Sexual Independence In Philadelphia In The Early 1800's

The varying degrees of sexual independence in Philadelphia during the early 1700s-early 1800s were representative of the social and political issues of the period. Pre-Revolution, colonists successfully decimated the strict boundaries of British common law in regard to marital divorce and expanded the desire for personal freedom to a powerful platform: sex. Philadelphia’s shifting sexual parameters reflected the overarching gender, class, and racial growing pains felt by a newly formed nation.
The city’s vast ethnic makeup presented a variety of interpretations of what constituted acceptable social behavior; for example, the rural English and Welsh were indifferent to non-marital sex and the Scottish were sympathetic to bastardy (Lyons 2006). This challenged any notion of instituting a unanimously recognized code of sexual conduct, and as sexual freedom became more prevalent women’s rights expanded. Historically passive, women became empowered by the acceptance of a blossoming sexual culture and began to claim owners’ rights to their own bodies via adultery and divorce; unmarried
As yet another way for white colonists to “shore up the racial divide” (Lyons 2006) slaves and indentured servants were forbidden the rights to marry and bear children under the claim of financial hardship for their owners and the city. After the Gradual Abolition Act of 1780 declared slavery (eventually) unlawful, continued white supremacy concerns usurped the financial argument. The growing number of free, increasingly independent African Americans was of grave concern to the white community, and attacking African Americans’ morality was a focused effort to maintain whites’ higher social standing. Replacing the financial hardship argument was the new popular opinion that “the superior moral character of whites would be diluted through the union with a black race unable to exercise reason” (Lyons