Volume 49, Number 11 · June 27, 2002
Those Sexy Puritans
By Edmund S. Morgan
Sexual Revolution in Early America
by Richard Godbeer
Johns Hopkins University Press, 430 pp., $34.95
If there was a sexual revolution in early America, it was not because people had revolutionary ideas about sex. In their new communities the settlers made sex outside marriage illegal, as it had been in the world they left behind. But the New World presented new situations that invited defiance or reconsideration of conventional restraints, and Richard Godbeer looks at the results in a book that shows how sex inside and outside marriage helped to shape American society. In three of the places he examines, the usual limitations on sex outside marriage simply did not work.
Review, 2812 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |