Reviewed by Bruce Burgett | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.1

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Reviewed by Bruce Burgett | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.1 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Sexual Revolution in Early America. By Richard Godbeer . (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Pp. xiv, 430. $39.95.)

Reviewed by Bruce Burgett , University of Washington/Bothell

Michel Foucault famously began his first volume of The History of Sexuality with a section titled, "We 'Other Victorians.'"¹ His point was that the late twentieth-century, Euroamerican truism that sexual life was in the process of being liberated from the "imperial" prudery of the Victorian era was misguided, not because sex was still repressed, but because the agents of the sexual revolution had inherited from the Victorians a set of very familiar assumptions about the relations among sex, sexuality, politics, and power. If Foucault had been writing in the United States, the first section of his study would undoubtedly have been titled "We 'Other Puritans,'" because as Richard Godbeer points out in Sexual Revolution in Early America, it is the iconography of the seventeenth-century Puritan magistrate, not the nineteenth-century British monarch, that governs popular thinking about the history of sexuality in the United States. Remembered largely through the Hawthornean lens of Puritan mortification and hypocrisy (a lens polished by any number of high school and college literature classes), early American sexuality tends to be thought of as "sour, repressed, and joyless" (p. 54)—quite the opposite, one imagines, of the sweet, liberated, and joyous sexuality that we Americans live today.

This is the primary myth that Godbeer sets out to debunk. Drawing on and synthesizing an impressive array of scholarly and archival sources, Godbeer reconstructs an early American sexual geography that is best characterized, not by a topography of liberation and repression, but by divisions along three overlapping axes of power: "an ongoing struggle among different versions of sexual morality; the role of sex in fostering and combating a profound fear of cultural debasement in the New World; and the interplay of sexual with political revolution in the late eighteenth century" (p. 13). Though each of these themes pervades the book as a whole, each also indexes regional and chronological divisions. The first cluster of three chapters ("Passionate Pilgrims") focuses largely on class-based conflicts between traditional or popular sexual moralities and the attempts at their regulation by ministerial and governmental elites in the seventeenth-century New England colonies. The second cluster ("Sex and Civility") turns to the racial(izing) battles over the relations among sex, libertinage, and civility in the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century southern colonies, including the British West Indies. The final set of chapters ("The Sexual Revolution") dwells on the impact of revolutionary republicanism on an increasingly commercialized and nationalized "marketplace of sexual desire and fulfillment" (p. 10), though here too the focus is primarily on the northern and middle colonies in general and the capital city of Philadelphia in particular.

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