The sexual culture of eighteenth-century Philadelphia was relatively open, particularly when compared with other North American colonial cities. This was due in part to its diverse, multi-national and multi-racial population and traditions, as well as to a steady stream of new ideas. During this period perceptions about gender, sexuality, and marriage were evolving, influenced by new scientific theories, Enlightenment thought, and republican ideology, disseminated by its changing population and the availability of printed sources. In addition, many laws changed as the colony became a state, and within the city new prisons and almshouses were built. Nevertheless, rape, as now, was seldom reported or prosecuted, and especially in the nineteenth century Black women and women considered ‘unrespectable’ were often blamed for enticing men. During the eighteenth century men and women easily moved in and out of relationships, sexual relationships outside marriage were frequently tolerated, and women had some sexual freedom. Prostitution was not confined to one section of the city; neither were the births of illegitimate children. Women could obtain abortifacients, and erotic literature was widely read. However, by the nineteenth century such behaviour was increasingly considered deviant, and Philadelphia was a much less tolerant place.

Chapter 5 examines how, via the daily parade of summonses, a variety of actors employed local courtrooms to shape the social and cultural contours of marriage and affiliation. As in other aspects of metropolitan life, the courtroom was not merely a venue for the expression of law or norms that were constituted elsewhere or a space for the enforcement of middle-class standards of morality. Legal structures originally developed to protect patriarchal privilege could, to some degree, be co-opted by women instead. Several decades before working-class women could directly shape the terrain of formal politics, they were effectively navigating the terrain of local courtrooms and influencing both their daily practices and the meanings that emerged from them. Their engagement demonstrates how crucial working-class women were to recasting the nature of the state in this period. The adaption of the state to address familial matters occurred in tandem with the adaption of women to the mechanisms of the state.

From contact, gendered violence was critical to the European conquest of America. The Spanish conquistadors sexually exploited indigenous women as part of their subjugation of native societies in Mexico and Peru. French and English colonists also exploited native women, although they imagined themselves as victims of Indian sexual abuse. In the English colonies, the importance of the household as a unit of political organisation gave men enormous power over women and other dependents. This concealed sexual violence in the family and spousal abuse. Rape was illegal in the English colonies, but rarely prosecuted, except among the Quakers in Pennsylvania. The prevalence of unfree labour also contributed to gendered violence in early America. Indentured servants were often left to the mercy of their masters. Enslaved African American women were routinely brutalised and raped in order to reproduce more slaves. The Enlightenment and the American Revolution challenged colonial sensibilities. As the power of the household head weakened and marriages were idealised as loving relationships, spousal abuse and rape were problematised and prosecuted at higher rates. However, the persistence of slavery limited these changes to white women.