Sex and Sexuality in Early America

Merril D. Smith

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1998
• ISBN:
  9780814729366
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

What role did sexual assault play in the conquest of America? How did American attitudes toward female sexuality evolve, and how was sexuality regulated in the early Republic?

Sex and sexuality have always been the subject of much attention, both scholarly and popular. Yet, accounts of the early years of the United States tend to overlook the importance of their influence on the shaping of American culture. Sex and Sexuality in Early America addresses this neglected topic with original research covering a wide spectrum, from sexual behavior to sexual perceptions and imagery. Focusing on the period between the initial contact of Europeans and Native Americans up to 1800, the essays encompass all of colonial North America, including the Caribbean and Spanish territories.

Challenging previous assumptions, these essays address such topics as rape as a tool of conquest; perceptions and responses to Native American sexuality; fornication, bastardy, celibacy, and religion in colonial New England; gendered speech in captivity narratives; representations of masculinity in eighteenth- century seduction tales, the sexual cosmos of a southern planter, and sexual transgression and madness in early American fiction. The contributors include Stephanie Wood, Gordon Sayre, Steven Neuwirth, Else L. Hambleton, Erik R. Seeman, Richard Godbeer, Trevor Burnard, Natalie A. Zacek, Wayne Bodle, Heather Smyth, Rodney Hessinger, and Karen A. Weyler.

Part I
European/Native American
Contact, 1492–1710

When Europeans crossed the Atlantic and encountered “the New World,” they attempted to master the land and its peoples. Conquest meant bringing men, animals, and goods from Europe and Africa; imposing European systems of government and religion; and interbreeding, often forcibly, with the native women. Unfortunately, few documents record the feelings and reactions of the native Americans to their conquest by these early European explorers, soldiers, and priests. Lost entirely to the modern world is how they viewed various sexual activities and concepts, such as virginity, transvestism, homosexuality, and rape.

Stephanie Wood discusses these problems in her study of conquest and sexual coercion, noting, too, that most often sexual assaults were committed secretly or in private. Moreover, even the definition of what constitutes a sexual violation may differ between two cultures, as it may differ between men and women. Wood, therefore, has for the most part had to deduce the reactions of the indigenous population by interpreting European narratives. She determines that although rape may not have been a consciously promoted tool of conquest, it did become part of the apparatus of conquest. Political and military leaders did not announce rape as an aspect of their policies, but common soldiers considered the indigenous women part of their “spoils” of war. Those in authority did little to curb sexual abuses and in fact may have even tacitly encouraged sexual coercion as a means to impose power over the people they were trying to conquer.

Gordon Sayre’s essay concerns the representation of Native Americans by European explorers and missionaries. He observes that characterizations of the Americas and Americans are filled with erotic overtones. Moreover, the accounts of these early eye-witnesses were highly influenced by their preconceptions, as well as by their own behavior. Like Wood, Sayre finds that historians of today must rely upon the biased sources of the conquerors. Sayre further notes that these sources are colored by the particular observer’s prejudices, fears, and desires. Thus, accounts of Native American sexuality written by missionaries differ from those of explorers and promoters. Using the example of the berdache, the Indian men who dressed as women and took on the role of females, Sayre shows how Native American sexuality is still being disputed and debated by present-day scholars.

Stephen Neuwirth presents a different aspect of Native American and European encounters in his analysis of Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative. By revealing Rowlandson’s “female voice,” Neuwirth determines that here was a woman who spoke out, albeit subtly, against both the Native American and the European men who controlled her life. At the same time, Rowlandson redeems herself as a proper Puritan matron. By invoking stereotypical images of the Indians as drunken, lusty savages pursuing her, Rowlandson presents it as a miracle that she, a weak woman susceptible to the devil, remained chaste. Thus, Neuwirth’s essay gives us additional insights into gender roles, the body, and religion in colonial New England, topics that will be explored further in part 2.

