On the eve of the American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin published a satire instructing the British on humbling their American vassals. The British could castrate American males, thereby reducing American population growth. The logistics were simple: “Let a company of sow-gelders, consisting of 100 men, accompany the army. On their arrival at any town or village, let orders be given that on their blowing of the horn all the males be assembled in the market place. If the corps are men of skill and ability in their profession, they will make great dispatch, and retard but very little the progress of the army” (Franklin Reference Franklin and Lemay1987, 718). Satire aside, Franklin's generation believed that sex and reproduction had a significant impact on the independence, strength, and durability of nations.

America's new leaders ushered in a liberal society that disputed patriarchal rule and seemingly freed young people to experiment with nonmarital sex. Leaders elevated the significance of male rationality as the basis for consent, promised individual liberty for white men, and set limits on government power. They also produced a republic that diminished the importance of patriarchal rule in favor of civic virtue as the basis for liberty, welfare, and the public good. Playing out tensions between liberalism and republicanism, leaders feared that Americans' experiments in nonmonogamous sexuality unleashed disorders that threatened the viability of the new nation. They reacted by reinforcing patriarchal family structures and relying on the patriarchal state to regulate sexual behavior and limit sexual transgressions.

After a revolution against British patriarchal authority, however, attempts to promote patriarchal authority were subject to public suspicions and charges of tyranny. Early leaders mitigated the suspicions and undercut the charges in three ways. First, they applied patriarchal police power to an emerging middle class that identified with “clean” sex (chastity prior to marriage and fidelity within marriage). Because respectable Americans did not defend sexual misconduct or oppose Christian reformers who sought to eradicate it, they rarely protested against the use of police power on people's sexual behavior. Furthermore, middle-class compliance was relatively easy to obtain because coercive police power was rarely targeted at the well-to-do. For them, being policed was more a matter of being warned than of being prosecuted. Coercive policing was applied mainly to the lower classes. Second, leaders nearly always packaged police power with popular consent and made patriarchal rule appear to be a citizen choice. If coercion was involved, then it was presented as necessary for “their own good” and deserving of consent (Dubber Reference Dubber2005, 73). Third, officials applied police power over sex with discretion. They used common-law precedents and recent statutes selectively, making patriarchal authority appear to be much milder (and less threatening) than it might otherwise be. The result was that for the first 50 years of U.S. history, leaders relied mainly on patriarchal family and political authority to police sex in America. Remarkably few people questioned their legitimacy.

The efforts of moral reformers, civic leaders, and public officials to promote patriarchal authority to police Americans' sex lives had consequences that modern historians rarely appreciate. For example, elite reform efforts helped undermine the very differences that scholars allege separated and ranked the sexes. Elites downplayed the male capacity for civic virtue, rationality, and disciplined consent. They emphasized the male propensity toward desire, sinfulness, and viciousness, which underscored the need for an authority to restrain men. That authority would be the traditional one of higher-status men (civic fathers) and the patriarchal state (political fathers). Elite efforts also de-emphasized women's capacity for piety and self-sacrifice (the moral bases for republican motherhood) and highlighted the dangers of female desire, lust, and seductiveness. Authoritative patriarchs were still needed to govern women. Leaders who were concerned with sexual license inviting chaos viewed both men and women primarily as creatures of passion who caused grave disorder unless closely monitored and governed. Men and women were equal in sexual desire and transgressions, and they were equally in need of patriarchal governance. The key difference was that leaders relied solely on men, howsoever flawed, to exercise patriarchal authority.

Early elites also embedded patriarchal thinking, institutions, and practices into American society. Protected by a wall of privacy that kept out public officials (in all but the most extreme cases of abuse), fathers and husbands were free to police sex within their own families. They could do whatever they pleased to protect “their” women (see Roth Reference Roth, Daniels and Kennedy1999). Simultaneously, political fathers and the patriarchal state wielded the legal authority to police sex within abusive families, among individuals in the process of family formation and dissolution, and in nonmarital relationships. The Revolution brought with it new expectations of liberty, but laws provided leaders with patriarchal policing authority to punish those who experimented with sex in what elites and reformers considered inappropriate ways. Citizens were more concerned with who was wielding patriarchal authority than with patriarchal authority itself: “Americans didn't appreciate being policed, but they had no qualms about policing” (Dubber Reference Dubber2005, 83).

Finally, the patriarchal policing of sex displayed possibilities for both republican and liberal political theory to find a suitable place for the rule of fathers in the enlightened world of civic virtue and individual rights. For those emphasizing republican civic virtue and the public good, the policing of sex was portrayed as politicians' common-law obligation to foster citizen welfare (Tomlins Reference Tomlins1993, 58–59). Other elites who invested in liberal rights, consent, and weak government were satisfied to limit federal authority but reserve to state and local officials the discretionary authority to police sex. Discretion was crucial. Most respectable Americans were willing to “speak out” against un-Christian sexual practices, but they often “tolerated” transgressions born of excessive human passion that was practiced privately and quietly. Influential citizens could consent to the authority of governors to regulate the most intimate aspects of people's lives, knowing that they would show restraint in applying the rules.

In sum, early elites feared that the passion of both sexes was a disruptive force. They perpetuated patriarchal thinking, authority, and institutions but did so in innovative ways. First, they integrated what they considered the patriarchal need to police sex into emerging liberal and republican strains of political thought. Federalism enabled liberals to promote liberal laws at the national level, but perpetuate patriarchal policing at the subnational level. State and local elites then interpreted patriarchal policing as a by-product of consent. Common-law obligations invited republicans to secure the public's welfare, which encompassed policing morals, including sex. Under these circumstances, elites had little fear of generating significant public opposition. Second, elites' class-based approach to policing sex meant that they would find acceptance and support among respectable people whose political influence outweighed any discontent expressed by the lower classes. Civic leaders' success was partly based on their ability to condemn sexual misconduct, tolerate some transgressions (especially among members of their own class), and occasionally punish prohibited sex among the lower classes. These leaders identified themselves and the emerging middle class as sexually self-disciplined, decent people who needed little policing but who called on the state to exercise discretionary authority over the sex lives of the unruly masses. Third, elites could be critical of the sexual behavior of their fellow men, in part, because they allowed men to go mostly unpunished for sexual misdeeds, and they needed men to retain enforcement authority. Elites declared men and women guilty of sexual misconduct, but granted men sole control of the laws, courts, and state enforcement apparatus. Men were the policers and women were primarily the policed. Few men had to pay fines or suffer jail time due to sexual misconduct; many women did.

The perpetuation of patriarchal authority over people's sex lives represented a partial break with the past. Elites adapted patriarchal authority to the modern expectations, suspicions, and institutions of the liberalism, republicanism, class structure, and weakened gender categories of post-Revolution America.

