Reviewed by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.4

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Reviewed by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Smith College

Sex among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender & Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730–1830. By Clare A. Lyons. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. 432 pages. $55.00 (cloth), $22.50 (paper).
With its Quaker formation and its broad mix of peoples, Philadelphia was an unusually open city in the eighteenth century. Clare A. Lyons's work focuses on self-divorce (including adultery), bastardy, and prostitution and posits a rising arc followed by steep declension within the city's broader "pleasure culture" (1), of which sexual expression was a part, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It establishes a base point in the years before 1780 and then tracks changes through the age of democratic revolutions (1780–1800) and the early national period (1800–20).	1
Until Pennsylvania passed a divorce law in 1786, a common practice of marital separation was for a husband to advertise his wife's abandonment of his bed and board in the newspaper and declare that he ended all financial obligations to her. A wife could respond through the papers, either denying that she had eloped or offering her reasons for separation. Lyons probes these charges and countercharges to understand the meaning that husband and wife gave to marriage. She argues that wives gradually became more assertive, exposing their husbands' adulteries and, in some cases, expressing their own right to personal happiness.	2
In Philadelphia authorities and private citizens normally left neighbors alone unless there was a threat of personal harm or to the public order. In this environment casual sex led to a rising number of bastards. Philadelphia had an unusual outrelief system that helped to support independent women: pregnant women had the right of care during birth and early child support. Normally, the father paid, either willingly or because authorities forced him; if he could not, the woman could enter the almshouse. In the years before 1780, approximately one out of every thirty-eight adults was a parent of a bastard. That number increased in subsequent decades both absolutely with population rise and relatively by a doubling of the bastardy rate. Who was responsible and what were the remedies became matters of intense debate engendering changes in the understanding of sexuality and moral responsibility. Ultimately, Philadelphia adopted a more punitive system that forced expectant women into the almshouse and put their children to work to pay off the debts incurred by their very existence.	3
Prostitution had an open public face in eighteenth-century Philadelphia, part of everyday street life. Men socialized around prostitutes, and women moved fluidly in and out of the trade. In the revolutionary era, men were allowed to retain their extramarital liberty, and their freedoms grew with new assertions of male sexual prerogatives. Briefly, women also seemed to gain expanded sexual freedom; however, that door swiftly closed. Left outside were prostitutes and women engaging in casual sex. In addition, as the culture came to redefine female respectability as chastity or the married state, the category of prostitution expanded to encompass all nonmarital sex. Prostitutes were considered either victims, whatever their degree of agency, or part of the working-class and African American rabble, whatever their background.	4
The pleasure culture operating in Philadelphia found one of its expressions in the world of print by the mid-eighteenth century. The audience for newly eroticized almanacs, pamphlets, books, and prints expanded beyond the elite to include the literate middle and lower classes. Surviving works offer a path into the consciousness of Philadelphians. Almanacs, for example, supply a rich vein of material about casual and marital sex and relationships. Important in this exploration are what was written and who read it.	. . .

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