Sex among the rabble

"Placing sexual culture at the center of power relations in Revolutionary-era Philadelphia, Clare Lyons uncovers a world where runaway wives challenged their husbands' patriarchal rights and where serial and casual sexual relationships were commonplace. Reading popular representations of sex against actual behavior reveals the clash of meanings given to sex and illuminates struggles to recast sexuality in order to eliminate its subversive potential." "Lyons argues that attitudes and behaviors in Philadelphia echoed the broad intellectual transformations taking place in Britain and Western Europe. Sexuality became the vehicle for exploring currents of liberty, freedom, and individualism in the politics of everyday life among groups of early Americans typically excluded from formal systems of governance - women, African-Americans, and poor classes of whites. Men and women created a vibrant urban pleasure culture, including the eroticization of print culture, as eighteenth-century readers became fascinated with stories of bastardy, prostitution, seduction, and adultery."--Jacket.