| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Clare A. Lyons. Sex among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730–1830. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Va. 2006. Pp. 420. Cloth $55.00, paper $22.50.

This fascinating and well-written book describes the making of a "vibrant pleasure culture" (p. 1) in Philadelphia, one characterized by the widespread acceptance of sexual transgressions—even those of well-to-do women—that lasted from the 1760s to the turn of the century. This pleasure culture was followed by a postrevolutionary crackdown in the form of a "new gender system" (p. 2) that, by about 1820, had foreclosed sexual options for women and redefined all acts of nonmarital sex as sexual deviance associated with the lower-class "rabble." Throughout, Clare A. Lyons carefully distinguishes popular print culture from actual behavior, and she notes that cultural and legal reform efforts neither ended unlawful sex nor necessarily changed the meanings illicit relations held for those engaged in them. But by the end of this scholarly book, Lyons has made the persuasive case that the new gender system so drastically altered "the social and cultural context within which sexual nonconformity took place" (p. 310), that women's experience of nonmarital sex, adultery, prostitution, and unwed motherhood had been transformed. The ribald laughter that accompanied tales of cuckoldry among the middling sort in the mid-eighteenth century had been replaced by the stern reproof that middle-class women were naturally restrained, marking unchaste women as aberrant and deserving of the punishment that new nineteenth-century laws all but ensured.

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