At the same time, the local courts were turning their attention from prosecuting ecclesiastical matters to the commercial interests of the growing colonies. In the first half of the eighteenth century, nearly two-thirds of cases that came before the court in New Haven, Connecticut, involved fornication. After about 1750, however, such prosecutions practically disappeared, leaving the policing of the increasingly exuberant population of young adults to their families. Within this context, bundling was a compromise. It ensured that any premarital sexual activity that did occur happened under the watchful eye of parents instead of in some field or hayloft. While in the ideal the relationship wouldn’t be consummated until after marriage, premarital pregnancies weren’t particularly tragic in an agrarian economy where people married fairly young and children were an extremely desirable commodity as family laborers. For some, premarital sex functioned as a means of “fertility testing” to ensure that a woman could get pregnant, a version of the old Scottish Highland custom of “hand-fasting” in which two clan chieftains “agreed that the heir of one should live with the daughter of the other as her husband for twelve months and a day.” If the woman became pregnant during that time, “the marriage became good in law, even although no priest had performed the marriage ceremony” according to A History of the Highlands, and the Highland Clans. If she did not, the arrangement was ended and the woman was returned to her family “at liberty to marry or hand-fast with any other,” while the disappointed chieftain was free to find another trial bride for his son.
This casual attitude about premarital pregnancy was an extension of European courtship rituals, in which premarital sexual experience was unexceptional and often commenced with the betrothal or the expectation of one, the marriage ceremony itself being a formality. The demographer Peter Laslett noted that throughout most of Europe before the late nineteenth century, “a high proportion of all spouses at all times and in all places had sexual intercourse before marriage.” As the Reverend Bingley said of Wales, it was common for the consequence of bundling “to make its appearance in the world within two or three months after the marriage ceremony had taken place. The subject excites no particular attention among the neighbors, provided the marriage be made good before the living witness is brought to light.” Only the landed gentry, who had to worry about their heirs inheriting substantial estates, enforced expectations of premarital virginity in women, but they were a minority of the population. Even the Puritans recognized the special status of premarital sex within the expectation of marriage, says John Demos. While the standard fine for fornication in Plymouth Colony was ten pounds or a whipping for individuals who weren’t betrothed, it was only fifty shillings (each) for those who were engaged.
It was fairly easy for parents in small, close-knit colonial communities to police any pregnancies that did result from bundling and make sure they resulted in marriage. Any man who wouldn’t live up to his obligations could be excommunicated from the church or shunned from the community, a devastating punishment in a world where drifting single men were viewed with suspicion. If social pressure didn’t work, there were legal options. In addition to paternity suits that were initiated by women, fathers could sue men for seduction to recoup their financial losses due to being deprived of their daughter’s services during her pregnancy. Even a woman who didn’t get married because she was jilted by her lover or too distant from him in social class to enforce the expectation of marriage often didn’t have any trouble finding a husband in short order, her advertised fertility and a cash settlement from the father of her child having both erased her shame and made her a desirable bride. As the colonial historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich notes, “There is no evidence that in rural communities women who bore children out of wedlock were either ruined or abandoned.” It was a world in which the sexual appetites of both men and women were taken for granted and accommodated and in which both parties were held equally responsible for breaches of protocol.
Bundling had its detractors, especially ministers, for whom the flagrant disregard for the proscribed morality was galling. In a 1729 sermon, the famed Puritan minister Jonathan Edwards denounced “such liberties in company-keeping” that are “commonly winked at by parents” as “shameful and disgraceful.” But even some in the rising colonial elite admitted that bundling had benefits. In an unpublished 1761 essay written at the time he was courting Abigail, John Adams decried the stuffy courtship practices of “Persons of Rank and figure” who concealed their daughters “from all males, till a formal courtship is opened.” He thought it was a good idea for young women to get to know young men “privately,” and wrote, “Tho Discretion must be used, and Caution, yet on [considering] the whole of the Arguments on each side, I cannot wholly disapprove of Bundling.”
By the time of the Revolutionary War, bundling and premarital sex had become so common that about one-third of all brides were already pregnant when they got married, according to Smith and Hindus. In one Massachusetts parish, sixty-six of the two hundred covenanted members of the church who married between 1761 and 1775 confessed to having premarital sex. The experience of midwife Martha Ballard in the Maine town of Hallowell in the 1780s and 1790s was typical. Just under 40 percent of the first babies she delivered were conceived out of wedlock, some of them the children or grandchildren of town leaders. However, thirty-one of the forty women were married by the time her services were needed—some just barely. “Was called … to go and see the wife of John Dunn who was in Labour,” she wrote in her diary on August 25, 1799. She recorded that Mrs. Dunn was “safe delivered … of a fine son” at 7:30 Sunday evening, having been “married last Thursday.” Ballard’s own son Jonathan got a woman named Sally Pierce pregnant out of wedlock: “Sally declard [sic] that my son Jonathan was the father of her child,” Martha wrote of the delivery in her diary, which she knew would be used as evidence in court when Sally sued Jonathan for paternity. A month before his trial and four months after the baby was born, Jonathan married Sally.
