Taming Passion for the Public Good
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Taming Passion for the Public Good

Policing Sex in the Early Republic

Mark E. Kann

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Taming Passion for the Public Good

Policing Sex in the Early Republic

Mark E. Kann

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About This Book

“Kann's latest tour de force explores the ambivalence, during the founding of our nation, about whether political freedom should augur sexual freedom. Tracing the roots of patriarchal sexual repression back to revolutionary America, Kann asks highly contemporary questions about the boundaries between public and private life, suggesting, provocatively, that political and sexual freedom should go hand in hand. This is a must-read for those interested in the interwining of politics, public life, and sexuality.” —Ben Agger, University of Texas at Arlington The American Revolution was fought in the name of liberty. In popular imagination, the Revolution stands for the triumph of populism and the death of patriarchal elites. But this is not the case, argues Mark E. Kann. Rather, in the aftermath of the Revolution, America developed a society and system of laws that kept patriarchal authority alive and well—especially when it came to the sex lives of citizens. In Taming Passion for the Public Good,Kann contends that that despite therhetoric of classical liberalism, the founding generation did not trust ordinary citizens with extensive liberty. Through the policing of sex, elites sought to maintain control of individuals' private lives, ensuring that citizens would be productive, moral, and orderly in the new nation. New American elites applauded traditional marriages in which men were the public face of the family and women managed the home. They frowned on interracial and interclass sexual unions. They saw masturbation as evidence of a lack of self-control over one’s passions, and they considered prostitution the result of aggressive female sexuality. Both were punishable offenses. By seeking to police sex, elites were able to keep alive what Kann calls a “resilient patriarchy.” Under the guise of paternalism, they were able simultaneously to retain social control while espousing liberal principles, with the goal of ultimately molding the country into the new American ideal: a moral and orderly citizenry that voluntarily did what was best for the public good.

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Publisher
NYU Press
Year
2013
ISBN
9780814764671

