UNC Press - Sex among the Rabble

432 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 15 illus., 29 tables, 2 figs., 2 maps, appends., notes, bibl., index

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

Cloth

ISBN 978-0-8078-3004-8

Published: February 2006

Paper

ISBN 978-0-8078-5675-8

Published: February 2006

Sex among the Rabble

An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730-1830

By Clare A. Lyons

Awards & Distinctions

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.

About the Author

Clare A. Lyons is associate professor of history at the University of Maryland.

Reviews

"No summary of Lyons' argument can communicate the richness of her data or the subtlety with which she wields it."
--Journal of American History

"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

"An impressive scholarly accomplishment. . . . So engaging and intriguing that, after four hundred pages, the reader wants more."
--Historian

"Masters the unstable terrain of sexualities and power relations, and gives readers a new, compelling, and politically significant way to understand the transformations underway in the age of revolutions."
--Journal of the Early Republic

"[A] bold, wide-ranging, and deeply researched book. . . . Refreshingly, it places at the center of analysis the issues of desire and pleasure. . . . The heroes of this book are lusty women shaping their own destinies, satisfying their desires, and pursuing sexual pleasure. . . . Placing provocative interpretations on the table, [it] succeeds admirably."
--Journal of Interdisciplinary History

"Summarizing this book does not do justice to its rich detail, attention to race and class, effort to link culture and practice, and fine writing. The amount and quality of information is staggering. . . . With abounding detail it unearths valuable material."
--William and Mary Quarterly