The colonial world was undergoing its own revolution, though that made it less likely that Jonathan would marry Sally. Better roads and growing towns and cities, as well as the war itself, created a more transient population, which made it harder to enforce local expectations about marriage following a premarital pregnancy and more likely that a young woman would be abandoned. The percentage of truly illegitimate births, which had been low, started to rise in the last decades of the 1700s, reflecting this changing society. This possibility of abandonment, and a rash of babies without paternal support, gave “rise to profound and widespread anxiety” about the sexual exploitation of young women, says the historian Richard Godbeer. It was this anxiety—the result of the “disintegration of the traditional, well-integrated rural community” at the dawn of “economic and social modernization,” conclude Smith and Hindus—that fostered a profound change in attitude about premarital sex. If local communities could no longer police premarital sex, then young adults would have to respond to a riskier sexual marketplace by “constraining their sex drives.”
The rise in nonmarital pregnancies attracted the attention of ministers and moralists, who fretted about what it meant to the moral health of the young nation and called for an end to bundling. In 1781, the Reverend Jason Haven shocked his congregation in Dedham, Massachusetts, when he denounced bundling, “a favorite custom” about which only “mirth and merriment” had been heard, from the pulpit. “The females blushed and hung down their heads. The men, too, hung down their heads, and now and then looked out from under their fallen eyebrows, to observe how others supported the attack,” remembered one parishioner, who noted that afterward the “custom was abandoned.”
Other cultural forces helped prompt a change in attitude about premarital sexual experimentation. Seduction novels became wildly popular among an increasingly literate American audience, introducing the trope of the virtuous maiden who is seduced and abandoned by a libertine and dies, either literally or figuratively, of shame. Two o
f the bestselling books of the era, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded (1740) and Clarissa: or, The History of a Young Lady (1748), focused on the importance of chastity and the dangers of seduction. In Pamela, a young housemaid refuses to surrender her chastity to her persistent master. He is reformed by her rectitude and marries her. While Pamela is rewarded with “virtuous domesticity,” Clarissa dies in disgrace after she runs off with a charming rake named Lovelace who traps her in a brothel and despoils her. In addition to melodramatic tales of despoiled maidens, widespread reports of sexual assaults by British troops during the Revolutionary War also reinforced the idea of women as vulnerable to sexual predation. A woman’s virtue increasingly became intertwined with the honor of the young nation, which was itself striving for legitimacy.
Bundling, and the casual attitude about premarital sex it represented, now came under attack as immoral and dangerous. A popular 1785 ballad called “A New Bundling Song; or, A Reproof to Those Young Country Women” ridiculed “sparks courting in a bed of love” as a “vulgar custom” admired by “many a slut and clown”:
A bundling couple went to bed,
With all their clothes from foot to head,
That the defense might seem complete,
Each one was wrapped in a sheet.
But O! this bundlin’s such a witch
The man of her did catch the itch
And so provoked was the wretch,
That she of him a bastard catch’d.
Now, premarital sex was portrayed as the road to illegitimacy and ruin instead of the gateway to marriage. The “Bundling Song” was so influential, says Stiles, that even decades later its publication was remembered as a watershed. After that, “no girl had the courage to stand against it, and continue to admit lovers to her bed,” he said. Other widely circulated poems and moral tracts like “The Forsaken Fair One” warned young women that if they dabbled in premarital sex, they not only risked impregnation and abandonment, but also would be irrevocably stained and cast out by society. In a 1791 essay in Massachusetts Magazine, an anonymous author referred to a “ruined female” who had “fallen from the heights of purity to the lowest grade of humanity.” Now, a woman who had sex before marriage was “ruined” and, unlike her colonial sisters, “fallen” and unredeemable in the eyes of society. In this way, the responsibility for managing premarital sex was transferred from the community—and men and women more or less equally—to women, and shame was the means of enforcing their compliance with this new, more restrictive regime. “By the late 1700s,” notes Godbeer, “moralists regularly portrayed women as the guardians of sexual virtue.”
In the first decades of the 1800s, premarital sexual restraint became more important than ever as young men delayed marriage to get enough education and experience to compete for jobs in an urbanizing and industrializing country. Now, a premarital pregnancy could derail their path to the expanding middle class. With a revolution in transportation and many young men on the move, young women found themselves at even greater risk of abandonment. A seemingly earnest suitor might take liberties and then disappear on a steamboat to New Orleans, a packet boat up the Erie Canal, or, eventually, a train to Cincinnati before anyone was the wiser. By the time Washington Irving published his satirical Knickerbocker’s History of New York in 1809, he was already mocking bundling as a “superstitious rite,” a relic of New England’s “primitive” past, albeit one that populated the coast with “a long-sided, raw-boned, hardy race of whoreson whalers, wood-cutters, fishermen, and peddlers; and strapping corn-fed wenches.”
