Rebecca Davis teaches history at the University of Delaware and writes a newsletter called Carnal Knowledge. She is also the co-host of a podcast called This Is Probably a Really Weird Question, in which she discusses sexual health and history with a family physician. Fierce Desires is her third book, and it was supported by a Public Scholar Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities. In addition to books, she has written essays for Slate, the Washington Post, the LA Times, and TIME magazine.
What’s the big idea?
Mainstream thinking about the origins of sexual repression in America is often historically misinformed. This politically charged topic tends to draw from a mythology about gender norms that obscures surprising freedoms in America’s erotic past.
Below, Rebecca shares five key insights from her new book, Fierce Desires: A New History of Sex and Sexuality in America. Listen to the audio version—read by Rebecca herself—in the Next Big Idea App.
1. The Puritans aren’t the problem.
A nation of Puritans, right? If you’ve been in a conversation about Americans as uniquely sexually repressed, you may have also heard that it’s due to the Puritans, a self-righteous group of 17th-century English religious dissenters. In the 1620s, groups of Puritans sailed across the Atlantic to create tiny settlements along the coast of what would later be called New England.
In the New England colonies, Puritans established laws that defined sodomy, fornication, and adultery as capital crimes. (Fornication meant sex with an unmarried woman; the law didn’t differentiate between married versus unmarried men.) The harshness of these laws has given many people the impression that the Puritans were prudes. Fictional representations of the Puritans burnished that reputation for sanctimony. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel, The Scarlet Letter, told the story of a Puritan woman in the 1640s who must wear a scarlet A as punishment after she becomes pregnant following a sexual affair with a minister. The idea that the Puritans were a bunch of killjoys had fully taken hold by the time H. L. Mencken, a sardonic observer of American culture, commented in 1917 that Puritanism was “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” Puritanism came to mean an American tendency to silence sexual candor and demonize erotic freedoms.
The Puritans who settled in North America were zealots, but they were not anti-sex. Like many Protestant Christians, the Puritans believed that sexual intercourse between husband and wife was one of the sacred obligations of marriage. And despite the severity of their laws regarding sexual morality, Puritan leaders hesitated to prosecute crimes against more powerful members of their communities. Sodomy prosecutions, in general, were extremely rare. The emerging laws that criminalized sex between Africans and English people were far more severe and consistently enforced.
For Puritans, sex provided a metaphor of the believer’s devotion. When a Puritan man submitted himself to Christ, he did so as a bride. In 1651, Boston minister John Cotton asked the members of his congregation if they fantasized about spiritual sexual intercourse with Christ: “Have you a strong and hearty desire to meet him in the bed of loves?” They used erotic language to describe “penetration” by Christ’s love. Puritans welcomed sexual pleasure as a spiritual experience and as an expression of marital union.
2. American preoccupations with sexual purity are connected to Anthony Comstock.
Anthony Comstock was a moral crusader who persuaded the U.S. Congress in 1873 to pass a broad anti-obscenity law to “suppress” many forms of vice. That category included pornography, paintings or sculptures of nudes, literary references to sex, sex toys, and anything to do with contraception or abortion—just to name a few. The law gave Comstock broad authority as a postal inspector to investigate, seize, and destroy any items that violated his sense of social purity. Many states passed similar laws to regulate intrastate commerce. Courts overturned some of Comstock’s most outrageous actions, but his efforts curtailed the free circulation of sexual information for decades. For the first time, government agents actively sought evidence of anything they considered sexually obscene rather than waiting for evidence of criminal conduct. Unlike the Puritans, Comstockian anti-vice crusaders raided bookshops, private homes, and even art galleries in search of allegedly obscene goods.
“For the first time, government agents actively sought evidence of anything they considered sexually obscene rather than waiting for evidence of criminal conduct.”
The Comstock Act of 1873 was just one example of a new investment of state and federal government resources in policing Americans’ sexual behaviors. In 1862, Congress passed the Morrill Act, which criminalized polygamy to punish members of the Mormon Church who were resisting federal authority. The Dawes Severalty Act of 1882 offered meager parcels of land to Indigenous men who became the monogamous patriarchs of a marital household. (Polygamous Native Americans received nothing.) One of the first immigration laws in the United States, the Page Act of 1875, asserted the power of the federal government to prohibit the migration of women suspected of being sex workers. The Comstock Act, in other words, was one piece of an expanding state interest in Americans’ sexual behaviors. We live with the consequence of this expanded authority over our personal lives.