CREATURES OF PASSION

The Revolution forced leaders to assess the people who would exercise newfound liberty. Many commentators worried that American men and women were creatures of passion prone to abuse liberty. Male captivity to passion usually began in childhood where, if not properly restrained, it led to gross immorality and criminality. Early crime narratives suggested that the “typical criminal . . . begins as an unfilial child, who throws off the yoke of parental guidance to pursue willfully vicious courses, usually involving sexual promiscuity or precocity. . . . [T]he criminal is always seen first as the willful or ‘ungrateful’ child; his violation of paternal authority prefigures and makes inevitable his later offenses against society” (Slotkin Reference Slotkin1973, 7). Sometimes these later offenses included sex crimes that revealed the individual's “capacity to commit all that was evil”; a rapist who demonstrated an “inability to control sexual impulse” implicitly “indicated a more dangerous inability to control all vicious impulses of the self” (Williams Reference Williams and Shuffelton1993a, 194–221; Reference Williams1993b, 56). Punishment was the means “to tame and control the wild impulses and passions” (Stuart Reference Stuart1854, 217–18). That could be accomplished, penal reformers argued, by sentencing criminals to spend years in the nation's new penitentiaries where, ideally, “[e]verything calculated to inflame the passions and sharpen the evil propensities of men [is] strictly avoided” (Society for the Preventiion of Pauperism 1822, 46). The cure for men's passionate excesses was passionless prisons.

Ministers and magistrates considered sexual promiscuity “the ultimate corruption” (Bailyn Reference Bailyn1992, 28). Men who participated in unauthorized sex exhibited a deep-seated depravity (Godbeer Reference Godbeer2002, 66). Their transgressions jeopardized the bonds of community and were emblematic of social degeneration (Bosco Reference Bosco1978, 162; Foster Reference Foster2006, 176). Individuals who indulged sexual desire were likely to suffer mental and physical illnesses, as well as to disgrace themselves and their families. Disgrace might begin with notoriety for personal moral failings manifested in the marketplace, where shady individuals practiced deception, engaged in misconduct, and gained reputations for being unworthy debtors or failed businessmen (Ditz Reference Ditz1994, 66; Graham Reference Graham and Horowitz2006, 71). Moralists considered excessive passion the root cause of individual vices, disorders, and crimes such as adultery, rape, and sodomy (Society for the Prevention of Pauperism 1822, Appendix 12; see also Beccaria Reference Beccaria, Bellamy and Davies1995, 80; Bradford [1793] Reference Bradford1972, 29; Livingston [1833] Reference Livingston1999, 309). According to Dr. Benjamin Rush, “When indulged in an undue or a promiscuous intercourse with the female sex, or in onanism, it produces seminal weakness, impotence, dysury, tabes dorsalis, pulmonary consumption, dyspepsia, dimness of sight, vertigo, epilepsy, hypochondriasis, loss of memory, manalgia, fatuity, and death” ([1812] Reference Rush1962, 347). Rush was deeply concerned with masturbation. Practiced individually or in groups, masturbation was more detrimental to boys' physical and moral health than “the morbid effects of intemperance in a sexual intercourse with women” ([1812] Reference Rush1962, 33).

The problem of untamed passion was especially acute for young men. Many boys from good families were “early initiated into the mysteries of vice by unprincipled servants of both sexes!” (Rush [1798] Reference Rush1988b, 71). Those who lived together “in large families, male . . . boarding schools, and colleges” were nightly exposed to “youthful lusts” (Reports of the Prison Discipline Society [1855] 1972, 1:289). Their venereal appetites grew stronger in schools where they were “herded together, and lodge in the same rooms, or in the same beds” (Rush [1812] Reference Rush1962, 351). Boys' sexual cravings affected all aspects of their lives: “Sexual desire was seen as an especially powerful force in a young man, distracting him from his work, blinding him to his future duties as a breadwinner, and leading him to disease and possibly insanity” (Rotundo Reference Rotundo1993, 72). Even after marriage, the male tendency to abuse sexual desire was strong. Young husbands engaged in adultery, bigamy, and other transgressions that imperiled family stability and invited social disorder (Beccaria Reference Beccaria, Bellamy and Davies1995, 80). Youths' sexual appetite also infected their spiritual lives. Susan Juster points out that the growth of revivalism, with its open-air meetings and disregard for propriety, seemed “to conduce to a generally sexualized climate that was subversive of proper religious sentiments” (1994, 37–38). Wherever they became manifest, youths' illicit sexual desires degraded human interactions and undermined social institutions.

What could be done to temper young men's excessive passion? An article in the 1786 American Herald magazine instructed youth: “You have violent passions implanted in you by nature for the accomplishment of her purposes. But conclude not, as many have done to their ruin, that because they are violent, they are irresistible. The same nature which gave you passions, gave you also reason and a love of order” (Foster Reference Foster2006, 10). Unfortunately, leaders worried, many a young man was “a volcano of feeling” whose sexual desire overpowered his reason and love of order. It was helpful if family fathers and civic leaders employed the language of manhood to motivate youths to resist temptation, master passion, and exhibit manly self-control (Ditz Reference Ditz1994, 60–61; Hessinger Reference Hessinger2005, 135; Lyons Reference Lyons2006, 160–61). Still, men's struggle was daunting. Health reformer Sylvester Graham warned that stray thoughts and idle imaginings could generate sexual fantasies that harmed youths' vital organs and brought on insanity or death (Horowitz Reference Horowitz2003, 96).

The male struggle for sexual self-control was multifaceted. Rush advised young men to practice temperance, engage in exercise, focus on education and business, avoid women, but marry early ([1812] Reference Rush1962, 351–55). The logic behind early marriage was that “[m]atrimony in all ranks of people lessens the temptation to vice, and furnishes fresh motives to just conduct” (Rush [1798] Reference Rush1988b, 71). Young men were to achieve “self-made manhood” by channeling passion, ambition, and aggression into material interests (Leverenz Reference Leverenz1989, 73; Rotundo Reference Rotundo1993, 3–6). By defining manhood in terms of self-control, family mastery, and economic success, youths who committed sexual transgressions announced their failed manhood. They were slaves to lust, not free men (see Foster Reference Foster2006, 65, 67). Similarly, men who engaged in interracial sex were guilty of the “sordid passion” that robbed them of manhood and invited criminal behavior (Saxton Reference Saxton2003, 208). Even nineteenth-century utopians, who applauded sexual experimentation, believed that men must learn to master passion rather than simply indulge it (Frances Wright in Horowitz Reference Horowitz2006, 51).

Self-mastery had different meanings in different regions. It entailed self-denial, sobriety, familial responsibility, and economic achievement in the North, but put on a different face in the South. Glover writes: “Drinking, gambling, sexual experimentation, and dueling and other forms of orchestrated violence were accepted and even encouraged in southern male culture. These behaviors . . . did not, in the early Republic South, compromise a refined man's reputation. Southern elites instead viewed these actions as another manifestation of self-mastery: a man was not controlled by anyone but himself” (Glover Reference Glover, Friend and Glover2004, 29). Manhood was defined by behavioral codes that demanded of men that they monitor passion, respect boundaries, and conform to male conventions. Monitorial manhood was “a medical imperative” that sustained the individual's health while it strengthened his manly reputation (Miller Reference Miller, Daniels and Kennedy1999, 48). Men might be fundamentally corrupt, but monitorial manhood established limits on the depth and consequences of male corruption.

