The Forgotten History of Sex in America

In 1627, a professional lace-maker named Thomasine Hall boarded a ship in England and arrived at Jamestown, Virginia, to become a maidservant in the household of a man named John Tyos. Women of English origin were scarce in that part of the New World, amid the recently established and extremely labor-intensive tobacco plantations. A count conducted in 1624 recorded only two hundred and thirty adult women among the twelve hundred and fifty Europeans living in Virginia. Women were urgently needed for marital fellowship and procreation, and male settlers paid the Virginia Company the considerable sum of a hundred and fifty pounds a head for the transportation of prospective wives across the Atlantic. Females were also in demand for their gender-specific domestic skills. This was Hall’s value to Tyos. As an experienced seamstress, Hall, who was twenty-five or so, would have made clothing and other items. Additional duties would likely have included cooking, cleaning, candle-making, and other forms of women’s work.

But was Hall really a woman? After Hall had been living in Tyos’s household for a year or two, rumors started to spread that the supposed maidservant was—in the assessment of one male neighbor—“a man and woeman.” It fell to three local women to perform a physical examination of Hall’s genitals and make their own determination. When their investigation convinced them that Hall was male, the matter came to the attention of Captain Nathaniel Basse, whose military rank and past service in colonial government made him the community’s unofficial leader. Basse asked Hall, Are you a man or a woman? According to a partially surviving record of the exchange, from the Virginia General Court, in Jamestown, Hall “replyed that hee was both.”

Hall had, to go by the court record, “a peece of fleshe . . . as bigg as the top of his little finger”—that is, a penislike appendage, though Hall could not achieve an erection with it. Hall also had “a peece of an hole.” (It’s possible that Hall had a form of congenital adrenal hyperplasia, in which an individual with two X chromosomes produces an unusually large amount of androgen, resulting in an enlarged clitoris.) For Rebecca L. Davis, a professor of history and of women’s and gender studies at the University of Delaware, and the author of “Fierce Desires: A New History of Sex and Sexuality in America” (Norton), Hall’s story is a potent parable, revealing how questions of sex, gender, orientation, and identity had the ability to disrupt communities from the nation’s beginning, thereby laying bare the structures of power, property, and propriety by which those communities were governed.

Whether Hall was a man or a woman mattered a great deal in early America. This helps explain why the maidservant was subjected to multiple inspections, with a succession of witnesses rooting around beneath Hall’s skirts and petticoats for firm proof. A male indentured servant had the opportunity in the New World to work his way toward owning land—to become, Davis writes, “a patriarch of his own household, the governor of a miniature state who was expected to keep his dependents in line and maintain the family’s reputation.” Female servants had no such path to independence; the closest they could get was the status of wife, which itself was a condition of subservience. Imported workers were typically prohibited from marrying for the period of their indentured servitude, which could last from four to seven years, and were therefore barred from having legally sanctioned sex. A female servant’s value to her employer could be drastically undermined if she got pregnant, and she would have a year added to her contract of service to make up for her lost labor. It was, in fact, a rumor that Hall had been sleeping with a female servant in another household which forced questions about Hall’s sex. If the apparent maidservant was actually a man committing fornication that might lead to another servant’s falling pregnant, then Hall was a materially destabilizing influence in the community.

Hall, under examination, attested to a gender-switching backstory. Having been christened with the name Thomasine, Hall began living with an aunt in London at the age of twelve, and seems to have been trained in needlework. A decade later, dressed as a man and going by the name Thomas, Hall enlisted in the English Army, and spent a year in France in the service. Upon returning to England, Hall once again opted for women’s clothes and women’s labor, working as a lace-maker. “Hermaphrodites” and “androgynes” had been known of since ancient times, Davis writes. But, in Hall’s era, society “typically insisted that a person choose one gender—and stick to it. In their refusal to align with a single gender, Hall was unusual.” (Davis uses they/them pronouns for Hall.)

For Davis, what is most important about Hall’s story—with which she opens her book—is what seems most modern about it: Hall’s refusal to be defined within the limitations of a narrow gender binary. This fascinating bit of history is known only from two damaged pages of court documents; nonetheless, historians of sexuality and gender have in recent decades quested through them with no less vigor than Tyos and his neighbors once searched amid Hall’s underthings. In Davis’s own consideration of the case, she offers a heroic reading, in which Hall amounts to a below-stairs Orlando, asserting the right to move fluidly from one identity to another, and thereby subverting what would become the new nation before it even knew what it was.

