How sexually promiscuous were young people in America in the 1700s and 1800s, compared to today?

by booty_p

It seems to be commonly explained that modern attitudes towards premarital sex and sexual liberation are development of recent decades. Is this actually true? Were teenagers and young adults having sexual relationships like we see today?

mimicofmodes

There's always more to be said, but you may be interested in this answer I wrote in response to the question, In Hamilton, in the song A Winter's Ball, Burr says "so many ladies to deflower." How common was premarital sex in the colonies??

Premarital sex, and more particularly pregnancy out of wedlock, had been a public concern in Anglo-American society since the Puritans got a shock when they landed on Plymouth Rock. It had been a long-standing tradition in England that engaged couples could have sex before the wedding (I go into that in more detail here), largely due to the common-law tradition that a marriage only required consent of the marrying, rather than witnesses or a priest, but in the late sixteenth century church weddings were becoming more common. By the early seventeenth century moral reformers were attempting to stamp it out and the average person's mindset was beginning to incline that way, making the church ceremony paramount in transforming the sin of fornication into an acceptable, loving/reproductive activity - and, of course, this crossed the Atlantic with those hardcore moral reform-loving invaders, the Pilgrims.

Between this stigma and the lack of written material documenting everyday life, little was recorded about premarital sexual relations in and of themselves, and we generally have to look at births as a proxy for rough statistics. There are illegitimate births, of course, and then premarital or bridal pregnancy - children conceived before parents were married. This can be found in church records, since if a child was born and baptized within 8 months of its parents' marriage, it was probably the result of premarital sex. We see a rise in both of these proxies through the second half of the eighteenth century, as well as a decline in prosecutions against married couples that had a baby a few months after the wedding, indicating that the stigma was lessening. By the time of the Revolution, some New England towns saw 30-40% of brides go to the altar pregnant, in comparison to 19% in the 1690s. And, obviously, since sex does not always result in pregnancy, it's likely that more than 30-40% were actually sleeping together during the engagement.

Social changes were brewing over the same half-century that helped create this trend. The seventeenth-century ideal of a home with stern, disciplinarian parents who kept youths quiet and obedient gave way to a more reciprocally affectionate one, where children were given more freedom - even in sexual matters. Rural, non-elite parents became more likely to allow unmarried sons and daughters to engage in sexual activity in the family home, in an "if you're going to do it, I'd rather have you do it where I can keep an eye on you" sort of way, though there was clearly a public option as well: mid-eighteenth century pastors complained about young people's "night-walking" and "frolicking", young men's "impudence" and "shamelessness" with young women, and both genders "getting together in companies for mirth". "Bundling", courting couples sleeping non-sexually (... that was the intent, anyway) in the same bed while partially or fully clothed, was common throughout the colonies by the time of the Revolution, astonishing foreign visitors. Townsfolk might gossip a bit about bundling happening with casual, non-courting couples, but it does not seem to have really affected the girls' reputations. By this time, bawdy talk was normalized in public discourse, printed in almanacs and newspapers in titillating stories about men's and women's sexual misbehavior.

While New England churches continued to require married congregants to confess to premarital sex when questioned and to at least convincingly seem to repent, and carefully examined children born less than nine months into a marriage who were claimed to be premature, late eighteenth century courts were loosening up, less likely to prosecute married couples who'd had a bridal pregnancy or to just give them a slap on the wrist. That being said, both the churches and the courts continued to go after unwed mothers with illegitimate children quite strenuously - these children not only represented giving in to illicit, sinful lusts, but were the financial responsibility of the local authorities unless their fathers could be credibly named. Many unwed mothers actually wanted the prosecution, since it could force the father to step up, either at the court's order or to settle out of court. (Another reason parents were allowing sweethearts to hook up at home was so they could bear witness, if it came to that, as to who exactly had fathered their illegitimate grandchild.) These cases, however, were being handled in a more and more private fashion, avoiding the public shaming that was a common social tool a century earlier.

Elite and affluent women did not tend to participate in bundling culture to the same degree - they needed to prove that they would remain sexually continent in the future, ensuring that their children were their husbands', and while we do find them sometimes appearing in records of paternity suits, these mostly reflect the rural, farming population of the colonies and early United States. In the social context of "A Winter's Ball", Hamilton would have had to be extremely charming, clever, and lucky to end up having sex with any virginal young women invited to the party.

On the other hand, the stereotypical elite/affluent young man sowing his oats among women of lower social status, as depicted in much of the "seduction literature" popular in the second half of the century, was sometimes a problem. In these cases, marriage to the father of the illegitimate child was unlikely (and the idea mocked among elite society), and the woman would generally have to be satisfied with a financial settlement and, hopefully, a speedy marriage to someone else: being completely abandoned by one's child's father was considered shameful and degrading to the extreme.

For a more thorough discussion of early American sexual/courtship practices, I would recommend The Sexual Revolution in Early America, by Richard Godbeer (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), my main source on the topic.

In the decades following the revolution, this bawdy society was changing. I've written more about the turn toward "refinement" here.