Female passion was long considered a significant threat to family stability and social order (see Lockridge Reference Lockridge1992). Commentators thought that women's powerful passion “eclipsed the possibility of their exercising agency and rational choice” (Lyons Reference Lyons2006, 164). The destructive potential of women's irrationality generated “deeper fears about the expression of passion.” It represented uncontrollable forces in the new Republic. In this context, female purity was elevated to the stature of national necessity, and female displays of excessive passion were tantamount to treason (D'Emilio and Freedman Reference D'Emilio and Freedman1988, 44–45). In theory, women's passion was dampened by their natural affection, nurturing disposition, and inborn piety, which “represented the emotions that provided social glue rather than social disruption” (Evans Reference Evans1989, 42). Still, the question haunting American civic leaders was whether women were inherently selfish creatures with lustful, destructive tendencies subversive of decent society, or if they were potentially reliable, self-sacrificing souls who were capable of serving as “the guardians of sexual virtue” (Godbeer Reference Godbeer2002, 266). Were women up to the task of policing themselves and male sexuality? The answer among male elites—the traditional, resilient patriarchal answer—was a resounding “No.” Flawed men could fall back on the culture of manhood and male reasoning abilities, however weak, but women's passion overwhelmed all reason and sanity.

Women had to struggle to restrain lustful tendencies and fulfill guardianship responsibilities. They had to protect themselves from male deceivers and seducers who threatened their chastity and fidelity, and threatened ruin to them, their families, and society. The widespread sense that men were enslaved by sexual desire and unrestrained in their search for sex partners placed primary responsibility for maintaining sexual chastity and fidelity on women (Godbeer Reference Godbeer2002, 288). Contemporary fiction pointed out to middle-class female readers the wisdom of disciplining passion and fending off immoral suitors. Indulging romantic fantasies and sexual desire would only make women suffer devastating consequences, such as shame, isolation, poverty, illness, insanity, and suicide (Weyler Reference Weyler2004, 24). Still, fictive heroines failed to discipline unruly passion. The notion that women were fundamentally “passionless” creatures was mostly a republican ideal born of wishful thinking. The occasional assertion of female passionlessness belied the omnipresence and power of female passion. The assertion of passionlessness strengthened the case for women to assume responsibility for monitoring sexual relations among women and men, but neither male elites nor the laws that men enacted and enforced empowered women to be society's moral enforcers (Cott, Reference Cott, Cott and Elizabeth1979, 162–81; Lyons Reference Lyons2006, 289; Rupp Reference Rupp1999, 41; see also Rush Reference Rush and Butterfield1951, 1:486). Policing was an all-male pastime.

The mythic rendering of women as passionlessness made them ideal foils for men who lacked sexual self-control. A wife was to have a “restraining influence on a man.” A mother was to lay the foundations of conscience and self-control in her sons (Rotundo Reference Rotundo1993, 20, 73, 145). Still, women were portrayed as threats to manhood precisely because they sought to monitor men, restrain them, and limit male liberty. Giving substance to the bachelor creed that marriage was slavery, women's monitorial role fostered a fear of women that gave rise in literature to the omnipresent desire of men to escape their wives, children, and “adult responsibilities,” either by avoiding marriage or fleeing into the all-male wilderness. Even in literature, however, the escape was mostly temporary (Kimmel Reference Kimmel2005, 35). Mature masculinity required that a man forsake bachelorhood or return from the wilderness to head a family, provision and protect it, and assume the responsibilities of family patriarch and law-abiding citizen.

Post-Revolution concerns with people's excessive passion and sexual transgressions underscored the capacity of men and women for evil, irrationality, and chaos (Halttunen Reference Halttunen1998, 4). In an enlightened society, how did one explain premarital pregnancies, adultery, bigamy, rape, sodomy, and other sexual misdeeds? Regardless of proper upbringing, moral training, a supportive family, and a healthy environment, people of both sexes were moved by inexplicable “gusts of passion” that swept them into transgressive sexual behavior. Leaders identified the root of the problem as people's natural desire driven to excess in a post-Revolution world of newborn liberty. Leaders faced the practical, political question of how to discipline passion, punish impulsiveness, and teach self-control to harness desire without wholly denying citizens' liberty. Every politician understood that lustful men were a large part of the problem, but they also knew that men would have to be all of the solution. Ongoing patriarchal tradition declared that women were not fit to govern anyone's desire, much less their own.

PERPETUATING PATRIARCHY

The Revolution's emphasis on rights, liberty, and limited government promised to free individuals to make their own decisions regarding sex. For leaders sharing republican concerns with Christian ethics and civic virtue, however, sexual experimentation was a problem. The leaders felt that ordinary people were guilty of dangerous, sexual transgressions. They viewed incest, premarital sex, adultery, and bigamy, along with same-sex relations, prostitution, rape, and, later, late-term abortions, as markers of a society suffering from pervasive vice (Smith-Rosenberg Reference Smith-Rosenberg1985, 217–44). They recognized that human beings were flawed creatures prone to sexual misbehavior, some of which would have to be tolerated, but they also thought that many individuals, especially marginal people (such as the poor, free and enslaved blacks, and recent immigrants), lacked the self-restraint to resist sexual misbehavior or keep it within acceptable boundaries.

The persistence of patriarchal family structures and laws after the Revolution offered elites some reassurance. Counterforces notwithstanding, patriarchs remained in a position to discipline family members' sexuality. Husbands were expected to govern wives' passion, and wives were still their husbands' legal and sexual subordinates. Englishwoman Mary Astell saw the liberal social contract as the death knell of patriarchal authority, but patriarchy was resilient. Phillips notes: “The contract between husband and wife served for two and a half centuries as the basis on which women were denied the status of individuals—and were not privy to the social contract, or the later strengthening of democratic control. . . . The ‘individual’ is a patriarchal category.” (Phillips Reference Phillips1991, 35). American men were bound together by a common interest in asserting male “sex-right” (to access women's bodies) and consenting to a social contract (Pateman Reference Pateman1988, 102–3). By contrast, women were neither bound together nor “individuals” with enforceable claims to rights. Married women, in particular, experienced continuing legal subordination under the common law of coverture. As Kerber reports, “It did not seem to have occurred to any male patriot to attack coverture.” Instead, American leaders defined the “autonomous, patriotic, male citizen” as guardian of the Republic in opposition to women, who were alleged to suffer from “unreliability, unpredictability, and lust” (Kerber Reference Kerber1997, 129, 264). Decades after the Revolution, fathers and husbands retained the legal authority to monitor wives' sexuality.

