| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Sexual Revolution in Early America. By Richard Godbeer. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. xiv, 430 pp. $34.95, ISBN 0-8018-6800-9.)

Sexual Revolution in Early America explores sex as an aspect of the shifting social order among Anglo-Americans from 1600 to 1800. Richard Godbeer finds, during the seventeenth century, an ongoing conflict between traditional "informal" marriages and the ideological efforts of officials to regulate sexual behavior. In the mid-eighteenth century, however, Americans left both alternatives behind for "a more individualistic marketplace of sexual desire and fulfillment" (p. 10).

Godbeer begins with the efforts of New England magistrates to stamp out premarital sex and informal marriages, efforts that were frustrated by easy migration and community tolerance for folk traditions. He then delves into ministers' writings to explore how "the most remarkable aspect of Puritan sexuality was ... its eroticization of the spiritual" (p. 55). The section concludes by exploring how congregations rather than courts regulated sex in New England and found that enforcement varied widely. Godbeer does not, however, consider whether there were any patterns: for example, were port towns more likely than rural villages to embrace forgiveness?

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