Sex among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730-1830 Book

This is an important book for understanding the history of women in the US. It's an amazing work of history with great notes; it's probably not for a lay reader, but even so, give it a shot.

I came to this book interested in a very specific point in Philadelphia's history...but also as someone who has worked for victims' rights (primarily women who were sexually victimized). I can't emphasize enough how looking at this century of change in attitudes about sexuality and gender, just in this one city, can tell us about how mutable attitudes about sex and gender can be and how fast they can change.

Between 1730 and 1830, prevailing attitudes about extra-marital sex--from prostitution to adultery to seduction to bastardy to child support--went from permissive and understanding to women as victims (who had power to shape their lives) to the more typical fallen-woman-brought-it-on-herself attitude that sadly still exists. Philadelphia in the decades before the Revolution was liberal and rather practical in how it treated sex. For example, prostitution was rarely prosecuted, divorce was relatively easy to obtain (extra-judicially, but a divorce law did emerge later), and there was an established bureaucracy for ensuring illegitimate children would be provided for. "Fallen" women could go on with their lives and rejoin society.

In the early nineteenth century, though, all of this was changing as gender/sex roles calcified. "Fallen" women narratives generally ended in disease and death. Women had fewer resources available to them to obtain support for their illegitimate children. This understanding is the story we're already familiar with.

Although it is depressing reading what now seems like the inevitable march to Antebellum/Victorian attitudes, I came away from the book with renewed hope that a reverse trend--back toward liberality, compassion, and understanding--is possible, too. In the last thirty years, so much has changed in the US and around the world. At the end of a century, just imagine how far we could go.