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The University of North Carolina Press
432 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 15 illus., 29 tables, 2 figs., 2 maps, append., notes, bibl., index
Published: February 2006
An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730-1830
2007 James Broussard Best First Book Prize, Society for Historians of the Early American Republic
Placing sexual culture at the center of power relations in Revolutionary-era Philadelphia, Clare A. Lyons uncovers a world where runaway wives challenged their husbands' patriarchal rights and where serial and casual sexual relationships were commonplace. By reading popular representations of sex against actual behavior, Lyons 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. Lyons shows that 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, Lyons argues, by creating a gender system that simultaneously 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.
"This fascinating and well-written book describes the making of a 'vibrant pleasure culture' in Philadelphia. . . . Lyons tells a rich story, one full of surprises. . . . An intriguing book that merits a wide audience."
--American Historical Review
"Lyons skillfully crafts a book exploring the evolution of power in colonial and early American Philadelphia. . . . [Sex Among the Rabble] includes both a convincing thesis and compelling stories." "Clare Lyons has given us a book that has awaited its author for many decades "No summary of Lyons' argument can communicate the richness of her data or the subtlety with which she wields it." "Lyons has given us a book that has awaited its author for many decades "Lyons's provocative study illuminates a surprising post-Revolutionary world of sexual license in which the old rules have broken down and new individualist behaviors have arisen in their place. But the heyday of the lusty woman . . . was to be short-lived, subdued by the reassertion of sexual order through a redefinition of normative female sexuality."
--Teaching History
--about sex and the city. The book is full of surprises, brims over with a brilliant fusion of social, cultural, and intellectual history, and builds a major thesis
--Journal of American History
--about sex and the city. The book . . . brims over with a brilliant fusion of social, cultural, and intellectual history, and builds a major thesis
--Kathleen M. Brown, University of Pennsylvania
Cloth: $55.00
Paper: $22.50
© 2007 The University of North Carolina Press
116 South Boundary Street, Chapel Hill, NC 27514-3808
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