Sexuality was critical to how individuals experienced, learned, and contested their place in early America. Regulating Passion shows the sweeping changes that affected the social and political morass centered on sexual behavior during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Massachusetts-even as patriarchy remained important to those configurations of power. Charting the government's and society's management of sexuality, Kelly A. Ryan uncovers the compelling stories of the individuals charged with sexual crimes and how elites hoped to contain and exploit "illicit" sexual behavior.
In the colonial era, elites designed laws, judicial and religious practices, and sermons that defined certain groups as criminal, the cause of sexual vice, and in need of societal oversight-while defining others as chaste and above reproach. Massachusetts fornicators, adulterers, seducers, and rapists were exemplars of improper behavior in the colonial era and were central to emerging sexual subjectivities associated with gender, race, and class status in the early republic. As Massachusetts modernized, culture and socialization became vehicles for enforcing the marital monopoly on sex and gendered expectations of sexual behavior.
The American Revolution saw the decline of direct sexual regulation by government and religious institutions and a rise in the importance of sexual reputation in maintaining hierarchy. As society moved away from publicly penalizing forms of illicit sexual behavior, it circulated ideas about sexual norms, initiated social ostracism, and interceded with family and friends to promote sexual morality, even as the government remained involved in cases of prostitution and interracial sex. At the same time, this transformation in sexual regulation opened up means to contest the power of patriarchy. Women, African Americans, Indians, and the poor often resisted the efforts of elites and established their own code of sexual conduct to combat ideas about what constituted sexual virtue and how society defined its leaders. They challenged derisive sexual characterizations, patriarchal visions of society, and sexual regulation to establish a space in the body politic. Ironically, their efforts
often reinforced patriarchal ideals as their petitions asked for patriarchal privileges to be extended to them.
Based on records of crimes in lower and upper courts, print literature, and other documentary sources, Regulating Passion underscores the ways in which sexual mores remained essential to the project of differentiating between the virtue of citizens and contesting power structures in the tumultuous transitions from the colonial to early national period.
Industry Reviews
"Kelly A. Ryan has expertly crafted a history of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Massachusetts that is fully intersectional in its understanding of how hierarchies of gender, race, class, and age created an enduring system of white male dominance. Regulating Passion is also innovative for noting the ways in which white men's and women's participation in the American Revolution was not only gendered but highly sexualized...[and] is a welcome
addition to the growing body of scholarship on the history of sexuality....It is an approach to be emulated."--Journal of the Early Republic
"Ryan's work has many strengths, most notably her ability to analyze differences of race, class, gender, and age without losing sight of her broad interpretation of shifts in sexual regulation from the late colonial to the early national period. Moreover, her ability to address both changes in sexual regulation and continuities in patriarchal power is important and necessary in conveying the complexity and sources of white men's authority. She emphasizes the
constancy of white men's patriarchal power during this period while still revealing the challenges posed by individuals, groups, and new ideological trends. By highlighting these challenges, Ryan is able
to expose the ways in which patriarchal authority shifted and transformed to meet these pressures. Ultimately, she reveals the resilience at the heart of enduring systems of power..."--Commonplace
"Regulating Passion offers a compelling and creative answer to the longstanding question: how did the Revolution change American society? In this skillfully crafted narrative, Kelly A. Ryan investigates how men and women--both white and people of color--struggled to locate freedom and equality in the early republic. Regulating Passion adds a refreshingly new dimension to the literature of race and gender in Revolutionary America by viewing
the fight against patriarchy through the lens of sexuality. Based on detailed archival research, Regulating Passion sparkles with fascinating stories of youthful fornicators, defiant Native Americans, and nervous
founding fathers. Students and general readers alike will be impressed by this book's breathtaking scope and its bold assertions of how the American Revolution shaped the politics of race, gender, and sexuality that we recognize today."--John Gilbert McCurdy, author of Citizen Bachelors
"Kelly A. Ryan has produced a thoroughly researched analysis of the history of sexuality and patriarchy in Massachusetts over the long eighteenth century...Regulating Passion offers readers a useful case study that affirms the consensus of historians of sexuality in early America that continuity is more powerful than change in the Revolutionary era, and that Anglo-American patriarchy reinvented itself in order to continue privileging white men's
interests amid the social upheavals of warfare and political independence. Ryan's synthesis of a generation of scholarship on the history of sexuality will be of particular interest to non-specialists in the history
of sexuality and graduate students."--Ann M. Little, Journal of Eighteenth Century Studies
"In her welcome contribution to the developing historiography investigating the American Revolution's impact on sexual culture, Kelly A. Ryan sounds a cautionary note. In contrast to scholars who have claimed that a sexual revolution took place during the late eighteenth century, Ryan argues that patriarchy remained a powerful force regulating the sexual behavior of white women and non-white women and men well into the nineteenth century...Overall, she claims,
the changes that resulted from the Revolution were more in style than in content, as legal control shifted to social control, but left hierarchies intact."--Rachel Hope Cleves, The New England
Quarterly
"Ryan's intersectional analysis...distinguishes Regulating Passion...Ryan argues that the official mechanisms of sexual regulation policies women's sexuality in racialized ways while gradually excusing white men from sexual oversight...By refusing to bring complaints against women of color, Massachusetts instantiated a racialized double-standard."--April Haynes, Early American Literature