Chapter 1
Sexual Violation in the Conquest of the Americas

Stephanie Wood

Underlining the essential link between sexuality and conquest, historian R. C. Padden writes: “Biologically speaking, it was neither microbe nor sword nor mailed fist that conquered Mexico. It was the membrus febrilis” He credits the “love-making” between the “donjuanistas,” who were “in their masculine prime,” and indigenous women with transforming Mexico into a European colony. He suspects that the “Spaniards commonly left more pregnancies in their camps than they did casualties on the field of battle.”¹ Indeed, one conqueror recalled a compatriot who had sired thirty children by indigenous women in only three years.²

But was that “feverish member” simply engaging in an expression of love or was it also wielded as a weapon of conquest? Could sexual assault, or at least coerced sex, have been a regular feature of early transatlantic “encounters,” beginning with the voyages of Christopher Columbus in the 1490s? Should we not scrutinize the role of sexual domination in warfare and war’s particularly repugnant expression, conquest, before we giddily salute the so-called civilization Europeans introduced into this hemisphere some five hundred years ago?³ Rape has gained notoriety as a feature of conflicts as recent as the wars in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda and counterinsurgency efforts from Peru to the Middle East. For this reason, a critical examination of the topic has the potential not only for shedding light on the darker side of the Columbian legacy but for illuminating resolutions of social conflict in our modern, crime-ridden societies as we approach the turn of the millennium.⁴

There is no universally accepted definition of the highly charged term “rape,” whether in law or in common usage. Because the topic is so loaded emotionally, “definitional consensus is difficult to attain,” writes Linda Brookover Bourque in her preface to Defining Rape.⁵ She finds a “wide variety of behaviors” that different people will identify as rape. The violence of sexual assault can be expressed in various forms, has a wide range of perceived gravity, and meets with varying degrees of acceptance by both men and women.⁶

For the purposes of this essay, which focuses on heterosexual relations, what is important is the possible sexual violation of a woman’s physical and spiritual being, her integrity, dignity, self-possession, power, control, and choice. “Sexual violation” is defined in European terms, owing to our meager knowledge of corresponding concepts among the indigenous populations. Both short- and long-range effects on her person, her family, her community, and her nation are also important. Other issues of concern are the perpetrator’s possible gender chauvinism, racism, classism, religious intolerance, or other forms of cultural prejudice, and the meaning this gives to the colonialism that took shape in the Americas.⁷ The degradation and subjugation of native women by European men may have been part and parcel not only of conquest but of the imposition of a new, multilayered power structure.⁸

Sexual assault and coercion, all-too-often secret acts, defy quantification, neat historical synthesis, and easy answers. What was the exact nature of the act? What kinds of people committed these acts? At what times and in what kinds of places? What means were used? Why, and how often? Single incidents, which can be shocking and can seem larger than life, do not necessarily clarify the prevalence of sexual violation.⁹ Although we have lately begun to broaden our definition of “text,” the work of historians usually demands some kind of written documentation.¹⁰ Unfortunately, our sources on sexual assault and coerced sex in the conquest of the Americas are both limited in number and dominated, almost exclusively, by the perspective of the European male.¹¹ Lamentably, all too often we have to approach other views, such as that of the indigenous male through the filter of European sources. Even more rarely do we find the perspective of native woman (object of most assaults) in these sources.

Dancing around sensitive moral and ethical issues, these records can be fraught with euphemism and metaphor or subterfuge and denial, particularly when directed toward an official or audience of mixed gender. Alternatively, authors also sought to intrigue, impress, and arouse their (typically, male) readers, employing fantasy, invention, exaggeration, bragging, and projection. As Gordon Sayre eloquently discusses elsewhere in this volume, Europeans also saw in Native American sexuality what they wanted to see.

The following account, left by Michele de Cuneo, an Italian noble on Columbus’s second voyage to the Caribbean, is extremely rare for its detail and clarity:

While I was in the boat, I captured a very beautiful Carib woman, whom the said Lord Admiral [Columbus] gave to me. When I had taken her to my cabin she was naked—as was their custom. I was filled with my desire to take my pleasure with her and attempted to satisfy my desire. She was unwilling, and so treated me with her nails that I wished I had never begun. But—to cut a long story short—I then took a piece of rope and whipped her soundly, and she let forth such incredible screams that you would not have believed your ears. Eventually we came to such terms, I assure you, that you would have thought she had been brought up in a school for whores.

