Delaware Sex Ways: “Not to Go into Her but for Propagation”

The Quaker doctrine that “in souls there is no sex” also had another meaning. Among Friends, the Inner Light was thought to be the enemy of the carnal spirit. Quakers drew a sharp distinction between love and lust. William Penn wrote, “It is the difference betwixt lust and love that this is fixed, that volatile. Love grows, lust wastes by enjoyment.”¹

The meetings of Friends, often very active in the discipline of their members, heard sexual offenses less frequently than did Puritans or Anglicans; but when they did so, the punishments were severe. Fornication before marriage, a venial sin for Puritans of Massachusetts and the Anglicans of Virginia, was sometimes cause for disownment, the heaviest penalty in the power of a meeting to inflict. The Leeds preparative meeting, for example, heard only three cases of fornication in twenty years (1692-1712)—all males. But two cases ended in disownment; the third offender was allowed to remain only after receiving condemnation in two successive meetings.²

Quakers were specially interested in ending the sexual exploitation of social inferiors. George Fox in 1672 insisted that any master who had sexual relations with a female servant must marry her, “no matter what the difference in outward rank or race.”³ The meetings of Friends also specifically condemned the predatory attitude toward sexuality which had been so much a part of Virginia’s sexual customs. The Marsden monthly meeting agreed that

All men who hunt after women, from woman to woman, and also women whose affection runs some time after one man and soon after to another and so … draws out the affection one of another and after a while leaves one another and goes to others and do the same things and the doing makes them more like sodomites than the saints and is not of God’s moving nor joyning together.⁴

In addition to these actions by Quaker meetings, the public laws of Pennsylvania were very harsh in their repression of sexual offenses. That colony’s Law Code of 1683 included a statute against fornication which specified that both single men and women should be punished “by enjoyning marriage, or fine, or corporal punishment, or any or all of these.” This statute was more rigorous than those of Massachusetts, Virginia or England. After 1700 it was disallowed by the Crown as “unreasonable.”⁵

For adultery, the penalty in Pennsylvania after 1682 was a year’s imprisonment for the first offense and life imprisonment for the second. A revision in 1700 required that adulterers on the third offense should be branded on the forehead with the letter A. They were not merely required to sew the letter to their clothing as in New England. Quakers decreed that the faces of adulterers should be disfigured permanently for their crime. Quakers did not hang people for adultery, as did the Puritans, but this was because of a difference in attitudes toward capital punishment rather than toward the crime itself.⁶

For the offenses of sodomy and bestiality, the laws of Pennsylvania ordered single men to be imprisoned for life, and whipped every three months. Married men were ordered to be divorced and castrated. Imperial authorities also disallowed this statute as “unreasonable” and excessively severe. The Quakers were not libertarian in matters of the flesh.⁷

On the question of sex within marriage, Quakers were not of one mind. Some carried their sexual asceticism to the point of condemning all carnal relations between husband and wife. This was actually a prevailing view among Friends in New England for a brief period. When the missionary couple Joseph Nicholson and his wife came to Salem in 1660, they reported that most Quaker couples totally abstained from sexual relations; one couple had done so for four years; others for a year or more. The Quaker Mary Dyer who was hanged at Boston believed in total celibacy within marriage.⁸ This attitude survived among radical Quakers even to the late eighteenth century, and gave rise to a sect of Quaker heretics called Shaking Quakers or simply Shakers, who seceded largely on the question of marital celibacy.

Most Quakers did not believe in celibacy, but many tried to restrain sexual activity within marriage. In 1795 a Quaker named Joshua Evans had an interesting conversation with a Shaker on the morality of sex within marriage. The Shaker declared: “The manner you gratify yourselves with your wives when they are not in a capacity of conception but to gratify your lust is fornication, as it is not for multiplying.” To this the Quaker replied:

I told him if others erred they [the Shakers] did on the other hand in forbidding what Christ did not, but taught to leave father and mother and cleave to his wife. And though I did see they were in error, his remarks are worthy of serious thought, that none may abuse that privilege of marriage by gratifying lustful inclinations, with no design of multiplying, and though they carry the matter to an extreme the other way, yet in beholding the sins committed by men and women I do not wonder some are raised up who will not touch women that way. Though I told him the right path lay between us viz. to marry but not to go into her but for propagation and asked if he did not believe the same. He said yea.⁹

That rule of sexual restraint was often carried into practice. Abstinence for extended periods seems to have been common and even normal in Quaker families. Even between husbands and wives, the Quakers urged restraint in the exercise of “animal passions.” When English Quaker Robert Dudley married for the third time, he was visited by two Quaker spinsters of advanced age.

He was warned by one of them against too fondly indulging in conjugal delights, lest, (like Sampson formerly) he should lose the means of his strength, whilst reposing in the lap of his Delilah. The other minister felt (or thought that she felt) a like concern forboth, and my friend assured me, alluded to some things about which they (as old maids) could not have been supposed to know anything. And all this too in the presence of a youth, the son and stepson of the parties!¹⁰

Behind this attitude lay an assumption that sex was sinful in itself, and that a strong physical relationship between a husband and wife threatened to weaken the spiritual foundation of a proper marriage.

Here again the tone was set by William Penn. As early as 1671, when he prepared to marry the beautiful Gulielma Springett, Penn began to be tormented by stirrings of “lust” and “lewd thoughts.” To restrain them, he wrote a paper for the men’s meeting on the eve of his marriage, in which he prayed that he and his wife “may not give way to the inordinate aboundings of affection, for that dishonors the marriage bed, yea that is a defiled bed, as well as grosser pollutions.”¹¹

One unintended consequence of this attitude was that Quakers became the first people in Anglo-America who succeeded in controlling fertility within marriage. In the beginning, birth rates were very high in the Delaware Valley. A Welsh Quaker immigrant named Gabriel Thomas observed before 1690 that there was “seldom any young married woman but hath a child in her belly, or one upon her lap.”¹² But as early as the mid-eighteenth centuryperhaps even earlier—Quakers in the Delaware Valley and also on the island of Nantucket were practicing some method of birth limitation within marriage. How they managed to do so remains unknown, perhaps unknowable. No evidence survives of coitus interruptus in any Quaker family, or contraceptive technology. But much quantitative evidence testifies to a regime of sexual abstinence, single beds, separate rooms and the control of physical contact between husbands and wives.

From an early date, Quakers also encouraged the practices that would be called prudery in the nineteenth century. Quaker meetings carefully monitored female dress and sternly forbade even the slightest hint of sensuality. In 1718 the London yearly meeting went so far as to condemn “naked necks.”¹³ Ordinary language was carefully purged of carnal connotation. A French traveler in the eighteenth century was startled to discover that respectable ladies of Pennsylvania could not bring themselves to speak plainly about their bodies even to their physicians, but delicately described everything from neck to waist as their “stomachs,” and anything from waist to feet as their “ankles.”¹⁴ This prudery had an important function. It lowered the general level of sexual tension in social relationships, even between husbands and wives. The Quakers of the Delaware Valley were very different in that respect from both the New England Puritans and Virginia Anglicans, but very similar to their co-believers in England.

A similar spirit of sexual asceticism was shared by many groups of German Pietists, some of whom practice it to this day. It also became part of the official culture of Philadelphia, which was very different from New York or Baltimore. For many generations, what Digby Baltzell calls “mild sexlessness in the Quaker tradition” set a tone for the sexual ideology of an American region.¹⁵