1
In the Shadow of Patriarchal Authority

This book tells the story of how American leaders were able to conserve, legitimize, and perpetuate patriarchal authority over the sex lives of the first few generations of Americans to reside in a newly emergent liberal society. America’s early elites rejected the rule of English kings and transformed the nation into a liberal society of rights-bearing citizens who consented to limited, lawful government.1 An important litmus test of elites’ patriarchal authority and police power was their ability to regulate the most intimate aspects of citizens’ private lives, including their sexual language, behavior, and partners, without provoking widespread citizen anger, protest, or rebellion. The new nation’s political father figures retained virtually uncontested legitimacy and power to regulate the terms of citizens’ marital relations as well as their nonmarital sexual experiments, regardless of the widespread rhetoric of liberty and the robust growth of individualism. In the process, they succeeded in reconciling core aspects of traditional patriarchal authority and the new liberalism.
Patriarchy meant the government of fathers. In ancient Greece and Rome, the patriarch, or male head of household, was believed to have the “natural” authority to make all final family decisions. Families included a number of dependents: wives, children, relatives, servants, and slaves. Although philosophers and politicians debated the limited or unlimited nature of the family patriarch’s authority, they agreed that he was the one who set the rules for family life, enforced them, and disciplined and punished family members for infractions. To assert patriarchal authority was to control and police family members. However, the family patriarch did not govern arbitrarily. His main obligation was to foster the welfare of the family, to protect it from internal strife, and to fend off external threats to it by any means necessary. He had extensive discretion. The main restraint on his governing powers was the common expectation that he would use his extensive discretion for the good of his household rather than as a tool of selfishness, malice, or vengeance.2
Western political theory offered two main ways by which family fathers’ patriarchal authority could be transformed into ruling monarchs’ political authority. Moral patriarchalism was based on the premise that political authority belonged to the original generation of fathers, beginning with the biblical Adam. The original fathers then bequeathed to their sons the right to govern their families and family members. Authority passed by inheritance from fathers to sons. In time, families expanded into larger entities, and new generations of youths became patriarchs who inherited authority and exercised it over the members of their extended families; and those extended families eventually developed into larger political entities such as commonwealths and kingdoms. At this point, fathers became political rulers or kings. Sir Robert Filmer made the most well-known argument for moral patriarchalism in his classic Patriarcha, or the Natural Power of Kings. A second way by which fathers’ patriarchal authority was transformed into political authority was ideological patriarchalism. Historically, male individuals adopted the language, symbols, and images of fatherhood as their means to lay claim to political authority. Teachers, masters, employers, and magistrates regularly assumed the role of fathers, portrayed themselves as fathers, acted as fathers, and sought to parlay people’s natural loyalty to their family fathers into citizens’ devotion and obedience to civic fathers and political fathers.3 These men emphasized patriarchal values such as tradition, hierarchy, discretion, and welfare. Although this second pathway to political authority lacked the moral logic and weight of the first, it was much more flexible and often far more persuasive than authority claims founded on inheritance.
Seventeenth-century social contract theories, especially John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, disputed the legitimacy of Filmer’s moral patriarchaliam. Locke argued that the natural authority of family fathers did not transfer to political rulers. Fathers and their adult sons were politically free and equal. Fathers and their adult sons had natural rights. Young men might remain loyal to their fathers and even remain obedient to them, but the young men had no natural obligation to obey their fathers indefinitely. According to Locke’s theory, all adult males sought to protect their rights by conceiving and consenting to a limited government that would maintain order and settle disputes peacefully. The convention of consent, not inheritance, legitimized political authority, and the defense of adult males’ rights was the main justification for (and limit to) the exercise of political authority. In late eighteenth-century America, social contract theories served as the intellectual foundation for an emerging liberalism that emphasized individual rights, private property, a free-market economy, limited constitutional government, and the rule of law. Liberalism discredited Filmer’s ideas, rapidly gained ground at the expense of moral patriarchalism, and dealt a severe blow to people’s acceptance of patriarchal values, reasoning, and institutions.
Nevertheless, important aspects of ideological patriarchalism persisted even where liberalism thrived. For example, the liberal idea that all men were political equals was counterweighed by the patriarchal belief that particularly “masculine” men had a natural ability, if not a natural authority, to govern other men and all women. R. W. Connell suggests that modern male hierarchies developed with three main elements: “hegemonic masculinity, conservative masculinities (complicit in the collective project but not its shock troops), and subordinated masculinities.”4 Even where hereditary kings were replaced by elected parliaments or congresses, at least a few powerful men (natural aristocrats?) continued informally to proclaim their dominion and succeeded in getting other men to recognize, respect, and obey it. Liberal equality did not replace, neutralize, or eliminate patriarchal pecking orders. Second, the liberal social contract left intact the domination of men over women. Carole Pateman argues that an implicit “sexual contract” preceded the social contract.5 The sexual contract was an informal agreement among men to maintain male authority over all women. Male thinkers were convinced that women were deficient in the qualities necessary for granting consent and exercising independent citizenship. Only after women were sequestered and subordinated in patriarchal households did male theorists make their case for a social contract that contested the patriarchal authority of kings and sought to replace it with a fraternal society—a liberal male society in which equal rights and limited government constituted the bases for citizen interactions. Additionally, Anglo-American jurisprudence contained common-law guarantees for husbands’ authority over their family members and, equally significant, for governments’ patriarchal authority to intervene in society to ensure “the due regulation and domestic order of the kingdom.” English legal scholar Sir William Blackstone explained that “the individuals of the state, like members of a well-governed family, are bound to conform their general behavior to the rules of propriety, good neighborhood, and good manners; and to be decent, industrious, and inoffensive in their respective stations.”6 When citizens failed to conform to the norms of good behavior, political officials had a patriarchal duty to use their discretion to police citizens and to intervene in their lives in the cause of restoring good order. Officials had the authority to invoke this duty to regulate any and all aspects of people’s lives, as we shall see, including their sex lives.
