History of Marriage and Sex

Times have changed. Nowadays even a work as mundane as this one cannot be complete without sex rearing its head, which we gather is not so ugly as it was when we were adolescents. There are no normative at­titudes toward sex, since they change, like everything else, over time. Connecticut people, along with the rest of the world, have sometimes been promiscuous and sometimes restrained. A number of serious histo­rians have investigated the matter.

The earliest probing of the issue of sex was that by Charles F. Adams in “Some Phases of Sexual Morality and Church Discipline in Colonial New England,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 26(1916):477-516. Adams brought to light a sexual looseness in the seventeenth century that was not in style during the generation before World War I, when he wrote. An attempt to refute him was made by H. B. Parkes in two articles in the New England Quarterly: “New England in the Seventeen-thirties” 3(July, 1930)3:397-419; and “Morals and Law En­forcement in Colonial New England” 5(July, 1932)3:431-52. But Adams’ position was thoroughly supported in what is the best discussion of the matter, a book that all teachers who deal with the colonial period should know, Edmund S. Morgan’s The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Rela­tions in Seventeenth-Century New England (1944; Harper Torchbook, 1966). For a shortcut, see Morgan’s “The Puritans and Sex,” New England Quar­terly 15(December, 1942)4:591-607. All these works include considerable Connecticut materials.

Cliometricians are working their programs and computers to arrive at a more complete understanding of sexual behavior throughout our his­tory, but none of their studies have yet focused on Connecticut. There are, however, a few traditional studies of marriage, sex, and divorce in Connecticut.

Barron, Milton L. People Who Intermarry: Intermarriage in a New England Industrial Community. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1946. The community is Derby; the years are 1930 to 1940. The volume of marriages related directly to the ethnic and religious similarity of the groups involved. Marriages were least frequent across race; less infrequent across religion; and more common across ethnicity.

Board of Student Editors. “Family Law Jurisdiction: Its Connecticut Back­ground.” Connecticut Bar Journal 26(September, 1952)3:302-13. This article in­volves considerable historical material all the way back to the seventeenth cen­tury.

Brooks, Carol Flora. “The Early History of the Anti-Contraceptive Laws in Mas­sachusetts and Connecticut.” American Quarterly 18(1966)1:23+. There was a widespread effort to suppress discussion of contraception before the 1830s. The laws were originally passed not in relation to religious doctrine but “to give legal support to a widespread attitude about obscenity.” (p. 23) The only op­position was from free-speech advocates. Both Connecticut and Massachusetts passed anti-contraceptive laws in 1879. One of the leading figures in pushing the legislation through the Connecticut General Assembly was the Chairman of the House Committee on Temperance, one P. T. Barnum.

Cohen, Sheldon S. “To Parts of the World Unknown: the Circumstances of Di­vorce in Connecticut, 1750-1797.” Canadian Review of American Studies 11 (Winter, 1980)3:275-93. A survey of 839 divorce petitions, 1750-1797. The prime cause of divorce was desertion, the sole legal ground given in over half the petitions surveyed.

Cohn, Henry S. “Connecticut Divorce Mechanism, 1636-1967.” American Journal of Legal History 14(1970)1:35-54. “The paper is divided into four periods, begin­ning with earliest times and ending at the present. Within each period the means employed by the parties to obtain a divorce are explored and new developments are indicated. Examples are taken from the legislative records and court documents of the day, showing the intricacies of jurisdiction, proof, judgement, and appeal. This is then a study of the absorption of the once taboo action of divorce into Connecticut’s judicial framework.” (p. 35) The author, a student at the University of Connecticut when this was published, is wrong; divorce was not taboo in Connecticut, even in the seventeenth century.

Dudziak, Mary L. "Just Say No: Birth Control in the Connecticut Supreme Court Before Griswold v. Connecticut, Iowa Law Review 75 (May 1990) 4:915-39.

Godbeer, Richard. "'The Cry of Sodom': Discourse, Intercourse, and Desire in Colonial New England," William and Mary Quarterly, 3^rd ser. 52 (April, 1995) 2:259-286. Godbeer says that colonial New Englanders did not include a category of homosexual in their characterological typology. Sodominical acts were treated as behaviors -- even when a pattern was evident for periods of thirty years and more -- and punished (or, more often, not punished) as such.

Godbeer's principal case in point is located in Windsor in the period after 1650. Citation #6 on p. 260 will lead readers to other scholarly discussions of sexuality in colonial New England.

Pollack, Harriet. ‘“An Uncommonly Silly Law’: The Connecticut Birth Control Cases in the U.S. Supreme Court.” Doctoral dissertation, Columbia, 1967. The focus is on Griswold v. Connecticut 381 U.S. 479 (1965). “The twenty-five year judicial campaign was conducted by an elite pressure group [the] Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut and so intimately involved were leading faculty members of Yale University that the cases came to be known facetiously as the ‘Yale Project.’” The role of pressure groups in the judicial process, the role of the supreme court as a policy-making body, and the “relationship of law to morality” are all considered, (quotations from the abstract)

Pope, Laura M. The Connecticut Abortion Statutes: Legislative History, Case Law De­velopment, Comparative Analysis, Some Recommendations: A Report to the Connecticut Law Revision Committee. Hartford, 1966. A very useful ninety-five-page pamphlet.