| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Richard Godbeer. Sexual Revolution in Early America. (Gender Relations in the American Experience.) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2002. Pp. xii, 430. $34.95.

In this ambitious work of synthesis and original research, Richard Godbeer argues that early Americans underwent a transformation of sexual behavior and attitudes during the final quarter of the eighteenth century that constituted nothing less than a "revolution." Youthful rebellion against parental authority, the application of revolutionary slogans to sexual matters, and the rise of distinct urban sexual cultures all contributed to this sea change in mores. In response, ministers and parents—traditional guardians of youth—as well as the authors of printed ephemera and novels warned young people of the dangers of sexual liberty and constructed for women a world of sexual danger that could best be resisted with chaste virtue. Concern for their sons and daughters overlapped with concern for the new nation, whose successful bid for independence owed so much, in the minds of many, to the moral character of its people. The book ends with this reinvigorated communitarian agenda for sexual morality ascendent but still plagued by dissent from those who defined sexual mores differently as well as from libertines, who rejected any moral constraint on sexual expression. . . .

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