The Attitudes Of Puritans Towards Sex: Crime And Punishment
Henry Adams once made an observation that only two Americans, Walt Wittman and Bret Harte, gallantly wrote about sex. Puritans, unlike popular presumption, were not to be held accountable for the prudish views held by most Americans. Samuel Willard and John Cotton, both ministers in the Old South Church, viewed sexual intercourse as part of human nature and was a necessity in marriage. Puritans were not abstinent in nature; they merely held the notion that earthly pleasures should not interfere with one’s servitude to God. They believed that sexual exploits in marriage were like any other forms of pleasure like food and drink, and were all supposed to be refrained from during days of fasting. Evidently, Puritans stance of sex outside marriage was purely antagonistic. They actively passed laws that dealt with cases of adultery and fornication through death and flogging respectively. They understood that human beings were prone to sin and falling short of God’s glory, but carried out punishments for fear of God’s wrath. Cases of sexual offences in the seventeenth century were so common as many of the first settlers in America had their wives back home in England. The number of men in the colonies was too high and they needed ways to satisfy their sexual needs. Servants of these English men also formed another group of people who frequently looked for ways to satisfy their sexual urges outside marriage. In theory, all servants lacked a private life which led them to undertake their sexual escapades during the night when they could easily slip away from the house.
Sometimes the servants entertained themselves in their bedchambers, if available, while their masters slept upstairs. Many cases of fornication among servants occurred in this way and records showed that sometimes masters took advantage of their maids and subjected them to sexual abuse. The increase in extra-marital sexual activities led to an increase in the number of illegitimate children being born among the Puritans. They solved this when in 1661, the General Court of Massachusetts ordered that any man accused of fathering a child out of wedlock would support the child. Notably, the increase in these sexual occurrences led the Puritans to be more lenient with their punishments. This saw adultery and rape being punished through whipping and/or a fine and some form of marking to identify the individual. Fornication met a lighter form of whipping or finning while cases of sodomy were punishable by death. The Puritans saw it better to take precautionary measures to curb the menace by seeing to it that children got married as early as possible and forbade any illicit relations among people who were not married. These precautions did not in any way hinder any sexual activity among the puritans but in some way reduced its number from what it would have otherwise been.
In conclusion, the Puritan views towards sex encouraged man to accept his human nature without neglecting his Godly duty and treated offenders with great understanding. Their rules aimed at enforcing the commandments made by God that only allowed sexual intercourse in the confines of marriage. The Puritan way of life views that sexual intercourse is a human necessity and in no way do they portray the prejudice that is commonly associated with them.
Works Cited
- Edmund, Morgan S. “The England Quarterly. ”, Vol. 15, No. 4 (Dec. ,1942), pp. 591-607
