NEW YORK -- Contrary to common belief, pre-Victorian Americans believed sexual abstinence could be harmful to their health and often engaged in sex during courtship, American Heritage Magazine reported.
The Victorian veneer of a straitlaced, prudish society was laid on only in the mid-1800s, when men were told sex was risky 'animal lust' and women were encouraged to forgo 'carnal passion' as beneath their proper role as mothers and homemakers, historian Jack Larkin wrote in an article published Monday.
'Early 19th-century Americans were more licentious than we ordinarily imagine them to be,' he said. 'For many couples sexual relations were part of a serious courtship.'
Records into the late 1700s show premarital sex was widely accepted and 'pregnancy was frequently the prelude to marriage,' Larkin wrote. 'Nearly one-third of rural New England's brides were already with child.
'Pregnancies usually simply accelerated a marriage that would have taken place in any case,' the article said. 'Most rural communities simply accepted the 'early' pregnancies that marked so many marriages.'
Unwed mothers customarily were interrogated during labor about the father, not out of concern over immorality but to force the father to support the child 'born a bastard and chargeable to the town,' he wrote, quoting a document of the era.
'Into the 1820s almost all Americans would have subscribed to the commonplace notion that sex, within proper social confines, was enjoyable and healthy and that prolonged sexual abstinence could be injurious to health,' Larkin wrote. 'They also would have assumed that women had powerful sexual drives.'
A common custom before 1800 was 'bundling,' in which couples shared the same bed 'without undressing' and with 'the shared understanding that innocent endearments should not be exceeded,' according to a commentator of the era.
Said Larkin, 'Folklore and local tradition, from Maine to south New York, had American mothers tucking bundling couples into bed with special chastity-protecting garments for the young woman or a 'bundling board' to separate them.'
However, 'if bundling had been intended to allow courting couples privacy and emotional intimacy but not sexual contact, it clearly failed,' he said. 'Couples may have begun with bundling, but as courtship advanced, they clearly pushed beyond its restraints ...'
The proportion of pregnant brides 'peaked in the turbulent decades during and after the Revolution,' but soon 'the sexual lives of many Americans began to change, shaped by a growing insistence on control,' Larkin said.
He cited an 1832 book counseling young men that sexual indulgence 'was not only morally suspect but psychologically risky' and caused 'a shocking state of debility and excessive irritability.'
'The remedy,' Larkin wrote, 'was diet, exercise and a regular routine that pulled the mind away from animal lusts.'
So America's forefathers gradually began 'reining in the passions in courtship, limiting family size and even redefining male and female sexual desire,' he said, noting that by 1840 the pregnancy rate of New England brides had dropped to one in six or less.
The article is adapted from Larkin's upcoming book, 'The Reshaping of Everyday Life in the United States, 1790-1840,' published by Harper & Row.