By 1828, the Yankee could report that, unlike in earlier eras, “to have had a child before marriage would now be fatal to a woman … No man would have the courage to marry her; no woman of character would associate with her.” The lusty colonial sexual ethic had been eclipsed by a bourgeoisie standard of sexual morality that elevated female purity and shunned those who violated it. A woman who had fallen from virtue, the Middlesex Washingtonian could say with confidence in 1844, is “an object of disgust and loathing—a very worm, that creeps along the bye-ways of life, shunned and abhorred by all the virtuous and the good.”
At the same time, the production of household goods like candles, soap, and cloth moved from the home to the factory, and middle-class women became more and more symbolically domestic, the “angels of the home” whose proper, virtuous role was in the domestic sphere, while men competed in the public world. The new strictures on women were effective in terms of managing premarital pregnancy. By 1840, about 20 percent of brides were pregnant when they got married; over the next forty years, that would fall to only about 10 percent.
Attitudes about gender and sexual desire were readjusted to fit this new reality. Women were now viewed as having innately less sexual desire than men, which better positioned them to control sex. The most popular sexual advice book of the mid-1800s, William Acton’s Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs, assured readers that “the majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled with sexual feelings of any kind.” The vigorous participation of women in the religious revivals that swept the nation during the Second Great Awakening in the decades prior to the Civil War reinforced the idea that women were more morally virtuous than men. At the same time, men came to be seen as naturally more sexually aggressive and licentious than women and in need of an outlet for their sexual desire, which women who were “ruined” both conveniently provided and justified. The Victorian double standard was born.
Having raised the value of a woman’s chastity to that of a “priceless jewel,” as the Middlesex Washingtonian called it, society now had to grapple with the question of how to compensate otherwise respectable women for its loss, without appearing to condone promiscuity. Throughout history, various cultures took differing approaches to this conundrum. In the Bible, a man who takes the virginity of a woman “who is not engaged” must pay her father fifty shekels of silver and marry her. Under Welsh medieval law, a woman of age who “goes with a man clandestinely, and taken by him to bush, or brake, or house, and after connection deserted” was owed a “bull of three winters” if her family filed a complaint. The catch, however, was that the bull was to have “its tail well shaven and greased and then thrust through the door-clate” and the woman was to stand on the other side of the threshold and “take his tail in his hand.” If she could hold on to the bull, she could have it as compensation for her wynet-werth (face-shame), but if she couldn’t, all she would get was “what grease may adhere to her hands.”
Under western common law, seduction lawsuits could be filed to compensate fathers—and originally, masters—for the loss of a woman’s labor if she was impregnated illicitly, thus having been “seduced” away from her work. Women themselves weren’t allowed to bring suit, as seduction was viewed as a property matter and women had no property rights. The Victorian feminist Caroline Dall bitterly complained that “in the eyes of this law, female chastity is only valuable for the work it can do.”
As the American marriage market became more autonomous and women more vulnerable under the double standard, the courts stepped in to enforce promises of marriage under breach of promise suits. Here, women could file themselves, since the suits were based on the common law understanding of a betrothal as a contract. In the colonial era, breach of promise suits were equally likely to be brought by a man or a woman if one party torpedoed a carefully negotiated marriage agreement, which usually included a dowry from the wife’s family and a portion of land or other inheritance from the groom’s. In 1661, for instance, John Sutton sued Mary Russell for two hundred pounds for “engaging herself to another by promise of marriage wheras shee had engaged herselfe by promise of marriage unto the said John before.” He lost when Mary testified that she had “heard such thinges concerning said Sutton as might justly discourage her” from marrying him. Courts would continue to hold that discovering that a potential partner was unchaste after an engagement had been made was grounds to b
reak the contract.
An 1818 case, Wightman v. Coates, established breach of promise suits as a special recourse for women who had been jilted. Maria Wightman sued Joshua Coates after he failed to make good on what she said was a longstanding engagement and married another woman. In a decision finding for Wightman, Massachusetts chief justice Isaac Parker wrote that women had more reason to resort to breach of promise suits and that juries had more reason to apportion them generous damages because their life prospects were “materially affected by the treachery of the man to whom she had plighted her vows.” Parker also said that breach of promise suits were necessary to protect the interests of society in men making good on marriage promises, particularly in a culture with a rigid double standard, writing that “the delicacy of the sex, which happily in this country gives man so much advantage over woman, in the intercourse which leads to matrimonial engagements, requires for its protection and continuance the aid of the laws.”
Breach of promise suits became largely a female recourse as the nineteenth century progressed. Like the bull with the greased tail, however, there was a catch: they applied only to virtuous women, including in some instances those who had sex with their fiancés under the understanding they were to be married. A woman who was otherwise already ruined couldn’t expect consideration from the court because she had no chastity to defend. As Justice John Dillon wrote in Denslow v. Van Horn, an 1864 case in which the court ruled that evidence of a woman’s past sexual indiscretions should be given to the jury, a “woman who falls from virtue, no matter how artful the deception, or how distressing the circumstance, is, by the severe edict of society, dishonored.” The Pennsylvania Supreme Court put it more harshly in dismissing the 1875 breach of promise suit of a prostitute: “It is enough to say that the law will not enforce a contract of marriage in favor of a party who is not fit to be married at all.”
Bringing Down the Colonel Page 4