“Fierce Desires” is billed as the first major history of sex and sexuality in America since John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman published “Intimate Matters,” in 1988. (A third edition was published in 2012.) In their study, D’Emilio, a pioneering historian of gay life, and Freedman, a much lauded feminist historian, wove together a wealth of research about the expression and policing of sexuality in American lives through three centuries, from the family-centered reproductive imperatives of the colonial period to the more romantic model that prevailed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in which sexual relationships were taken as a source of personal identity and happiness. The authors made it clear that, for instance, the Puritans were not so pure. In one case of bestiality prosecuted in Plymouth, the perpetrator was required to identify in a lineup the specific sheep that he’d violated, before both the man and the animals were executed for the crime. In the nineteenth century, Western cowboy culture bred same-sex intimacy, along with bawdy doggerel about saddling up and riding. D’Emilio and Freedman sought to complicate the straitlaced fantasies about the past which religious and political conservatives were promoting in the nineteen-eighties, but reproductive heterosexuality was at the center of their narrative—understandably enough, since reproductive heterosexuality is the structure within which most Americans have lived.

“It’s a paddle, not an oar. I keep hitting you in the head with the paddle.”

Cartoon by Robert Leighton

Davis, on the other hand, centers marginal identities, whether those of nonconforming individuals or those of whole peoples whose sexualities were vilified and constrained by colonial conquest and exploitation. Davis has not written a history of queer America, or a queer history of America. But, determined to show how unstable the binaries of sex and gender always were, she refers us to the seventeenth-century category of “deputy husband”—a woman who might legitimately take over masculine responsibilities in the stead of a long-absent spouse—and to the tender exchanges of nineteenth-century male friends who addressed each other as “husband” and “wife” while also sharing hopes for future female spouses. When Davis does address reproductive heterosexuality, she’s particularly intent on exploring the long history of women’s efforts to exert control over their own bodies, whether through avoiding conception or inducing abortion. She wants to show how the battles of today—over issues like gender nonconformity and reproductive rights—have antecedents that have been forgotten or suppressed.

Like D’Emilio and Freedman, Davis arranges her book chronologically: it runs from colonial-era sex police to the contemporary moral panic over Drag Queen Story Hour. (Her title has an echo of drag terminology, in which “fierce” is a term of approbation.) Unlike her predecessors, however, whose work was a narrative synthesis of research enlivened by dramatic vignettes, Davis tells her history largely through a series of short biographical accounts of individuals, laying out her case studies with a sympathetic imagination that attempts to fill in the inevitable gaps. The figures include Abigail Abbot Bailey, an eighteenth-century New Englander whose efforts to leave her abusive husband, Asa, were hindered not just by strictures against divorce but also by the prevailing attitudes toward conjugal desire. Asa eventually agreed to a parting of ways, but only for fear of being charged with the capital crime of incest, having raped his and Abigail’s teen-age daughter Phebe. And this happened after the penniless Abigail was obliged to take an almost three-hundred-mile solo horseback journey to be reunited with her younger children, from whom Asa had arranged to separate her. Such stories, Davis suggests, need not be typical to be illustrative of what was a common experience among disempowered groups: the experience of sexual coercion, or the threat thereof. At the same time, Abigail’s story is hardly evidence of intergenerational female solidarity. When Asa first began to demand that Phebe accompany him when he was travelling, Abigail seems to have focussed less on the threat to her daughter than on her own neglected status in the role of wife. “My room was deserted,” she complained. Davis notes that “reports of child abuse and incest in divorce cases from the eighteenth century rarely expressed outrage on the children’s behalf.”