Men retained patriarchal legal authority, but encountered new expectations about how they should govern subordinates. Boston Mayor Josiah Quincy asserted the full weight of patriarchal authority in the fall of 1823. His administration closed down saloons, dance halls, and brothels. It engaged in mass arrests and prosecutions of prostitutes. Quincy's heavy-handed, law-and-order campaign, mass arrests, and special police court designed to speed up the processing of defendants represented “a radical break with the past.” He generated substantial public opposition, especially among patrons of the institutions he shut down, from citizens forced to shoulder the extra tax burden to pay for expanded detention facilities, and from “powerful prostitution interests,” such as landlords and merchants who profited from the commercial sex trade (Hobson Reference Hobson1990, 11, 14–15, 18, 25). No one questioned Quincy's authority to use government as an instrument for reform, but enough Bostonians questioned his tactics to deny him a second term in office. The exercise of patriarchal authority was acceptable to most citizens, but it had to be applied with a light touch, as exemplified by the new model of the caring family patriarch.

Henceforth, “the figure of the tyrannical parent who too rigorously or irrationally insisted on total obedience became an object of contempt.” The cold husband or powerful father figure was replaced by a “new ideal of paternity” emphasizing a “more sentimentalized” idea of family mastery (Juster Reference Juster1994, 187–88). Lewis sees new family patriarchs as “friendly paternalists who exerted influence in their families by more subtle, psychological means” (Lewis Reference Lewis1987, 165). If friendly paternalists relied mostly on persuasion, then they still retained traditional patriarchal authority. Kathleen Brown warns that “it is a mistake to conclude that paternalistic styles represented a lesser authority than patriarchal ones. . . . [P]aternalism—in the guise of the ideal of domestic tranquility—[is] one face of patriarchy, not a softer replacement of it” (Brown Reference Brown1996, 322–23, 366). This emphasis on friendly paternalism helped to perpetuate patriarchal family governance and reinforced men's authority to monitor the sexual behavior of wives and children.

Fathers' patriarchal authority was tested. Sir Robert Filmer's patriarchal cosmology was discredited during the Revolution; economic trends and geographic mobility weakened paternal control of children, and youths' claims to independence provided ample grounds for contesting fathers' authority (Coontz Reference Coontz1988, 174; Norton Reference Norton1996, 404). Rodney Hessinger (Reference Hessinger2005, 177–78) summarizes the challenge faced by family fathers in the new Republic: “Overthrowing a patriarchal king delegitimized patriarchy in the young country. In addition, fathers had been losing much of their leverage over children as land supplies were depleted by successive partible patrimonies in older village communities. Just as importantly, community churches and courts forsook oversight of courting and sexual behavior, decreasingly punishing the sin of fornication. Declining patriarchal and community control is clearly revealed in the booming rates of pregnancy before marriage in these years.” A dilemma for family patriarchs of the post-Revolution generation was to sustain their authority to guide the younger generation. For Hessinger, “persuasion, rather than coercion, became the main means to direct youth” (2005, 2). Gentler but wiser fathers relied on Lockean education schemes to ensure that children's gratitude, loyalty, cooperation, and obedience endured into adulthood.

Political leaders also relied on culture to reinforce fathers' claim to authority. The emerging middle class identified itself with sexual chastity prior to marriage and sexual fidelity within marriage. Parents, neighbors, ministers, and magistrates urged young people to honor the “chastity ideal” (Hessinger Reference Hessinger2005, 13, 176). “Passionlessness” was a middle-class ideal applied to men and women. Often, however, the ideal was ignored or devalued by undisciplined youths. Parental persuasion and cultural pressure were insufficient to convince many young people to avoid sexual misconduct. Commonly, young men failed to exhibit the rationality associated with manly self-control. And young women regularly fell short of exhibiting female piety and morals. How did elites address the new generation's transgressions? Most politicians did not resign themselves to accepting youths' sexual experiments. Like their forebears, they relied on the patriarchal state to restrict youthful sexual behavior. Foster reminds us that “in colonial America sexual activity was very much a public concern. In fact, it was the business of the state. It was regulated, controlled, discussed, and crafted as part of an effort to create social stability and define racial, class, and gender social boundaries” (Foster Reference Foster2006, ix). State regulation of sexual behavior persisted well beyond the colonial era and the American Revolution.

State officials gradually assumed a greater role in regulating the sexual content of printed matter. Horowitz notes that “[b]y 1819 the legal system had interjected itself into the sexual conversation of the United States. It successfully established that it had the power to set the ground rules for debate and the authority to prosecute, convict, and imprison” (Horowitz Reference Horowitz2003, 44). When judges wanted to set an example, they found old statutes or drew on general nuisance laws to prosecute offenders (see Grisham and Ligan v. The State. 10 Tenn. 589, 1831). Politicians maintained a complicated presence in penalizing sodomy. As Greene explains (2003, 208, 215): “Failing to punish sodomitical offenses, it was believed, threatened to unleash a wave of sexual deviance across the land. Yet punishing sodomy—punishing it, above all, in public—threatened to do much the same thing.” The dilemma was political. How could officials punish the crime without publicizing it in a way that integrated it into the normal sexual repertoire of experimenting youths? Legislators wanted to avoid “mimetic corruption,” whereby talk about transgressive behavior encouraged people to replicate it (Meranze Reference Meranze1996, 8).

MIDDLE-CLASS SEXUAL IDENTITY

The Revolution's emphasis on liberty and virtue had a mixed impact on popular perceptions of sexual behavior. “On the one hand,” writes Godbeer, “young adults appropriated revolutionary rhetoric and its invocation of liberty to justify their insistence upon sexual independence.” Youths left parental homes, congregated in cities, and created urban subcultures that enabled them to experiment with sexual practices and partners. On the other hand, republican ideology demanded civic virtue among the citizenry and, along with Christianity, required that sex be restricted to monogamous marriages and patriarchal families (Godbeer Reference Godbeer2002, 15). This applied to men, whose sexual behavior was “indicative of . . . manly personhood,” and to women, who “represented and guaranteed the fledgling nation's moral integrity” (Foster Reference Foster2006, 178; Godbeer Reference Godbeer2002, 267). An ongoing challenge for civic leaders and politicians was that claims to sexual independence seemed to invite immoralities that threatened to undermine the foundational values of the new Republic.

If traditional patriarchal family order was secure, then fathers and sons would be more likely to invest liberty in virtue. The patriarchal family was the location where boys learned manhood and men exhibited it by governing, provisioning, and protecting dependents, and by assuming the responsibilities of citizenship. It was where women reproduced, nursed and nurtured children, and provided an environment for their upbringing. It was the place where parents prepared the new generation for virtuous, productive, law-abiding lives. This institution seemed to be imperiled by breaches of sexual propriety that threatened family cohesion, integrity, durability, and continuity. Conspicuous sexual misconduct could not be ignored. Norton reports the common belief that “[l]eft unpunished, sexual offenses could . . . shake the very foundations of the commonwealth” (Norton Reference Norton1996, 357). Sexual offenses varied in their manifestations, intensity, and danger. Instances of upper-class sodomy, middle-class fornication, and interracial mixing were not nearly as threatening as middle-class “filth” undermining the educated classes, or lower-class “spectacles” overtly challenging the normalcy of Christian monogamy.

