Title: Sex Among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender & Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730-1830
Author: Clare Lyons
Year of Publication: 2006
Thesis:
Clare Lyons finds a contingent moment in Philadelphia, a relatively newer colony and later state compared to its New England counterparts. The largest city in the new U.S., it also boasted the most diverse population in terms of race, class, and hosted the largest group of free African Americans. An intellectual lighthouse of the Enlightenment, it offered more likely place for more nuanced forms of sexual, gender, and race relations. Before long, however, Lyons demonstrates how Englightenment thinking was used to establish natural difference between (white) male virility and passive (white) female sexuality. In turn, these dynamics were pitted against the representation of poor people and especially African Americans as naturally licentious. Tightening gender boundaries rooted in a presentation of racial and sexual biology proved a powerful way to subvert this contingent moment in Philadelphia. The shift we are seeing in the latter part of the 18th and early part of the 19th centuries is one where gender and race are reaffirmed as loci of power.
Time:
1730-1830
Geography:
Philadelphia
Organization:
List of Illustrations and Tables
List of Abbreviations and Short Titles
Introduction
- Largest city in U.S. with ethnic, intellectual, class diversity w/greatest population of free African Americans. (7-9)
Part I. The Sexual Terrain of Colonial and Revolutionary Philadelphia
1. A Springboard to Revolution: Runaway Wives and Self-Divorce
- Also includes "popular representations of marriage." (9)
2. The Fruits of Nonmarital Unions: Sex in the Urban Pleasure Culture
- "investigates the development of the urban pleasure culture and examines bastardy and prostitution." (9)
3. The Pleasures and Powers of Reading: Eroticization of Popular Print and Discursive Interpretations of Sex
- Reading the media representation of this "multiclass, mixed-gender reading public" against their sexual behavior." (9)
Part II. Sex in the City in the Age of Democratic Revolutions
4. To be "Free and Independent": Sex among the Revolutionary Rabble
- This section analyzes race & class (9)
"But the Revolution had fundamentally changed the relationship of the common people to the state. In their turn away from monarchy to a govern- ment of the people, Americans embraced a political philosophy that relied on the virtue of its citizens. If the people were to be self-governing, republican leaders professed, they must be virtuous and rational and act for the com- mon good. Uncontrolled sexuality could become dangerous: because the body would come to rule the man, such men would not make good citizens. The implications of the Revolution seemed to lead in two di√erent directions." (188)
- "Bastardy" becomes a concern of local governments
- Turns out that middle-upper classes are more likely to commit adultery / have out-of-wedlock children than poorer classes (who were more likely to have serial relationships) - this is a case of the white middle-upper class policing itself, then. (207-208)
"For some of the lower sort, sexual nonconformity was an assertion of the primacy of love or romantic attachment over the propriety of marriage. For many of the middle and elite classes, expansive sexual experience meant casual and multiple sexual a√airs, and adultery be- came a component of their marriages. For them, such behavior was personal indulgence in libertine excess." (236). <-- this isn't a hard line she draws, but it is interesting. So the important thing is HOW the w/m-c saw itself - adultery and "bastardy" as aberrant, vs. "lower sort" as their natural inclination.
5. Sex and the Politics of Gender in the Age of the Revolution
- Women's citizenship curtailed by men's control over them. (238)
- Comes straight out of enlightenment thinking: "The subordination of women to men through marriage, Locke argued, existed in the state of nature; women were, therefore, excluded from the status of indi- viduals in the state of nature. As individuals formed the social contract upon which republican government rests, women had already been excluded by their position as subordinate wives within male households—and thus excluded from becoming full citizens. Other thinkers, most notably Rousseau, argued that women were naturally inferior to men and lacked the mental capacity to participate in important affairs of the world, particularly governance." (239)
- Women's education became a central goal to improve gender equality, where attacking non-marital relations became the counter-attack.
- Shift in representations of white m/c women as being chaste against a backdrop of unchaste behavior in lower classes
Part III. Normalizing Sex in the Nineteenth Century: The Assault on Nonmarital Sexuality
6. Through Our Bodies: Prostitution and the Cultural Reconstruction of Nonmarital Sexuality
7. Through our Souls: The Benevolent Reform of Sexual Transgressors
8. Through Our Children: Bastardy Comes under Attack
- "This final section of the book demonstrates how the establishment of the middle-class gender system normalized sex and created the illusion of deviancy among the rabble to explain and thus justify the subordinate status of nonelite women, African- Americans, and the lower classes in antebellum America." (10)
Conclusion and Reflection
Appendix
- Establishing Class
- Bastardy Totals
- Mother's Requests for Out-Relief Bastardy Child Support
Manuscript Sources
Type:
Methods:
Sources:
Historiography:
Keywords:
Sexual behavior:
"Sexual behavior, like any other fundamental human experience, has no fixed meaning. To write a history of sexuality one must perform an act of cultural translation by re- covering and explaining the meanings attached to familiar behaviors. This study interweaves two story lines to accomplish that: it explores sexual be- havior left in the historical record, and it analyzes the meanings, often various and in conflict, associated with those behaviors." (8)
Gender:
"the set of beliefs and ideas acrived to the social categories of man and woman." (9)
Sex:
"Erotic desire and erotic bodily practice." (9)
Sexuality:
"an invention in Western culture at some point during the transformations discussed in this book and was tied to both the emergence of normative heterosexuality and the invention of a rigidly bounded intert definition of female sexuality." (9)Themes:
Critiques:
Questions:
Curious how this compares to the wider world beyond Philadelphia.
Quotes:
Notes:
- The more I read on Enlightenment thought, the more it seems like it applies differently to the individual than it does to a state.