Cuneo twists the rape into a scene of seduction, titillating his European male audience back home, knowing full well that the “Carib” woman’s version of events would never come to the fore.¹² Her resistance—overcome—is central to the message of his own sexual prowess, and such resistance was apparently not unusual in the Caribbean experience.

Examples of women’s particular resistance and fear provide important indirect evidence of sexual violation. On one of Columbus’s voyages, ten women who had been captured and taken aboard ship jumped overboard at one point and tried to swim the half-league to safety on the island of Hispaniola (modern-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic).¹³ In another incident, Cuneo reports that when Spanish conquerors released some surplus female slaves on the same island, they “left their infants anywhere on the ground and started to flee like desperate people.” The scene suggests a considerable feeling of urgency on the part of the women to put distance between themselves and the Spaniards. Cuneo reported that some ran eight days “beyond mountains and across huge rivers.”¹⁴ If the story is true, the infants could have been the product of sexual assault at the time of capture or in the ensuing captivity period, and the women may have figured that the Spanish fathers should claim the infants and care for them, not wanting the sad burden themselves.¹⁵

We know from the experience at the first settlement Columbus left behind on Hispaniola, La Navidad, that the European men were coercing sexual relations with the local women. As one European of the period, Guillermo Coma, put it, “Bad feeling arose and broke out into warfare because of the licentious conduct of our men towards the Indian women, for each Spaniard had five women to minister to his pleasure,” and “the husbands and relatives of the women, unable to take this, banded together to avenge this insult and eliminate this outrage.” Columbus found the fort destroyed and all the men he had left behind dead when he returned on his second voyage.¹⁶

While Christopher Columbus regularly remarked about Caribbean women’s nakedness, launching what has become a long tradition we might call ethnographic voyeurism,¹⁷ his reports were fairly matter-of-fact and aimed at an official audience. In contrast, his contemporary Amerigo Vespucci felt free to elaborate a more literary image, loaded with sexual hyperbole.¹⁸ Whereas other records remind us that “the women of the islands seem … to have been naturally resistant to European advances,” Vespucci’s accounts emphasize the women’s sexual liberality and exaggerated lust, continuing a legend-making tradition launched at least as early as the reconquest of Spain, in descriptions of Moorish women.¹⁹ He teases his male audiences with stories such as the one that made him famous, about how sexually voracious women encouraged venomous animals (insects?) to bite their indigenous mates’ penises, enlarging them, apparently for the women’s satisfaction but to the point that many men would “lose their virile organ and remain eunuchs.”²⁰ The scene was thereby set for Europeans to take the native men’s places and become the object of erotic tortures (and take control of the island, to boot) because, the story goes, the women were so fond of “Christians” that “they debauch and prostitute themselves.” Still, European men were to proceed cautiously, for Vespucci reminds them of one man who complacently received the attentions of a group of indigenous women while another bludgeoned him from behind.²¹

Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo remarked several times on the sensuality of indigenous women on Hispaniola. He continued to build the myth of their preference for European men over their own. Like Vespucci, he recounts an episode with a subtext of arousal: “an Indian woman took a bachelor called Herrera, who had fallen behind his companions and was left alone with her, and seized him by the genitals and made him very tired and exhausted.”²²

Figure 1.1. European depiction of a scene described by Amerigo Vespucci, in which an indigenous woman prepares to bludgeon a Spaniard in the Caribbean. Line-drawing copy by Gabriela Quiñones of a scene in the Quatuor navigationes (1509), as published in Tzvetan Todorov, The Morals of History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 111.

Notwithstanding the fantasy of sexual paradise that European writers were forging, and the suggestions of coercion and resistance that sometimes temper it, we must also allow the possibility that indigenous cultures did have different perspectives on sex. According to Ramón Gutiérrez, among the precontact Pueblo peoples of what is now New Mexico, the women, especially, found sexual intercourse an activity of considerable “cultural import” and “essential for the peacefu...