The structure of the patriarchal family order could be stretched—but only so far. The remote family patriarch could be replaced by “the man of feeling” without compromising the integrity of the family or the Republic. Artifacts such as “lascivious pictures,” however, could inflame the lusty feelings of young men and incite them to immoral behavior (Horowitz Reference Horowitz2003, 43; Weyler Reference Weyler2004, 24–25). Reformers saw the specter of “independent female sexuality” as particularly worrisome. It threatened patriarchy by endangering “good order, morality, masculine political authority, and male sexual prerogatives” (Barker-Benfield Reference Barker-Benfield1992, 247–48; Lyons Reference Lyons2006, 390). Novels written for middle-class women “pathologized” their extramarital sexual desire and criticized transgressive female sexuality. The novels drew attention to female sexual misconduct and conceivably aroused in impressionable female readers untapped sexual desire. Many commentators were convinced that it was best to protect the patriarchal family order.

Americans recognized that sexual licentiousness had economic consequences. Premarital pregnancies not followed by marriage created the problem of bastardy. Who was to support illegitimate children? Usually, unwed mothers could not provide sufficient support. Fathers were not easy to identify and not always forthcoming in providing support. Citizens and local officials resented the use of public funds to pay support (Brown Reference Brown1996, 191–92; D'Emilio and Freedman Reference D'Emilio and Freedman1988, 32). Adultery produced inheritance problems. A wife's adulterous behavior could result in a childbirth that created “false claims on patrilineal property” (Ryan Reference Ryan2006, 76). Unless men were fairly certain that their wives' offspring were also their own, the family basis for the smooth transfer of property from one generation to the next was compromised.

Elites feared that a man who could not control sexual desire likely suffered from an inability to control all desire. Thus, “sexuality and criminality were linked” (Williams, Reference Williams and Shuffelton1993a, 196). Those guilty of sexual licentiousness were apt to frequent taverns and brothels known for interclass mixing, drunkenness, gambling, receipt of stolen goods, concealment of offenders, and interracial sex (Godbeer Reference Godbeer2002, 301). Those who consumed printed erotica were linked to “philosophic radicalism, heresy, and subversion” (Horowitz Reference Horowitz2003, 32). Bachelors were “ranked in the same category as suspected criminals.” They might reside in boarding houses known for attracting thieves and prostitutes and for corrupting innocent girls. Single men and women were mostly arrested for vagrancy or disorderly behavior, common-law crimes applied to individuals accused of sexual transgressions (Chudacoff Reference Chudacoff1999, 22, 75–76, 175). Wherever sexual experimentation appeared to be sexual license, respectable Americans and public officials claimed that transgressive misbehavior should be named, condemned, and punished.

The immutable middle-class message was that “the family provided the only acceptable outlet for sex, with the primary goal of producing legitimate children.” Still, this message was not sufficient to motivate all youths to restrain sexual desire. Founders, civic leaders, and politicians harbored deep worries that youths' powerful passion undermined civic order and virtue (D'Emilio and Freedman Reference D'Emilio and Freedman1988, 38, 45). Still, they were reticent to express their fear publicly. In 1831, the Reverend John McDowall published The Magdalen Report, an exposé of prostitution in New York City. Publication resulted in an outcry against the dissemination of sex talk that, critics claimed, had a deleterious effect on women. McDowall discovered that many New Yorkers wanted to silence him rather than address the problem of prostitution (Horowitz Reference Horowitz2003, 148–49). Similarly, middle-class Americans considered same-sex desire immoral and illegal, but shrouded it in an “imperative of silence.” The U.S. Navy sought to resolve all disputes involving homosexuality on board its ships quietly, outside official channels, resulting in “a pattern of intentional ignorance” (Benemann Reference Benemann2006, x, 82). Despite the danger of spreading the practice of sodomy by talking about it, many moralists were convinced that it had to be named and punished publicly: “Only the infliction of shame through the participation of the community as a whole could both prevent and cure this most public of secret crimes” (Greene Reference Greene2003, 218, 224). Periodic anti-vice crusades publicized sexual vices and politicized sexuality by “demanding greater state intervention in the regulation of morality” (D'Emilio and Freedman Reference D'Emilio and Freedman1988, 140).

Foucault recognizes that Victorian sex talk tended to be confined to the privacy of marital homes and “silence became the rule” in polite society. Still, politicians and professionals “dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret.” The implication was that sex was to be discussed behind closed doors but managed by politicians, legislators, judges, and police (Foucault Reference Foucault and Hurley1990, 3, 24, 35). Many politicians did attempt to manage people's sex lives (Brown Reference Brown1996, 196). They believed that marginal people were prone to licentiousness. Local leaders supported selective policing of sex for the lower classes. Standing laws against fornication, adultery, bigamy, rape, and sodomy, usually ignored in instances involving middle-class white men and women, were dusted off and used against members of the “rabble.” While the explicit targets for politicians' overt policing of sex were marginal people, however, their main object may have been to secure the power, identity, and authority of the emerging middle class.

The imprisonment of a lower-class man for rape served a dual purpose. First, it regulated sex among the rabble. Second, it warned middle-class men to exercise sexual self-discipline. Colvin writes (Reference Colvin1997, 81): “The great fear of failure, which motivated the middle class, could only be impressed . . . through extraordinary external measures of coercion. If they could not be persuaded through religious exhortation to embrace self-discipline, then the awesome example presented by the penitentiary would induce fear sufficient enough to at least make them behave as though they had.” The self-proclaimed superiority of the middle class, its productivity, leadership, and authority in society, and its participation in self-government and government of the masses were at stake. Foucault claims that the most refined means for policing sex were meant for the economically privileged and dominant classes. It did not matter much to elites whether marginal people were effectively policed and, for a long time, the lower classes escaped public efforts to control their sexual behavior (Foucault Reference Foucault and Hurley1990, 120–23). The dissemination of the idea that marginal Americans were essentially “promiscuous and depraved” helped to identify, elevate, and consolidate the status and power of the emerging middle class (D'Emilio and Freedman Reference D'Emilio and Freedman1988, xvi). Middle-class membership was not solely a matter of economic status; it was also a matter of demonstrable sexual self-control and social refinement.

This sense of middle-class moral superiority was reinforced by efforts to remove “overt sexuality” from the public sphere. Censorship of reading materials aimed to clean up public discourse. Warnings against such acts as the “secret vice” of masturbation sought to clean up individual behavior (Horowitz Reference Horowitz2003, 8, 86, 92, 107). Middle-class superiority was established by an exclusive ethic of clean sexuality that involved “the practice of continuously monitoring one's passion and actions” (Miller Reference Miller, Daniels and Kennedy1999, 48). The ideal of middle-class passionlessness for women and men stood in sharp contrast to the public image of the impassioned, promiscuous lower classes (D'Emilio and Freedman Reference D'Emilio and Freedman1988, 46, 142). The cleansed identity of middle-class families was reinforced by counterimages of the “Other,” of the “dissolute laborers below” (Gross, in Kerber et al. Reference Kerber, Cott, Gross, Hunt, Smith-Rosenberg and Stansell1989, 575). The white middle class claimed that its members excelled at self-monitoring and self-control, whereas members of the marginal classes suffered from a lack of self-discipline, especially sexual self-discipline (Rupp Reference Rupp1999, 41).

