The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Love, Courtship, & Sexuality Through History - The Colonial And Revolutionary Age Volume 4 by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780313086830
Publisher: Greenwood Press
Published: 2007-12-29T22:00:00+00:00

Cotton Mather contradicts the stereotypical Puritan he is presumed to embody. A strict Congregationalist, a loving father, a scientist, an indefatigable self-promoter, and author, he was endowed with capabilities far beyond the twenty-first-century caricature of a stern man who dressed in black, burned witches, and eschewed pleasure. His views on sexuality, as expressed in sermons, advice literature, and his diary, were in the Puritan mainstream. Coitus was the right and responsibility of all married couples. Puritans believed that sex was an essential component of marriage, not only to primarily fulfill God's command to be fruitful and to multiply, but also to promote marital harmony. Ideally, couples refrained from intercourse during pregnancy and while wives were breastfeeding. Premarital sexual intercourse was illegal. Couples whose first child arrived prior to thirty-two weeks of marriage and women who bore illegitimate children and their partners were prosecuted for fornication and whipped or fined. Masturbation was a moral offence; same-sex sexual activity a criminal offence, and adultery a capital crime. See also Bastardy; Medicine and Science; Religion; Witches and Witch Trials.

Further Reading

Silverman, Kenneth. The Life and Times of Cotton Mather. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.

Medicine and Science

William E. Burns

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the West, medicine and science occupied a much more central role in defining sexual issues, in many ways beginning to displace religion. However this was not a revolutionary break, as the scientific revolution and Enlightenment inherited millennia of Western thought on sex and sexuality. The new medicine and natural philosophy dismantled some old ideas, but many continued, only expressed in a different language.

There were many early modern scientific theories on sex and the differences of the sexes. The two major groups of theories were those that emphasized the similarities of the sexes and those that emphasized their differences. The similarity, or “one-sex” school, drawing on ancient medicine and philosophy, found men's and women's organs analogous—the male nipples to the female breasts, for example. Women were incomplete men, whose primary sexual organs had not been fully pushed out due to insufficient “heat.” Thus the vagina was an inside-out penis, and the ovaries were often referred to as female testes. (The increased attention given to the clitoris from its “discovery” in the late sixteenth century complicated this picture, as it competed with the vagina for the title of “female penis.”) Biological processes as well as organs were claimed as common to males and females—hemorrhoidal bleeding was the male equivalent of menstruation. One consequence of one-sex thinking was the emphasis placed on the female orgasm in conception. Since a man must climax to beget a child, a woman must also climax to conceive one.

The difference school, with less ancient textual authority, conceived of men and women as radically different and complementary, at least in their sexual and reproductive roles. Difference thinkers minimized the importance of structural similarities. The difference thinkers, whose rejection of ancient thought had many parallels in the scientific revolution, became the scientific mainstream during the Enlightenment. The ancient similarity

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