Book Review

Methods/Theory

Adding depth to a feminist truism, scholars have demonstrated in recent decades that the personal is not only political but historical. Since the 1960s, works exploring historical constructions of femininity and masculinity have transformed our understanding of the American past. Recently, historians interested in gender have turned their attention to the most intimate relations between and among men and women: what Michel Foucault famously termed "the history of sexuality." Since the 1980s, pioneering studies by Estelle B. Freeman, John D'Emilio, Lillian Faderman, and George Chauncey, among others, have allowed us to peer into the bedrooms of prior generations and to glimpse the historical import of what went on there. Such works make clear that sexual practices and identities may appear static or natural but are, in fact, dynamic constructions of culture, contingent upon time, place, class, race, and other variables.	1
It is not surprising that these trailblazing historians of sexuality tended to focus on the post-Civil War period, when discourses about sex became relatively public, making evidence on the topic relatively plentiful. If the history of sexuality is a young field in general, it is newer still to early Americanists, whose sources are often scarce and silent, even about "public" matters. But as the essays presented in this book reveal, such obstacles are not insurmountable. The young scholars whose work editor Merril D. Smith brings together—seven of whom are either graduate students or newly minted Ph.D.s—showcase both the promise and the problems of figuring out what sexuality meant to historical actors who would not have even recognized the term.	2
Smith writes in her introduction that she has "chosen to interpret sex and sexuality broadly" (p. 4), and the essays range widely in time, place, and methodology. Yet she manages to bring coherence to this motley group by dividing the volume into four parts, based on both chronology and region. Clusters of essays address, in turn, the sexual politics of early contacts among Europeans and Native peoples; relationships between religion and sexuality in colonial New England; the nexus of sex, race, and power in the southern colonies; and the evolving gender boundaries of post-revolutionary America. Astutely drawing the reader's attention to the overarching themes uniting each section, Smith enables these independently produced and previously unpublished essays to speak to each other. The result feels more like a scholarly conversation than do most anthologies.	3
This conversation, at least implicitly, concerns the evidentiary challenges of mapping what contributor Richard Godbeer calls the "sexual cosmos" (p. 135) of people both laconic and long dead. The paucity of surviving documents—particularly of sources that might bring to light the attitudes of non-elites and nonwhites—haunts many articles, especially the contributions of Stephanie Wood, Gordon Sayre, and Steven Neuwrith, whose essays explore the sexual frontiers along which Europeans and Indians met and mated. As Sayre explains, the scholar who would unravel the knotty fabric of domination and desire that marked intimate encounters between European men and indigenous women must make do with imperfect tools: "accounts by Europeans who didn't understand the cultures they described" (p. 37). Where Sayre works to read between the lines of his biased sources, Neuwrith and Wood often seem to put words in their subjects' mouths, turning Mary Rowlandson into a "burgeoning frontier feminist" (p. 67), or the women who bedded Spanish conquistadors into victims of post-traumatic stress disorder. Such impositions of twentieth-century sensibilities upon early modern subjects reveal how quickly anachronism creeps in where evidence fears to tread.	. . .