Question In Managing Sexual Behaviors in Colonial North America

History of Sexualities Timeline 13th – 18th Century all spellings per quoted sources Hutchison / 1

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Legal

13th century; 1200-1299

1290 Fleta, a treatise of English common law, decrees that anyone “guilty of bestiality or of sodomy” or anyone [that is, any Christian] having sexual intercourse with Jewish men or women “shall be buried alive in the ground.”

Legal

Immigration

14th century; 1300-1399

1300 Britton, a legal treatise succeeding Fleta, prescribes that sodomites should burned alive.

1376 An unsuccessful petition by the House of Commons to King Edward III would have banished foreign brokers, artisans and traders, with a particular focus on bankers from Northern Italy, who were said to loan money at outrageous interest, along with Jews and “Saracens” (i.e., Muslims), whom they accused of introducing “the too horrible vice which is not to be named” [i.e., sex between men] to England.

15th century; 1400-1499

Medicine

Culture, religion

Legal

Legal, Medical

16th century; 1500-1599

16th century Italy First documented use of condoms: linen sheaths soaked in chemicals and dried before use as prophylactics to prevent infection with syphilis or other STIs, not generally as contraceptive barriers to prevent pregnancy.

1511-1513 In De Orbe Novo Decades, Peter Martyr d’Anghiera describes what he saw as aberrant behavior by Natives of what is now Panama: "[I saw] a brother of the king and other young men, obliging men, [who] dressed effeminately with women's clothing [and behaved] unnatural[ly].” Vasco Núñez de Balboa threw 40 such individuals to his dogs, who tore them apart. D'Anghiera claims that "only the [Native] nobles and the gentlemen practiced that kind of desire. . . . [The] indigenous people [i.e., the commoners, as opposed to their royalty] knew that sodomy gravely offended God. . . . [causing] the tempests that with thunder and lightning so frequently afflicted them, or the floods that drowned their fruits [causing] hunger and sickness."

1533 The country’s first civil sodomy law “An Acte for the punishment of the vice of Buggerie” is passed by the English Parliament under King Henry VIII. Buggery is defined as an unnatural (that is, non-procreative) sexual act against the will of God and man, punishable by hanging until dead. The wording of the act allowed the state to confiscate all lands and property of those convicted under the act and sentenced to death, including members of religious orders. The law was used in part to decimate the ranks of Catholic priests and nuns while increasing the Crown’s resources.

1551 Sir Edward Coke formulates the "born alive rule" in common law, which holds that until physically born and living separately from its mother, various criminal acts against persons, such as homicide and assault, do not apply to a fetus or unborn child

History of Sexualities Timeline 13th – 18th Century all spellings per quoted sources Hutchison / 2

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Legal

due to not having an independent legal existence. (Note: medical advances in the 19th and especially in the late 20th and 21st centuries have informed an evolving understanding of personhood under the law.)

1553 The Buggery Act was suspended under the brief reign of Queen Mary, who as a Roman Catholic supported the role of ecclesiastical courts in such matters.

1563 Queen Elizabeth I reinstated the Buggery Act as part of the return of Protestant rule and the primacy of secular courts in establishing guilt and punishment.

Legal, Religion

Culture

Punishment

Legal, Religious,

Legal

Legal, Religious

Punishment

Punishment

Religious

Religious- Legal

17th century; 1600-1699

Colonial New England antisodomy laws combined existing British laws (like the 1533 Buggery Act) with Christian scripture-based prohibitions of same-sex behavior. Eventually, direct references to Old and New Testament proscriptions are replaced by language prohibiting behaviors in violation of the “natural law” of heterosexual, reproductive sex.

1607 A non-Shakespearean example of cross-dressing on the English stage: The Roaring Girl by Middleton and Dekker depicted cross-dressing criminal Mary Frith (aka Moll Cutpurse). Because women were not permitted to act on stage, the lead was played by a man impersonating a woman who passed as a man.

1624 Richard Cornish, master of a ship anchored near the Virginia Colony in North America, is tried and hanged for committing sodomy with William Couse, a 29-year-old cabin boy.

1624 Thomas Morton founds Merrymount in Eastern Massachusetts with 30 male indentured servants and others; develops good relationships with Native people, and urges the male colonists to marry Native women. The threat to Puritan norms causes him to be sent back to England in 1629.

