AM 214: FAMILY, SEX AND SEXUAL REVOLUTION

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• AM 214 FAMILY, SEX AND SEXUAL REVOLUTION

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Plan of Lecture

• Families and social order

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Orderly households

• The family was the real not just metaphorical-
  foundation of the state
• Indian sachems Masschussetts 1644 required to
  honour parents and stop sexual deviance

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Household heads

• Role to maintain order
• Greater importance of household heads in America
  than in Europe
• Threats to orderly family based society mostly
  from colonial demography
• Family structures, except in New England and New
  France, much looser than in Europe

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Patriarchy

• The historically specific authority of a father
  over dependents in his household
• Not just about rights but about reciprocal
  obligations
• Patriarchal rights only secured by negotiation in
  which all parties had some power
• Benefits for married women within a patriarchal
  system

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Changes in family structure and values over time

• Need to emphasise continuity rather than change
• Major change move from Old World to New World
  and breakdown of traditional kin and family
  assumptions
• James Horn the move to America did not
  undermine patriarchalism, the theoretical basis
  for male dominance, or alter in practice the
  somewhat more ambiguous social relations between
  men and women.

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Epistolary correspondence

• Charles Carroll of Annapolis to Charles Carroll
  of Carrollton
• Richard Grafton to Mary Dulaney
• Emphasis on domestick peace and content and
  companionate marriages

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Interracial relationships

• Barbarous nations display superiority, by
  reducing their females to the most abject slavery
  But the male sex, among a polite people,
  discover their authority in a more generous,
  though not a less evident manner by civility, by
  respect, by complaisance, and, in a word, by
  gallantry. David Hume

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Indian views of European families

• Europeans effeminate because did womens work
• Shock at women scolding men
• Gender frontiers could be sexual middle grounds

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Europeans and Africans

• Edward Long on Jamaican planters and their lack
  of self-control
• Black women as scheming jezebels
• European men led astray because so little
  restraint is laid on the passions in the tropics
• John Stedman and the charms of Joanna
• Ode to the Sable Venus Reverend Isaac Teale
• The black woman as eternally erotic

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The Sable Venus, after Bottichelli
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Female quadroon slave of Surinam
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American sexuality

• Ruth Bloch historians have too often sought to
  locate sexual attitudes in the past along a
  preconceived, one-dimensional spectrum running
  from repression to permissiveness and pleasure.
• Michel Foucault sexuality equals modern identity
• Richard Godbeer Nicholas Sension and sodomy

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Homosexuality

• Ann Alweye, transvestite, and John Crawford
• Clare Lyons argues for relative acceptance of
  homosexuality in late eighteenth century
  Philadelphia need for white male solidarity and
  expansion white male sexual privileges

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Rape

• Rebecca McCarter I consented at last
• Rape defined as unlawful and carnal Knowledge of
  a Woman by Force and against her Will
• Sex as a Battle with women needing to be overcome
  by force
• Blurring of divisions between consensual and
  violent sex

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A Sexual Revolution?

• Move to greater individualism
• Increased sexual permissiveness, especially in
  cities
• Concerns about white purity
• White women as repositories of sexual virtue men
  as morally frail and involuntarily lustful