Made In America - Bill Bryson [195]
Sex among the Puritans was considered as natural as eating, and was discussed about as casually, to the extent that ‘the writings of the Puritans required heavy editing before they were thought fit to print even in the mid-twentieth century’.5 Premarital intercourse was not just tolerated but effectively encouraged. Couples who intended to marry could take out something called a Pre-Contract – in effect, a licence to have sex. It was the Puritans, too, who refined the curious custom of bundling, or tarrying as it was just as often called, in which a courting pair were invited to climb into bed together. Though the practice appears to have originated in Wales, it was sufficiently little known in Britain to have become a source of perennial wonder for British visitors to New England up to the time of the American Revolution and somewhat beyond. As one seventeenth century observer explained it:
When a man is enamoured of a young woman, and wishes to marry her, he proposes the affair to her parents; if they have no objection they allow him to tarry the night with her, in order to make his court to her. After the young ones have sat up as long as they think proper, they get into bed together, also without pulling off their undergarments in order to prevent scandal. If the parties agree, it is all very well; the banns are published and they are married without delay. If not they part, and possibly never see each other again; unless, which is an accident that seldom happens, the forsaken fair proves pregnant, and then the man is obliged to marry her.
In fact, more underclothes were yanked off than the chronicler dared to consider, and pregnancy was far more than ‘an accident that seldom happens’. Up to a third of bundling couples found themselves presented with a permanent souvenir of the occasion. Nor did it necessarily mark the advent of a serious phase of a relationship. By 1782, bundling was so casually regarded, according to one account, that it was ‘but a courtesy’ for a visitor to ask the young lady of the house if she cared to retire with him.
Although never expressly countenanced, fornication was so common in Puritan New England that at least one parish had forms printed up in which the guilty parties could confess by filling in their names and paying a small fine. By the 1770s about half of all New England women were pregnant at marriage.7 In Appalachia and other back-country regions, according to one calculation, 94 per cent of brides were pregnant when they went to the altar.8
Not until the closing quarter of the eighteenth century did official attitudes to sex begin to take on an actively repressive tinge with the appearance of the first blue laws. The term originated in Connecticut in 1781 because, it is often said, the state’s laws concerning personal morality were printed on blue paper,9 though other sources say that it was the church laws that were given the blue treatment.10 Whichever was the case, no one knows why blue was thought an apt colour for such laws. More pertinently, I can find no evidence of anyone’s ever having seen a law printed on blue paper. It may simply be our curious tendency to equate blueness with extreme moral rectitude, as in the expressions blue nose and blue stocking. Blue nose is said to have begun as a jocular nineteenth-century New England term for the fishermen of Nova Scotia, whose lives on the frigid waters of the north Atlantic left them with permanently