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Sex and Sexuality The Public, the Private, and the Spirit Worlds PAT R I C I A C L I N E C O H E N Historians of sex in early America have long attended to a public/private dichotomy, for the simple reason that most sexual behavior in past times was confined to a very private realm, usually beyond direct observation, while the rules, norms, prescriptions, and laws—all the ways a society attempts to regulate sex—had to be part of the public realm to be effective. The news that a third realm, the spirit world, offers another metaphorical arena bearing on the history of sex at first sounds rather strange; but in the mid-nineteenth century such was the case. This essay first highlights both classic and recent scholarship exploring private behavior and public regulation of sexuality in the early republic, and then it turns to ideas about sex inspired by (or, more accurately, justified by) a spirit world invoked to challenge the institution of marriage starting in the years around 1850. The spirit-inspired challenge ultimately failed to attract many adherents, but while it was garnering headlines it generated a remarkable debate about sexual desire built around a distinction between sexual love and lust. Foundational work on the history of early American sex emerged some forty years ago in the field of demographic history centered on the colonial experience. Practitioners drew on large data sets to capture change over time in reproductive behavior, to be sure a very imperfect proxy for sexual behavior. While the quantitative approach is out of fashion of late, in its heyday it produced very useful studies based on the good vital records kept by New England towns. Averages, such as average age at Patricia Cline Cohen is professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is currently working on a book about Mary Gove Nichols and Thomas Low Nichols, two antebellum marriage reformers and advocates of free love. SEX AND SEXUALITY • 161 marriage or average family size, allowed inferences about marital sex, and rates of fornication, bastardy, and prenuptial pregnancy gave us baseline measures of the frequency of non-marital sex. The news that perhaps a third or more of New England brides were pregnant at the point of marriage in the mid- to late eighteenth century seemed stunning back in the 1960s, since it so sharply contradicted traditional assumptions about pious New Englanders.1 Since then, we have developed greater caution about equating premarital pregnancy in 1790 with 1950s dating behaviors ; the numbers produced by historical demography still need sensitive interpretation. The ever-terse Martha Ballard eschewed judgmental comments in her long-term midwifery diary as the numbers of ‘‘early’’ births mounted up in Hallowell, Maine; but did that mean she approved of premarital sex?2 Some 1830s ministers active in the Seventh-Commandment Society (a male moral reform group) expressed astonishment at their own church records from fifty years earlier, with lists of births and marriages that manifested the pattern of high early first births. Their astonishment over the ministerial silence of that earlier era says a lot about a half-century sea change in attitudes toward female chastity that we are still struggling to make sense of. Early demographic studies clustered in seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury towns where vital records allowed for family reconstitution. The early republic, with its population mobility and less complete vital records , has proved more resistant to the local study approach, which requires a stable universe of people out of which averages and rates can be calculated. Still, my hunch is that with all the new genealogical and local history sources on the web now, the time may arrive when future scholars will reengage with quantitative methods and find a way to apply them to small towns of the early republic. Perhaps there will be new surprises then, maybe not in prenuptial pregnancy rates but, I’m guessing , bigamy.3 1. The classic work is probably ripe for restudy now: Daniel Scott Smith and Michael Hindus, ‘‘Premarital Pregnancy in America, 1640–1971: An Overview and Interpretation,’’ Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 5 (1974–75): 537–70. 2. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on her Diary, 1785–1812 (New York, 1990). 3. Two recent works point in this direction: Hendrik Hartog, Man and Wife in America: A History (Cambridge, MA, 2000); and Beverly J. Schwartzberg, ‘‘Grass Widows, Barbarians, and Bigamists: Fluid Marriage in...

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