Whose Sexual Revolutions?

Abstract

On June 26, 2003, the United States Supreme Court handed down a decision in the case of Lawrence v. Texas, ruling that the state cannot interfere in the private and consensual sexual practices of consenting adults regardless of their gender. This case is just one more episode in the struggle over competing sexual moralities, particularly in defining the legitimacy of specific kinds of sexual behaviors, under what kinds of circumstances, a struggle that Richard Godbeer demonstrates has existed from the earliest years of British North America. Sexual Revolution in Early America identifies a series of sexual revolutions that took place in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries out of which emerged some of the elements of our modern sexual world. In Puritan New England, moralists and leaders sought to impose a revolution from above, establishing a hegemonic sexual order that was an integral part of the Puritan experiment. In the southern colonies, ordinary colonists enacted their own revolution, refusing similar attempts of southern leaders to reform popular sexual mores. In both regions, notions of proper sexual behavior were intimately linked to their proponents' identities as Christian, civilized, and English; thus alternative sexual arrangements were seen as threatening to the establishment of English societies in North America and even to colonists' very sense of self. Two additional revolutions took place in the eighteenth century: one fundamentally revised the image of (some) women as sexual beings while the other began the process of legitimating the individual pursuit of sexual happiness, a pursuit that the recent Supreme Court decision has deemed deserving of constitutional protection. Sexual Revolution begins with New England, not because it was the first nor the most typical region of North America settled by English colonists but rather because Godbeer wants to confront popular stereotypes about Puritans and sex from the beginning. Building upon, but going beyond, Edmund Morgan's classic reinterpretation of Puritan sexual values, Godbeer reveals not only how Puritans spiritualized the (marital) erotic, considering it a fundamental component to a healthy marriage, but also how they eroticized