1636 New Plymouth Colony defines “sodomy, rapes, buggery” as three of eight offenses punishable by death.

1641 Massachusetts Bay Colony’s sodomy law echoes the New Testament: “If any man lyeth with man kinde as he lyeth with a woman, both of them have comitted abhomination, they both shall surely be put to death” [all spellings as in original].

1646 Jan Creoli is choked to death and burned to ashes in Manhattan, New Netherlands Colony, when convicted of a second sodomy offence.

1649 The first known prosecution for same-sex activity between women in North America occurs in March when Sarah White Norman is charged with "lewd behavior" with Mary Vincent Hammon in Plymouth, Massachusetts.

1653 Michael Wigglesworth admits his sinful feelings about his male students in a coded diary entry: “Such filthy lust flowing from my fond affection . . . [makes me] confess myself an object of God’s loathing as my sin is my own; and pray God make it no more to me.”

1656 New Haven Colony (Connecticut) enacts the only Puritan-era law prohibiting same-sex sexual acts between women, as sodomy was generally considered to involve penetration with a penis. This law enacted the death penalty for any man lying with men and masturbation in the sight of others, and cited one of the epistles of Paul in the Christian New Testament “. . . if any woman change the natural use, into that which is against nature as Rom. 1:26 she shall be liable to the same sentence, and punishment.” Other penalties—whipping, imprisonment, castration and forfeiture of

History of Sexualities Timeline 13th – 18th Century all spellings per quoted sources Hutchison / 3

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Culture

3rd gender

Culture

Medical

Legal

land and goods-- began to supplant the death penalty for sodomy, although severity of punishments, and numbers of prosecutions differed across the colonies.

1673 John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1647-1690) exemplifies English libertinism as a reaction against Puritanism. Class privilege enables men to sexually exploit anyone of lower class: sex/gender of the other is not important. The line “missing my whore, I bugger my page” appears in his poem sometimes known as “Regime de Viver”; his sexual philosophy is also evident in “The Imperfect Enjoyment,” about premature ejaculation, and “Signior Dildo,” an ode to a pleasure-giving device—though his authorship of the latter is contested.

1673-77 Jesuit missionary Jacques Marquette observes third-gender practices in several groups of Native people as he navigated the Mississippi River: “While still young, [they] assume the garb of women, and retain it throughout their lives. . . . They are summoned to the Councils, and nothing can be decided without their advice.”

1682 A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson is one of the first captivity narratives capitalizing on white colonizers’ fascination with the potency and danger of Native men’s sexuality.

The Problems of Aristotle (1683), available in North American colonies, queried whether “canal copulation [can] be done by the mouth.”

1696 Massachusetts law explicitly forbids cross-dressing.

Punishment

Legal, Gender

Medical- Legal

Medical

Citizenship, Gender

Legal, Gender, Race, Immigration

Legal

18th century; 1700-1799

1702 Pierre Liette observes the prevalence of “the sin of sodomy” despite, he claims, a ratio of 4 women to each man in the Miami nation.

1726 Mother Clap's molly house in London is raided by police, resulting in Clap's death and the execution of all the men arrested.

1765 Post-quickening abortion is no longer considered homicide in England, but even while confirming homicide is only applicable to those "born alive" William Blackstone calls abortion "a very heinous misdemeanor."

1787 Abortions are openly advertised and commonly performed in the United States.

1787 The difference between effete, weak English men (exemplified by Mr. Billy Dimple) and brawny, straightforward American masculinity (in the person of Colonel Manly) is dramatized in The Contrast by Royall Tyler.

1790 The U.S. Naturalization Law of 1790 limits naturalization to immigrants who were "free white persons" of "good moral character,” excluding Native Americans, indentured servants, enslaved people, free blacks, and Asians from citizenship. While women were included in the act (as non-voting citizens), citizenship descended through fathers; the law stipulated that the right of citizenship did "not descend to persons whose fathers have never been resident in the United States."

1790 "The right of the people to be secure in their persons" is guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment, ratified as part of the U.S. Bill of Rights. While this has not historically been interpreted as the primary basis for reproductive rights, legal scholars have suggested that it represents a strong, explicit constitutional basis for the right to bodily autonomy.

1792 France decriminalizes sexual acts between men.