Did American revolutionaries and their successor generations reject patriarchal authority? The answer depends on how one understands patriarchal authority. Does it refer to the government of hereditary kings over subordinated subjects? Or does it denote the rule of hegemonic men over subordinated men, the dominance of males over females, and the intervention by public officials in the lives of citizens to ensure their welfare? Clearly, the American Revolution was “antipatriarchal” in several senses.7 Historians point to the weakening of family fathers’ powers over their wives and offspring. They count Americans’ defeat of the English monarchy as a blow to patriarchal authority. Simultaneously, they highlight the spread of liberal norms and institutions that emphasize liberty, equality, and opportunity in opposition to patriarchal inheritance, hierarchy, and deference. Many historians detect traces of postrevolutionary patriarchal authority, but they mostly treat these phenomena as secondary matters, as vestiges of a disappearing past or perhaps as anomalies likely to suffer extinction in the foreseeable future. Occasionally, they characterize residual evidence of patriarchal authority as the inevitable reaction to change by old elites and vested interests defending their established power bases. Overall, I believe it is fair to say that American historians who study the early national period prefer to identify patriarchal authority with the receding past and liberal values with the progressive future. Their overall view is that patriarchy was not fully vanquished in early national America, but it was dealt a crippling blow.
Some historians, however, are reticent to declare the defeat or even the significant weakening of patriarchal authority, values, and practices. Scholars interested in gender, especially feminist historians, may see little change in patterns of male domination (over lower-status men and women) or relevant laws (such as “coverture”). Similarly, scholars focused on subnational governments (e.g., states, cities, etc.) remark that American civic leaders and political officials showed little concern for liberal individual rights and limited government when confronting issues crucial to local community welfare. They report that early liberalism did not necesarily guarantee individual liberty. Rather, local public officials exercised discretionary police power to administer, legislate, and adjudicate in the service of the common good of the people. The rise of liberalism notwithstanding, these analysts portray patriarchal authority as an ongoing force and often-used justification for the elite decision-making that persisted for decades, even centuries, following the American Revolution.
Thaddeus Russell argues that the resiliency of patriarchal authority is evident in the behavior of those American “renegades” who defied it. They were the “bad” people who ignored and resisted the rules of “propriety, good neighborhood, and good manners.” They were the young people who did not give much thought to conforming their behavior to what was considered “decent, industrious, and inoffensive.” They were folks who would “drink, sing, dance, have sex, argue politics, gamble, play games, or generally carouse with men, women, children, whites, blacks, Indians, the rich, the poor, and the middling” on the streets and street corners of urban America. Their ranks included numerous white women who felt free to leave their husbands at will as well as white prostitutes who felt free to cross the color line without hesitation and to socialize with black men without concern for social gossip or stigma. Early national elites were painfully aware of these individuals, who rejected virtually all manifestations of authority and who assumed that liberty and license were identical.8 Elites wanted to accumulate and perpetuate sufficient political authority to control these disruptive folks, to reform their disorderly tendencies, and to put them on a path back to good citizenship.
Especially when it came to issues involving sexual behavior, primarily local civic leaders and political elites confronted the challenge of (1) reconciling patriarchal authority and emerging liberalism and (2) deciding whether to deploy patriarchal authority to regulate the language, behavior, and liaisons of citizens. Many local influentials and public officials laid claim to the patriarchal authority to police people’s sex lives. Upper-status, elite men in cities and villages across America perceived a significant post-Revolution need to regulate and tame people’s passions. They deployed both cultural and legal leverage to achieve their ends. Remarkably, elites showed considerable circumspection when actually applying the power of culture and the power of the state to monitor and regulate people’s sex lives. Moreover, their relatively modest efforts encountered little citizen opposition, despite the fact that postrevolutionary American society expressed liberal political ideals, engaged in ubiquitous democratic discourse, and both resented and opposed outside intervention in their lives. The timing was no coincidence. Colonial leaders had relied on the patriarchal authority of family fathers, community leaders, church officials, and local magistrates to tame people’s appetites. Now, many of the new nation’s leaders believed that a steady dose of patriarchal authority was still necessary, perhaps more so than ever, to counteract the excessive passions that had been unleashed during the revolutionary struggle and the creation of the new nation. Within this context, local elites considered sexual promiscuity to be a significant manifestation of those excessive passions, especially among urban youths, the lower classes, recent immigrants, and free blacks and slaves. Elites’ common view was that some sort of patriarchal authority needed to be deployed to tame people’s passion and to restrain desires that often generated disorderly and criminal behavior.
