Description

A brief look at love, sex, and marriage in colonial America and the early republic.

The English colonies in North America, which were eventually to become the United States of America, developed their own idiosyncratic customs regarding love, sex, and marriage based on local circumstances. While the basis for all of these attitudes can be traced back to the Mother Country, local variations occurred because of the varying temperaments of the original settlers. The Puritans of Massachusetts had a different way of looking at sexual matters than did the more free wheeling Cavaliers of Virginia, or the trappers along the western borders of North Carolina. Then, as now, one size did not fit all.

Includes discussion of courtship, marriage, divorce, babies and birth control, transgressions, vice, plus more.