The result was what Clare Lyons calls “a two-tiered system of sexuality.” The top tier consisted of the ideally “virtuous women and virile men” of the middle class. On the bottom tier were the marginal classes with their “lustful, uncontrollable sexuality.” Lower-class men and women were guilty of “intemperance and uncleanliness,” as well as drunkenness and disease (Lyons Reference Lyons2006, 310; Miller Reference Miller, Daniels and Kennedy1999, 56–57). Civic leaders and public officials drew on laws (for example, prohibiting vagrancy, disorderly conduct, and public nuisances), and built institutions (such as hospitals, prisons, asylums, and schools) to identify, punish, and manage lower-class vices, not middle-class transgressions (Lyons Reference Lyons2006, 310, 312, 333, 354, 383; Miller Reference Miller, Daniels and Kennedy1999, 57).

Some middle-class Americans portrayed themselves as exemplars of cleanliness. They promoted an ethic of benevolence to reform marginal individuals guilty of sexual transgressions. They legislated strict laws to prosecute dangerous individuals, but they also supported redemptive penal institutions to cure transgressors and prepare them for free society. Often, their benevolence atrophied in the face of reality. Many reformers developed a fatalistic outlook toward marginal people, whose “passionate natures” prevented them from controlling base impulses. Respectable citizens believed that the lower classes were incorrigibly prone to licentiousness, just as they believed that black men were oversexed brutes (Chudacoff Reference Chudacoff1999, 32; Hatton Reference Hatton, Daniels and Kennedy1999, 129–30; Slotkin Reference Slotkin1973, 26–27). Middle-class moralists stigmatized lower-class women who committed sexual transgressions, which, they claimed, set them on a certain path toward prostitution (Lyons Reference Lyons2006, 312). America's two-tiered system of sexuality legitimized the superiority of the middle classes and the authority of politicians to police the sex lives of marginal people.

CONSENT AND COERCION

A middle class that prided itself on cleanliness did not object to having its leaders police sexual misconduct, especially when misconduct was associated with marginal people. Still, leaders had to overcome the politics of a post-Revolution patriarchal stigma and of public suspicions of government efforts to interfere with individuals' private lives. By what authority did civic leaders and public officials police American sex lives? Certainly they relied on the patriarchal authority claimed by family fathers, town fathers, and political fathers to promote the welfare of those under their jurisdiction. But traditional patriarchy was not enough in a society where liberal norms thrived. Did Americans consent to having their sex lives policed by middle-class, helping organizations and by state and local government officials? Even when benevolent reformers and government officials (often the same people) justified police power on the basis of their common-law responsibility to protect public welfare, consent was still important. Ignatieff explains: “Social order . . . had to be guaranteed by something stronger than a frayed and increasingly hollow paternalism. . . . Social stability had to be founded on popular consent maintained by guilt at the thought of wrongdoing, rather than by deference and fear” (Reference Ignatieff1978, 211). Elites discovered that the concept of consent was pliable. It could partner with coercion or obscure coercion. American leaders proved to be adept at molding consent into a construct that strengthened the public's perception of politicians' legitimate authority to police sex.

Consider a man charged with raping a neighboring woman. Establishing the consent of both partners was his most effective defense. What constituted “consent,” however, was open to interpretation. Contemporaries often understood normal sex to be a battle of wills between appropriately assertive men who initiated sex and ideally modest women who at first resisted male overtures but then accepted them. This understanding “blurred the distinction between voluntary and coercive sex.” Block reports that women “accepted a wide range of forceful sexual relations” as normal; evidence that men used physical coercion was not sufficient to demonstrate a woman's lack of consent (2006, 20, 23). Marietta and Rowe observe, “What would pass as sexual assault today was viewed then as part of the courtship ritual” (2006, 138–39). Coercion and consent complemented each other.

Women's resistance to male passion was commonly interpreted by male politicians and jurors as ruses by sexual temptresses who manipulated men. More benignly, officials interpreted women's resistance as a means to maintain chaste reputations despite their wish to give into male overtures. A woman who said “no” to men did not necessarily mean it, even if she, herself, did not recognize it. Further, respectable society assigned to women the responsibility to restrain male sexuality. When men used force to obtain sex, they were only doing what women implicitly wanted. Block explains: “If women should regulate men's passions, then women were responsible for men whose passions caused them to rape. And if women were believed ruled by the impulses of their own passions, then any sexual encounter might be consensual” (2006, 36–37, 41, 50–51). Women seen as lustful creatures made men's coercion seem like an occasionally necessary means to elicit women's consent. Importantly, it was male politicial officials who interpreted women's underlying nature and the consequent necessity of male coercion.

Community norms also affected the pairing of consent and coercion. Wealthy white men were in a position to repackage coerced sex and give it the appearance of consensual sex. White, elite men “could use the power of their position,” rather than physical coercion to force sex from vulnerable, “economically dependent and racially marginalized women.” White communities typecast black males as inherently sexual creatures. Any black men accused of raping white women elicited among white community members a self-evident sense of black men's guilt. Most white men felt that no white woman would consent to having sex with a black man. Communities that considered particular women to be especially promiscuous denied them the opportunity to refuse sex. These “women could not be trusted to judge or represent their own consent” (Block Reference Block2006, 4, 12–13, 39–40). Dominant community members—men—decided what counted as consent, even when male coercion was present and indisputable.

Many instances of coerced sex went unreported. Women did not report rapes out of shame, fear, and despair. Women who did file rape charges invited public scrutiny of their personal lives and motives, and they faced legal technicalities that conspired to make coerced sex appear consensual (Marietta and Rowe Reference Marietta and Rowe2006, 138–40). Female outsiders, maidservants, and black women who charged white men with rape were unlikely to be taken seriously. Male jurors projected onto these women “a general sexual willingness” that secured their status as consenting sex objects for men (Marietta and Rowe Reference Marietta and Rowe2006, 142–43; Saxton Reference Saxton2003, 119, 152, 208). Where women were viewed as “lusty creatures, barely capable of controlling their own bodily urges,” courts were unlikely to see them as victims of coercion, and juries were unlikely to convict the men who assaulted them (Brown Reference Brown1996, 193). Whole classes of ostensibly licentious women seemed to provide men with an open invitation for sex, and any man who took them up on their offer, even if he had to use coercion, was no sexual criminal. That was the view of the male elites, male lawmakers, male police, male jurors, and male judges who assessed women's credibility and men's behavior.

The pliable use of the concept of consent was embedded in American culture. Reformer Lyman Beecher pointed out that, “[i]n a free government, moral suasion and coercion must be united.” His point was that children should receive a religious education that accustomed them to voluntary subordination to divine rules. But their religious education and voluntary obedience had to be reinforced “by the supervening influence of law” (Beecher in Horowitz Reference Horowitz2006, 44). Consent needed to be supported by coercion. Similarly, writers who encouraged men to steep themselves in a culture of sensibility that valued consent and persuasion over coercion and violence showed little reticence “to double their chances by appealing to coercion as well” (Hessinger Reference Hessinger and Smith1998, 263). Reformers sought consent from clients but also requested assistance from politicians. The threat of government coercion made people's voluntary consent sturdier.

