"Marriage is no frolic"; or, The Rise and Fall of Nonmarital Sex in Early Philadelphia

In 1795, a young couple arrived at Philadelphia's Swedish Lutheran Church to be married. Throughout the ceremony, they and their large group of friends and relatives behaved in an increasingly "rude" and "groggy" manner, so much so that before long several friends began "grasping" at the bride, jockeying to get the first kiss once the vows had been spoken. These disruptions led the presiding minister, the Reverend Mr. Collin, to halt the ceremony; he "dismissed them with severe reproof, and rejected their entreaties to resume the office." Collin placed himself in the position of serving as a gatekeeper for the institution of marriage, and he refused to marry couples for reasons ranging from improper conduct to questionable credentials. He was particularly vigilant when it came to the "rabble"; whether it was an interracial marriage, a servant who lacked official permission to marry, or a young man whose "love was so violent that he might suffer if refrained from bedding with her that night," Collin not only denied these irregular unions, but described the inappropriateness of each one in extensive notes he kept in one section of the church's record book of marriages. "Marriage is no frolic," he recorded with a certain prudish satisfaction after refusing to marry yet another boisterous couple (pp. 217–25).

Mr. Collin is less unintentionally funny than his almost-namesake from Pride and Prejudice (1813)—and decidedly less impressed by his surroundings—but he possesses the same streak of prissy moralism. As such, he provides Clare A. Lyons some of the terrific material in her new book, Sex Among the Rabble—as well as a vivid example of one of the central phenomena she describes: the middle-class "assault" on unruly sexual conduct in general and behavior outside of marriage in particular. What is so well documented here is that not only did American middle-class reform begin earlier than most historians have recognized, but it was a response to what Lyons terms a freewheeling "pleasure culture" that flourished in Philadelphia from at least the 1760s until the early nineteenth century.¹ She displays an impressive array of evidence depicting the enjoyment of nonmarital sex by members of all social ranks and even across racial lines, encouraged by the ready availability of printed literature that ranged from the bawdy to the erotic. Readers who open the book expecting to find Philadelphians with strong beliefs in marital fidelity will have to wait until its final pages—and even then, individuals like Mr. Collin are fighting an uphill battle.

The book also has a much broader and very useful goal in tracing a long narrative that ties together sexual histories with the history of American (and, to a smaller degree, Anglo-Atlantic) gender and power relations. What makes such a narrative so valuable is the fact that it adds to a remarkable outpouring of new work since 2001 including Ruth H. Bloch's Gender and Morality in Anglo-American Culture (2003), Sharon Block's Rape and Sexual Power in Early America (2006), Kirsten Fischer's Suspect Relations (2002), Thomas A. Foster's Sex and the Eighteenth-Century Man (2006), Richard Godbeer's Sexual Revolution in Early America (2002), and the January 2003 special issue of the William and Mary Quarterly on the history of sexuality, all of which suggest that American practices and understandings of sexuality underwent important changes throughout the eighteenth century.² Taken together, these monographs demonstrate that a great diversity of practices and opinions obtained throughout the colonies during this century—resulting from the nexus of shifting legal enforcements of sexual mores, the dissemination of printed literature, new perspectives on interracial sex, and growing differences between urban and rural societies, among many other factors. These authors also show that the history of sexuality in eighteenth...