Elites’ common view was born of conservative fears that stood at the heart of emerging liberalism. Liberalism was marked by incredible optimism about individuals and their future potential. It emphasized the new American ideal of the “autonomous individual,” individuals’ efforts at “self-making,” and “man standing alone” as a new model for masculinity.9 Americans increasingly converted their families from institutions for the transmittal of intergenerational property into institutions for fostering independence in children (rather than simply demanding blind obedience from them). Widespread mobility shredded old community ties, and the proliferation of benevolent reform and voluntary institutions suggested that “uncoerced cooperation and voluntary efforts could do the work of central government and established churches.”10 A surge in private enterprise and new careers “laid the material footings” for a new kind of United States where morality was mostly a matter of personal autonomy and freedom of association rather than of deference, hierarchy, and other patriarchal values.11 Henceforth, “the animated world of voluntary action, self-improvement, and social betterment undertaken by the novices and amateurs who shaped American public life” stood ready to “supply with persuasion the deficit of coercion” that was a byproduct of liberalism.12 Evangelicalism emphasized “disciplined lives and self-mastery,” a rather “austere morality” consistent with individual enterprise. The new assertive citizen did not mind or resist or evade work. Labor was no longer seen as necessary drudgery but more as an opportunity for inventiveness, self-improvement, and especially “progress.” For Joyce Appleby, “What in an aristocratic society announced the badge of servility, democratic enthusiasts elevated to personal achievement.”13 The model American citizen became “the assertive individual” required by liberalism rather than the “model citizen of deferential politics” who fit snuggly into patriarchal families and politics.14
Common views of women were adjusted to harmonize with this new liberal paradigm. No longer presumed to be the lustful and seductive creatures of the eighteenth century, middle-class women in the nineteenth century were identified with “piety and moral virtue.” They were protected by religion from the lusts of men, and they were duty bound to “cling to religion” as their main safeguard against vice.15 Furthermore, women were fit for benevolent activities, making their marks on the world and leaving it a better place than they found it. Motherhood was not the only pathway to public good.
Appleby reminds us that the emergence of liberalism as an extremely optimistic philosophy of social progress was attended by “conservative worries about maintaining order.” She insists, however, that these worries did not generate efforts by the church and state to serve as “watchful censors of staid communities.” Patriarchal institutions did not enforce personal morals.16 Sheldon Wolin provides a different perspective on the conservative worries that haunted the leaders of the founding generation. For him, liberalism was based on thinkers’ “profound respect for the limits of reason and the pervasiveness of irrational factors in man and society.” In liberal cosmology, individuals sought pleasure without restraint. They overused and abused liberty and suffered “the primacy of pain.” Indeed, liberalism emerged as “a philosophy of sobriety, born in fear, nourished by disenchantment, and prone to believe that the human condition was and was likely to remain one of pain and anxiety.”17 Under these circumstances, work was experienced as “a grim necessity,” and ownership and transmission of property, rather than consent, silently coerced men “to political obedience.” The role of the state was less to protect individuals’ rights and more to provide individuals with a sense of security by protecting property owners from the desirous, greedy, jealous masses.18 The combination of “voluntary self-mutiliation” that defined capital accumulation and the fear of men’s weak reason subordinated to their strong passion made the “ever-present prospect of loss” rather than the desire for gain the master motivation for individuals in liberal society.19 Elites’ conservative fears encompassed the belief that the new nation’s experiment in liberty brought out in most men, freed from past restraints, their irreligious, utilitarian, egalitarian, emotional, and anarchistic tendencies. The liberated masses showed little respect for God and the divine; their parents; traditional ways of life; stable social orders, classes, and rankings; the inseparable link between freedom and property; the weakness of reason and the need for sound prejudice; and slow change as the only acceptable way to conserve peaceable existence.20 The way to resolve these worries was not solely to rely on voluntary associations, as Appleby emphasizes, or to expect public opinion to restrain individuals’ chaotic impulses, as Wolin suggests. Rather, the job of taming individual appetites continued to fall to traditional family patriarchs and father-figure politicians who wielded patriarchal authority.
Elites were not surprised that American youths would abuse liberty and engage in sexual experimentation. It was their way to quiet emotional fears and satisfy sexual desires. However, youths’ post-Revolution tendency to use liberty as a justification (or excuse) for their bad behavior was relatively new and mostly intolerable. In some moralists’ minds, it constituted a betrayal of the Revolution. That is why early American elites exhibited strong conservative fears, and that is why they asserted and perpetuated patriarchal authority as an important strategy for saving liberalism from its own citizens’ excessive passion. For founding elites and their successors, the theory of liberalism overemphasized liberty, underestimated the resilience of patriarchal authority (and the need for it), and mistakenly obsessed on the experimental attitudes and the prevailing sexual liberty of the postwar years. The reality was that liberalism and patriarchal authority were mutually dependent. They existed side by side.

Five Main Questions

I address five main questions in this book. First, in chapter 2, I ask, by what authority did civic leaders and public officials police sex in the early Republic? The American Revolution seemingly undermined the legitimacy of patriarchal authority and replaced it with liberal notions of individual rights, equal opportunity, consent of the governed, political equality, and lawful government. One predictable outcome of this emerging liberalism was that postrevolutionary Americans would enjoy substantially greater sexual freedom than their colonial forbears had. That is precisely what happened, according to Richard Godbeer, who identifies and describes a “sexual revolution” in late eighteenth-century America. That was when “young people took full advantage of that increasingly permissive atmosphere, experimenting sexually not only within the context of courtship but also as they dallied in more casual and transitory liaisons.”21 State and lo...

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