Sometimes, Americans treated coercion as a prerequisite to consent. Parents followed Lockean child-rearing manuals, which suggested that a boy's forced obedience to his parents was a necessary precursor to rational adulthood. Reformers considered it legitimate to use coercion today, including forced institutionalization or imprisonment, to educate or rehabilitate marginal people and gain their retrospective consent tomorrow. And as we have seen, when women were viewed as passionate creatures, male aggression was justified by the common understanding that forcibly breeching women's defenses was necessary in order to bring out women's deeper sexual selves and win their consent. The belief that coercion was necessary to elicit consent was commonplace. In turn, consent was sometimes perceived as a prelude to legitimate coercion. Consent could be understood as a one-time phenomenon. Once given, it was not meant to be reconsidered. After a man and women consented to a marriage contract, for example, the expectation was that they were married until death. Legal norms allowed a married man to wield broad, discretionary authority over his wife. He could use coercion to discipline her. Similarly, a man who gained a woman's consent to have sex once could assume that her consent carried over to his second and third opportunities, even if she changed her mind and resisted later overtures (Cott Reference Cott2000, 3, 11, 17). One-time consent legitimized later coercion.

Did Americans “consent” to have their sex lives policed by government officials? Were they willing to subject their private choices to political scrutiny? Did they rely on the coercive force of government to prevent sexual experimentation from becoming criminal licentiousness? Were the arrest and punishment of sexual criminals a product of popular consent rather than a patriarchal exercise in government coercion? Let me provide two answers. First, “consent” was always a matter of interpretation. When public officials wanted to use the coercive powers of government to police sex, they commonly invoked “consent” to legitimize their actions. In their minds, they were not only securing the community welfare but also doing what the respectable citizenry wanted them to do. Most of the time, the respectable citizenry supported public policing. Second, in the early Republic, citizens' consent to government, especially at the state and local levels, was consent to a mostly patriarchal institution. The precise nature of government's patriarchal authority was shifting. As Cott writes, “In an era when the natural rights of individuals were being heralded, even parental and husbandly authority seemed to require justification other than nature or custom” (2000, 14–15). The legitimacy of patriarchal authority and coercion could be taken for granted, but those who invoked it were subject to scrutiny. The common defense of men who employed police power was to show that their use of coercion was legitimized by consent. Patriarchy adapted to liberal norms and remained hardy, functional, and, in elites' minds, essential to an orderly republic.

STRATEGIC POLICING

The hallmark of patriarchy was discretion. Early American leaders employed discretion to adapt patriarchal authority to emerging liberalism and republicanism. Their reliance on discretion was apparent in the ambiguous laws they used to prosecute sex crimes. They applied vagrancy laws to punish prostitutes and public nuisance laws to close down brothels. As Lyons points out, “Arrests and prosecutions for prostitution were especially chaotic. . . . Some women . . . were picked up only as vagrants and imprisoned for thirty days. . . . Prostitutes who were arrested were rarely brought to trial” (2006, 336). Public women were subject to the discretionary authority of police who could choose to label them as vagrants and arrest them, and of magistrates who could summarily imprison them. One advantage of charging prostitutes with vagrancy was that it required no evidentiary proof in court. A vagrancy arrest was a convenient way for officials to get a woman shown to be ungovernable off of the streets and subject to governing authority. These vague, discretionary laws remained common in the United States into the twentieth century (Dubber Reference Dubber2005, 125; see also pp. 51, 143).

The main basis for policing brothels was the “public nuisance law,” what Novak calls “one of the most potent regulatory weapons in the common law arsenal, subjecting an offender to bold public remedies.” He adds that “the disorderly house was a paradigmatic case of nuisance” (Novak Reference Novak1996, 158). The common law, statutes, and city charters authorized officials “to restrain and prohibit tippling houses, gaming houses, bawdy houses” (City St. Louis v. Smith. 2 Mo. 113, 1829). Judges in Maine listed “stages for rope-dancing, for mountebanks, gaming houses and bawdy-houses” as indisputably injurious to the community (State v. Dudley L. Haines. 30 Me. 65, 1849). North Carolina courts condemned brothels for attracting “persons of lewd conversation and demeanor to frequent and come together, and . . . there to remain drinking, whoring, cursing, swearing and misbehaving themselves, to the great damage and common nuisance of all the good citizens.” Making matters worse, “a bawdy house was of criminal cognizance at common-law” because “the public peace was endangered by drawing together crowds of dissolute, debauched and quarrelsome persons. . . . A bawdy house is not the habitation of one lewd woman, but the common habitation of prostitutes—a brothel” (State v. Augusta Evans. 27 N.C. 603, 1845). North Carolina justices believed that the most serious threat was the sheer magnetism of the brothel, which attracted crowds that disturbed and destroyed the public peace and corrupted the citizenry. Kentucky officials focused in on the “habitual perpetration of the prohibited offences” that made brothels more worrisome than isolated instances of fornication or adultery (Smith v. Commonwealth. 45 Ky. 21, 1845; see also Commonwealth v. Willard. 39 Mass. 476, 1839). The proof needed for closing down brothels was minimal. The crime of keeping a bawdy house, “which being of a general nature, and made up of acts at different times and places, are not required to be set out with so much certainty” (Commonwealth v. Stewart. 1 Serg. & Rawle 342, PA, 1815). Regarding customers, the “open, public and notorious” frequenting of a bawdy house was indictable as a public nuisance (Hutchison v. The State. 24 Tenn. 142, 1844).

Tomlins notes that “the discourse of police” emphasized republican values as well as liberal rights; it underscored an older idiom of community “peace and unity” as well as “safety and happiness” (Tomlins Reference Tomlins1993, 58–59). That communal identity, peace and unity, and safety and happiness were sustained by the ongoing conviction of civic leaders and public officials that the patriarchal family and its culture of restricted, legitimate sexuality needed to be honored and protected with support from laws and courts. Leaders also had, at the very least, the tacit consent of a middle class that refused to defend or condone sexual misconduct. Most important, they had direct access to sufficient patriarchal power and discretion to police sex in America.

Officials had the undisputed authority to police sex, but they often chose not to use it. They sometimes tolerated sexual misconduct. Despite contrary sex norms and punitive laws, for example, men conducted discreet same-sex relationships without necessarily suffering abuse from neighbors or prosecution by magistrates (Benemann Reference Benemann2006, 267; Godbeer Reference Godbeer2002, 44). Sex across the color line was outlawed, but it was regularly “tolerated and accommodated” when mixed-race couples adhered to norms of family life (Rothman Reference Rothman2003, 4–5). Masturbation, fornication, adultery, and bigamy were widespread but widely ignored by neighbors and officials when participants did not make spectacles of themselves. Discreet prostitutes could ply the sex trade with little fear of legal consequences. They did have to sacrifice some prudence in order to advertise their services. Attempts to gain publicity by means of street walking or window displays attracted not only customers but also unwanted attention from neighbors and law-enforcement officials (Rothman Reference Rothman2003, 104). Still, the chance that they would be indicted was small, the likelihood of their conviction was minimal, and any punishment they might receive was mild and brief.

Why did citizens and authorities exhibit so much tolerance for transgressive sexual practices? Most civic leaders and public officials gave higher priority to the maintenance of social stability amid the uncertainties and instabilities of the post-Revolution years. That might require them to ignore sexual transgressions, such as bigamy, in the interest of maintaining peaceable neighborhoods. Even when sexual misconduct was an “open secret”—known but not discussed—leaders preferred people to adhere to a “cultural code of public silence” than to force the issue, publicize it, and thereby politicize it. Sometimes, authorities felt compelled to tolerate sexual misconduct. In a city like Richmond, Virginia, with a multiracial workforce, for example, it was impractical if not impossible for officials to police multiracial sex. Further, prostitution was integrated into local economies, and efforts to eradicate it might have caused economic hardship for many people, including politically powerful citizens. Rothman explains: “Money spent at brothels on alcohol, food, and prostitutes by local residents or by sailors and other visitors remained in circulation in Richmond, and nighttime illegalities boosted profits that kept businesses open during the day” (2003, 6, 31, 94). Tolerance was not simply a matter of liberality; it was also a matter of economic profitability and political necessity. Unlike Boston's Mayor Josiah Quincy, Richmond politicians showed a lighter touch. They focused on “controlling and containing” sexual misbehavior, rather than on attacking it or trying to eradicate it (Rothman Reference Rothman2003, 111; see also Friedman Reference Friedman1993, 127, 129–30).

The “trend of declining patriarchy” in politics, the “revolution against patriarchal authority” in families and schools, and the cultural ideal of “the self-made man” did not prevent local efforts to police people's sexual behavior. The legitimacy of sexual policing did not diminish (Connell Reference Connell1995, 226; Hessinger Reference Hessinger2005, 27, 73, 126). Old laws regulating sexual behavior remained on the books, and common-law policing of sex remained an accessible option for law enforcement. What changed after the Revolution were patterns of enforcement and punishments. Judges and juries spent little time prosecuting unmarried men for fornication but continued to regulate men's behavior during courtship (Bloch Reference Bloch2003, 90). Meanwhile, women's sexual behavior remained fully within the scope of patriarchal regulation by fathers, husbands, politicians, and police. Men seldom faced charges of fornication, but “unwed mothers were still subject to criminal prosecution, public shame, and the burden of supporting illegitimate offspring” (Ryan Reference Ryan2006, 86). Patriarchal authority over men's sex lives became more limited, but men's patriarchal authority over women's sex lives remained unchallenged and mostly unchanged.

The American consensus on sex was stable. Legitimate sex was reserved exclusively for married Christian couples. Laws supported and reinforced this ideal, and public officials maintained the authority to police sexual language and behavior that fell outside accepted boundaries. At the same time, however, Americans and their leaders understood and largely accepted the reality that sex could not be, and would not be, reserved solely for married couples. At best, sexual language and conduct could be managed, not repressed. Patriarchy persisted in families, society, and politics, and patriarchal authority had continuing influence, especially in policing women's nonmarital sex lives.

POLICING SEX AS A PRECEDENT

Since the early Republic, youths continued their sexual experiments and politicians continued to regulate people's sex lives. In the later nineteenth century, local elites' policing of sex served as a precedent for federal efforts to reform Americans' sexual activities. The 1870s witnessed the passage of the federal Comstock Act, which was quickly reproduced in laws passed in 24 states. The Comstock laws banned the sending of “obscene, lewd, and/or lascivious” materials through the mails. They restricted the distribution of information, devices, and drugs related to contraception and abortion. The laws invited moral crusades to discipline American sexuality and fostered ongoing intellectual and political debates by judges and justices to define obscenity, identify pornography, and draw a clear line between sexual devices and medical devices. The idea that legislatures and courts should be involved in setting acceptable standards for sex talk and activity was taken for granted.

Today, politicians sponsor laws to strengthen and refine the patriarchal policing of sex in the United States. State politicians legislate the age of consent to have sex, the minimum age below which a person is not legally allowed to have sex, and the prohibited age differential between youthful sexual partners. Some jurisdictions forbid all sexual activity outside of marriage, restrict allowable sex acts, and detail acceptable authority relationships between sex partners. Many states label violators of sex-related laws as sex offenders after they have been convicted of crimes such as sexual battery, sexual abuse of children, and public exhibitionism. State laws require them to register their sex-offender status and residential address with their current jurisdiction, and some jurisdictions publish sex-offender information to alert neighbors. Politicians are especially keen to manage the sex lives of minors below the age of consent, for example, by outlawing the illicit watching of sex, sexual activity with relatives, and “harrassment, nuisance, fear, injury, and assault of a sexual nature.” Most states criminalize sexual activities such as rape, sexual assault, sexual abuse, child sexual abuse, statutory rape, spousal rape, obscenity, human trafficking, exhibitionism, voyeurism, incest, sexual harrassment, polygamy, prostitution, pimping, sex with animals, ownership of sex toys, public urination, streaking, and stealing underwear. The state of Kansas lists some 25 separate sex offenses, along with varying degrees of infractions and punishments. The offenses range from adultery, a Class C misdemeanor, to enticement of a child to commit an unlawful sex act, a Class D felony (Kansas Statutes: Article 35-Sex Offenses, available at: http://www.lectlaw.com/sex07.htm). Both local and federal officials have now assumed the patriarchal authority to police sex in America.

The main similarity across time is that, today, most Americans still do not feel particularly strongly about the patriarchal policing of sex in America. “We the People” exhibit remarkable tolerance for individuals who quietly practice diverse sexual preferences. Consider the long-standing sex crime of sodomy, which Puritans considered an “abomination” punishable by hanging. Prior to 1962, sodomy was a felony in every state “punished by a lengthy term of imprisonment and/or hard labor” (“Sodomy Law,” in Wikipedia). Beginning with Illinois in 1962, individual states began to remove consensual sodomy from their criminal codes. More states followed suit by decriminalizing sodomy or reducing its penalties. By 2002, some 36 states had eliminated sodomy laws and the others rarely enforced them. It was only slightly surprising when, in 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Lawrence v. Texas that intimate sexual conduct between consenting, same-sex adults is part of the liberty protected by substantive due process under the Fourteenth Amendment. The Lawrence decision invalidated state laws that criminalized sodomy between consenting adults (Lawrence v. Texas 539 U.S. 558, 2003).

This debate has now shifted away from whether sodomy should be criminalized to whether gay and lesbian couples have rights to civil unions and/or marriages. The outcome of the debate is uncertain. We do know, however, that it will be segments of our governments and their officials—politicians, judges, and bureaucrats at the state and federal levels—that will exhibit elites' ongoing commitment to the patriarchal policing of sex by deciding and administering the intimate rights and marital choices of gay and lesbian Americans. This is only the most recent evidence that elites' application of patriarchal authority over citizens' sexual choices and behavior persists in a nation otherwise noted for its commitment to individual rights, its ongoing support for civic virtue, and its opposition to government intervention into people's private lives.