman Crane and Cornelia Hughes Dayton (a graduate student of Murrin's at Princeton) in two important books in the 1990s, and confirmed by historians of sexuality in the 2000s such as Sharon Block (another Murrin student) and Thomas Foster, this feminist declension thesis is further nuanced by Chandler's study. Far from being posited on the existence of an early colonial "golden age" for women, the feminist declension thesis was always much more about the rise of a gender and sexual double standard, that is, the increasing reluctance of eighteenth-century New England communities to punish young white men for their sexual misdeeds or to hold them as accountable as their white female partners in the seventeenth century.

In six economical chapters that move topically as well as chronologically through early New England, Chandler argues for the particularity of the legal regimes she studies: Puritan and reflexively anti-English Massachusetts; non-Puritan and disorderly Maine, which had looked eagerly to England for stabilizing institutions before joining the Massachusetts Bay colony; and anti-Puritan, affluent Rhode Island, which eagerly embraced English legal innovation. She also includes a chapter that delves into the legal changes in England in the late Stuart and Georgian eras, especially with respect to sexual misconduct. Her North American chapters focus on interracial sexual relationships; on the determination of paternity and the need to secure "maintenance" for children born out of wedlock; the use of justices of the peace and attorneys; and an in-depth look at the "process" that developed for prosecuting sexual misconduct cases. Chandler's close reading of a few exemplary sexual misconduct cases in each chapter demonstrates that, because of their particular histories, each of these jurisdictions experienced different rates of legal Anglicization and the regularization of sexual misconduct prosecutions.

Chandler builds her book very much around the "Reproductive Matrix" that dominated...