3. Abraham Lincoln probably had sex with men but was not considered bisexual or homosexual.
For much of the 18th and 19th centuries, it was not all that unusual for younger people to have intimate friendships with the same sex. These intimacies involved bed-sharing and could be erotic. Young men wrote letters to one another about enjoying nighttime sex play. Women described the pleasures they took in caressing one another’s bosoms. And same-sex pairs called each other husband and wife.
Abraham Lincoln was likely intimate with several men over the course of his life. Like many American men with queer desires, he married a woman eventually. Yet neither Lincoln nor any of his contemporaries would have recognized his behavior as bisexual or gay. Those words did not exist in the mid-1800s, and there was no comparable synonym. More to the point, sexual identity itself was not yet understood nor seen as a key part of each person’s identity. In a culture without sexual identities, it seems to have been easier for people to express what we might today call queer desires.
Sodomy was still associated with sin and vice, but many men appear to have distinguished their sex play with other men from a crime that was associated with some degree of force. And the fact that sex remained largely defined as an act of penetration by a penis meant that women had little to fear in terms of prosecution for their erotic intimacies with other women. Sex and pregnancy outside of marriage were far more damaging to a woman’s reputation than any perceived queerness.
4. Abortion is an American tradition.
Americans have always had abortions. It may have been one of the most common forms of fertility control during the 19th century. Indigenous women in North America controlled their fertility with herbs that induced miscarriage. Enslaved Black women sometimes chewed cotton root and drank teas with herbs that would stop pregnancies. White women also ended pregnancies. Mail-order tonics and powders that promised to “restore the monthly flow” were easy to get, and corner pharmacies offered other options. Salesmen advertised syringes that could be used for a feminine hygiene douche or an abortion. These were the products that the Comstock Act of 1873 pushed onto a black market. Euphemisms for contraceptives and abortifacients became necessary, but it didn’t require much imagination to guess the intended uses for what one manufacturer cheekily called a “Comstock syringe.”
“It may have been one of the most common forms of fertility control during the 19th century.”
States began to criminalize abortion between the 1820s and the 1890s, but even then, many of these laws permitted abortion before “quickening,” or the point in the pregnancy at which an individual felt the sensation of fetal movement. Quickening typically occurs after week 18 or even week 20 in a pregnancy. Enforcement of these laws was also extremely uneven and even haphazard. The threat of manslaughter charges nevertheless pushed abortion into the medical underground.
5. Variation is the norm.
When is sex normal, and when is it not? Those questions would not have made sense to most Americans living 150 years ago, let alone 250 years ago. It was only in the second half of the 1800s that the idea of a “normal” person, in body or mind, began to take shape, supplementing older ideas about the “natural” or “godly” person. The idea of the normal influenced psychiatry, human evolution, eugenics, and even educational theory.
A lot of people began to wonder which kinds of sexual desire or behavior were “normal.” The first major studies of American sexual behaviors were the Kinsey Reports of 1948 and 1953. Alfred Kinsey and his research team argued that any effort to define sexual normalcy was scientifically flawed. Too many of the preceding sex studies, Kinsey complained, assumed a norm based on cultural values and imposed value judgments on the results. With data that he gathered from thousands of interviews, Kinsey discovered anything but a statistical norm where sexual behavior was concerned. Instead, variation was the rule. His zero-to-six scale, from “complete heterosexuality” to “complete homosexuality,” for example, revealed a continuum of sexual behaviors, with most people having a variety of experiences.
The idea of normal versus deviant or perverted sexuality persisted, shaping everything from a major immigration law that in 1952 excluded the “sexual psychopath” from entering the country legally to debates decades later over marriage equality. But Kinsey’s rejection of sexual normalcy also prevailed, inspiring generations of activists to reject other people’s criticisms of their sexuality and to insist that variation is the only norm.
To listen to the audio version read by author Rebecca Davis, download the Next Big Idea App today:
