Sex among the rabble : an intimate history of gender & power in the age of revolution, Philadelphia, 1730-1830 / Clare A. Lyons.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lyons, Clare A., author.

Series:

Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Sex--Pennsylvania--Philadelphia--History.

Sex.

Sex role--Pennsylvania--Philadelphia--History.

Sex role.

Marginality, Social--Pennsylvania--Philadelphia--History.

Marginality, Social.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (433 p.)

Place of Publication:

Chapel Hill, [North Carolina] : Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Placing sexual culture at the center of power relations in Revolutionary-era Philadelphia, Clare Lyons uncovers a world where runaway wives challenged their husbands' patriarchal rights and where serial and casual sexual relationships were commonplace. Reading popular representations of sex against actual behavior reveals the clash of meanings given to sex and illuminates struggles to recast sexuality in order to eliminate its subversive potential.Sexuality became the vehicle for exploring currents of liberty, freedom, and individualism in the politics of everyday life among groups of early Americans typically excluded from formal systems of governance--women, African Americans, and poor classes of whites. Men and women created a vibrant urban pleasure culture, including the eroticization of print culture, as eighteenth-century readers became fascinated with stories of bastardy, prostitution, seduction, and adultery. In the post-Revolutionary reaction, white middle-class men asserted their authority by creating a gender system that allowed them the liberty of their passions, constrained middle-class women with virtue, and projected licentiousness onto lower-class whites and African Americans.Lyons's analysis shows how class and racial divisions fostered new constructions of sexuality that served as a foundation for gender. This gendering of sexuality in the new nation was integral to reconstituting social hierarchies and subordinating women and African Americans in the wake of the Revolution.

Contents:

The sexual terrain of colonial and revolutionary Philadelphia

A springboard to revolution : runaway wives and self-divorce

The fruits of nonmarital unions : sex in the urban pleasure culture

The pleasures and powers of reading : eroticization of popular print and discursive interpretations of sex

Sex in the city in the age of democratic revolutions

To be "free and independent" : sex among the revolutionary rabble

Sex and the politics of gender in the age of revolution

Normalizing sex in the nineteenth century : the assault on nonmarital sexuality

Through our bodies : prostitution and the cultural reconstruction of nonmarital sexuality

Through our souls : the benevolent reform of sexual transgressors

Through our children : bastardy comes under attack.

Notes:

Includes index.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [405]-406) and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

979-88-908780-4-5

979-88-908780-5-2

0-8078-3896-9

1-4696-0100-1

OCLC:

966761945