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Forum: Reconsidering Early American Sexuality
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Thoughts on the History of Sexuality
Michael L. Wilson
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THIS topical issue of the William and Mary Quarterly, emerging
from the McNeil Center/Omohundro Institute conference on "Sexuality
in Early America," offers an important opportunity for reflection.
However belatedly scholars of the period may have come to the study
of sexuality, research is flourishing. Historians of early North
America now face the practical and theoretical dilemma that characterizes
this moment in the study of the history of sexuality: the field
engages a wide range of topics, approaches, and questions but lacks
a clear direction, governing model, or paradigm. Participants at
the conference remarked on this dilemma as if it were unique to
scholars of early American history, but a quick glimpse at the Journal
of the History of Sexuality confirms that the history of sexuality
at present is a field with no well-defined object of study.
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I am not sure that this situation is necessarily undesirable or unproductive, and, if it is indeed a problem, I do not have a solution. I do have a tentative explanation of how our current state, whether seen as exemplary of intellectual pluralism or of scholarly confusion, has come to be. Rather than imagining such heterogeneity as the norm in a new subdiscipline or a focus on sex as merely the latest stage in a succession of clean, neat shifts of scholarly paradigms, I think we would do well to consider how our current thinking and practice carry forward and are marked by the traces of earlier historical approaches to sexuality. |
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I can only outline briefly this historiographical inheritance. Sexuality has never been entirely absent from historical accounts in the West. From at least the Renaissance through the nineteenth century, historians did not ignore sexual practices in their accounts of the past, but rather treated sexual mores as an index of the moral status of various societies and cultures, particularly of their elites. Contemporary historians of sexuality are more cautious about value judgments, but I do not think that we have ever abandoned our sense of sexuality as indicative, as a marker of larger social and political phenomena. |
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The history of sexuality as an independent field of inquiry arose approximately 130 years ago in the development of sexology as a scientific discipline. Just as sexologists identified sex as a crucial—if not the most crucial—drive and motivation in human behavior, they started to trace the history of that drive.2 These writers saw sexuality as having its own history, whether framed in terms of social problems (such as the late nineteenth-century concern with fertility or prostitution) or in terms of sexology's own emergent objects of study (the family, perverse behaviors, and deviant sexual identities). The historical narratives produced by the sexologists are whiggish in their confidence at discovering or recovering the realities of sexual life and in proclaiming their increased enlightenment at understanding human behavior over time. I do not believe we have entirely discarded this sense of our ever more accurate reconstruction and recovery of the sexuality of the past either. We even bear traces of the postwar, Freudianized history of sex, which argued that the Victorian prudishness attributable to repression was finally being overcome.3 The traces of this last inheritance are particularly hard to perceive because of the influence of Michel Foucault. |
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