Courtship

views updated

COURTSHIP

The process of finding a marriage partner increasingly became the province of young adults alone during the Revolutionary and early Republic eras. Mutual love was to be nurtured during courtship rather than spring from a union in marriage. Such changes were an important departure from colonial patterns, where elders and youth jointly negotiated courtship and couples were to cultivate warmth once wed.

colonial legacy

In colonial America, parents and village communities exerted significant influence over the courtship process. Particularly in northern subsistence farm communities, fathers were likely to use their control of available land to sway the courtship process. Children who spurned the wishes of their parents risked losing access to the land they needed for establishing their own families. In addition, village institutions, such as the church and court, checked the sexual behavior of young adults during courtship. Fornication, sex outside of marriage, was likely to earn both young men and women fines or whippings. Such surveillance mechanisms were weaker in the South, but planter patriarchs with large property holdings certainly could exert influence over the young. Family and community did not merely check the behavior of the young; they also promoted the courtship process. At social gatherings such as corn huskings, young men and women met and began to talk. Parents and friends also acted as marriage brokers, initiating and carrying on correspondence on behalf of courting couples. Still, deep bonds between partners were expected to await matrimony.

revolutionary freedoms

During the late eighteenth century a number of forces conspired to tilt control of courtship increasingly towards the young. As land supplies were depleted through successive divisions, parents lost leverage, especially after the West was opened up following American independence. In addition, courts and churches decreasingly regulated the sexual behavior of youth. Young men, in particular, were no longer punished for the sin of fornication. Simultaneously, as Americans approached the Revolution they grew weary of stern patriarchs, eagerly buying books penned by the English writer Samuel Richardson (1689–1761), who denounced parents who stood in the way of love and meddled in courtship. While most courting still happened in large social gatherings, young couples were afforded more privacy. An interesting compromise developed between parents and children in the practice of bundling. Young men and women were permitted to sleep together in one bed but had to be fully clothed. In addition, social gatherings were increasingly age-specific, with groups of young men and women interacting in various settings without the presence of adults. Not surprisingly, loosened surveillance allowed more illicit sex. By the late eighteenth century, close to one in three women was already pregnant by the time she was married.

new restrictions

Such a departure from past patterns produced cultural backlash. In the final years of the eighteenth century and early years of the nineteenth century, American authors such as Susanna Rowson and Hannah Foster earnestly took up the theme of seduction. In novels and short stories, these writers warned young women against the danger of male suitors who might steal their chastity and dash their marriage prospects. Seduction tales became a critical cultural site where new ideas about masculinity and femininity were forged. The mobile young man appeared as a lecherous villain whose wiles innocent young women were warned to avoid. In addition, women were advised to seek parental guidance in courtship. Such stories also carried important political overtones, with women's innocence seemingly embodying the virtue upon which the early nation depended. Such literature seems to have prefigured and directed changes in courting behavior. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, parents did not reassume control of the courtship process, yet sexual experimentation among the young did become more restrained. Coitus was increasingly reserved for married life as courting couples merely engaged in intimate petting.

early-nineteenth-century markets

Sexual and social fulfillment during courtship may also have been less necessary as new options appeared in urban America in the early nineteenth century. A young man could find a brothel with greater ease so that he might pursue sex with fewer emotional commitments. Some young women saw plying this illicit trade as a way to escape overbearing parents and enjoy sexual freedom. More conventionally, young men and women alike entertained one another in parlors and gathered in dance halls and theaters to meet prospective partners. In the South, young men and women of affluence had fewer options, except when young men took advantage of slave women. Not only did young people live at greater distances from peers, but in addition, property considerations were more likely to constrict the range of eligible partners. Young elite women were marrying at considerably younger ages than their female northern peers. As they married older men, they also were likely to be entering more unequal relationships. Nevertheless, these were not to be loveless matches. Among southerners, as with northerners, young adults increasingly expected love to develop during courtship. Without it, a couple was unsuited to go forward into marriage.

courtship under slavery

Courtship among African American slaves also underwent important transitions between the mid-eighteenth century and the Age of Jackson. By the time of the American Revolution, courtship was becoming a more realistic prospect for southern slaves. While state authorities never officially sanctioned the terminus of courtship, that is, marriage, slaves managed both to court and to marry one another. When slavery first became a significant presence in the late seventeenth century, the relatively small size of plantations and imbalanced sex ratios left few opportunities for young suitors. As plantations expanded and the sex ratio evened, however, young men and women could find more potential companions. And yet courtship was always more tenuous for blacks than for whites. As they paired off, African American couples always stood in danger of losing one another through forced sales, especially as cotton boomed in the Southwest in the early nineteenth century. In addition, some masters were quite willing to enforce matches on young slaves, thereby eliminating the courtship process. Still, many masters recognized the dangers of coercion when it came to matters of the heart. Some were even willing to allow young male slaves to court women on neighboring plantations, recognizing that denying such a privilege would create too much costly struggle with their bondsmen. Nonetheless, true courting freedom for African Americans would have to wait until the end of slavery in the Civil War era.

bibliography

Dayton, Cornelia Hughes. Women before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1639–1789. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.

Fliegelman, Jay. Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750–1800. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

Genovese, Eugene. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Pantheon, 1974.

Hessinger, Rodney. Seduced, Abandoned, and Reborn: Visions of Youth in Bourgeois America, 1780–1850. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.

Rothman, Ellen K. Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America. New York: Basic Books, 1984.

Rodney Hessinger

Encyclopedia of the New American Nation