The Baileys were white Protestants, but much of Davis’s attention is devoted to individuals from subordinated groups, not least those whose lands European settlers colonized. Davis writes about how Zuni women, in the American Southwest, would pray that a newborn girl would have “large and fruitful sex organs.” (Comparable prayers after the birth of a boy conveyed the hope that his sex organ would remain small.) The sexual habits of certain Indigenous peoples—like uninhibited engagement in premarital sex, or a woman’s practical expectation that a sex partner might give her a blanket or another useful household item afterward—are deduced from the appalled records of confounded Europeans, who had as much difficulty as any of us do in perceiving difference from their own norms as being anything other than perplexing deviance. Certain tribal nations understood that people might have both masculine and feminine qualities—in what has become known as “two-spirit” identities—and sometimes valued such people for their spiritual elevation. A Jesuit priest remarked on boys from tribal nations near Lake Superior who, “while still young, assume the garb of women, and retain it throughout their lives.” Davis notes that, for Native peoples, “gender transition among children assigned female at birth occurred less often,” although she does not explore the cultural conditions of this disparity further.

Davis writes, too, of the sexual exploitation endemic to the institution of slavery. Black women were not only subject to sexual assault from those who enslaved them but were evaluated for their fertility, so that slaveholders could increase the head count of those who labored in their fields. James Marion Sims, the onetime president of the American Medical Association and the so-called father of modern gynecology, developed a technique for repairing fistulas—a complication of childbirth resulting in a hole in the tissue between the bladder and the vagina—by experimenting, without anesthesia, on enslaved women. (A statue of Sims that once stood in Central Park was defaced and then removed, in 2018, after anti-racist protests.) Given the horrendous commodification of the enslaved woman’s reproductive system, the use of folk-medicine abortifacients like sage tea and cotton root functioned as a form of collective defiance. “Resistance to and subversion of enslavement’s brutality occurred not only in slave rebellions but in these intimate acts,” Davis shrewdly observes.

Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, Davis explains, sex and sexuality came to be understood not just as an enmeshment in a social order but also as the expression of individual desire. She gives an account of the origins of “free love,” a term used as early as the eighteen-twenties to characterize the behavior of those who rejected the notion that marriage was the only site for sexual activity. Primarily a pejorative wielded against bigamists, polygamists, and adulterers, the term could also be applied to, say, members of a community in Oneida, New York, established by the would-be theologian John Humphrey Noyes. Comparing marriage to slavery, Noyes insisted that both men and women have sex with multiple partners, and practice birth control, in a system that he called Complex Marriage. Davis does not exactly celebrate the gospel according to Noyes, who sounds like the kind of cult leader about whom Netflix would today make a lurid series. But she nonetheless insists that women who participated in the Oneida experiment—or who followed Brigham Young’s recommendation of polygamy—had made valid choices among the limited alternatives available.

By the later chapters of the book, more of Davis’s biographical subjects are speaking for themselves. Through the story of Steve Kiyoshi Kuromiya, born in the nineteen-forties and raised in Monrovia, California, Davis gives an account of the gay-rights movement, from the postwar “homophile” groups, which sought acceptance for gay people through assimilation into heterosexual society, to the rise of the more radical Gay Liberation Front. This group, of which Kuromiya helped found the Philadelphia chapter, emerged in the wake of the Stonewall riots and partook in the late-sixties iteration of free love, which Davis defines as “a defiant celebration of nonmarital, commitment-free consensual sex.” In her sketch of Kuromiya’s life, she tells of one of his formative experiences—his arrest and three-day detention at the age of ten, after having been caught in a park meeting a sixteen-year-old male acquaintance for sex—drawing not on court documents alleging his delinquency but on Kuromiya’s understanding of it: as an element in an activist’s origin story. According to Kuromiya, it was when he first learned “that somehow I was criminal without knowing it.” Still, the grownup Kuromiya’s utopian conviction that almost all men might find within themselves some degree of same-sex desire if freed from cultural inhibition is an expression of the liberation movement of the sixties and seventies, and now appears as time-bound as any of the other historical verities that Davis skeptically analyzes. Davis does not answer a tricky question that Kuromiya’s account raises: in what contexts could a ten-year-old child be considered a self-directed sexual actor rather than a victim of predation.

In her final chapters, Davis writes of the ways in which a concern for children’s safety in the realm of sex and sexuality has been weaponized by conservative culture-war activists, who, squaring off against Drag Queen Story Hours around the country, have a broader agenda in their sights—quashing advances in L.G.B.T.Q. rights and further restricting women’s access to birth control and abortion. It’s in light of such efforts that Davis offers the story of Thomasine Hall: not just as an early instance of gender nonconformity but as an admirable exemplar of resistance to oppressive systems. Davis explains that, after consideration of the case, the Jamestown court concluded that Hall should adopt men’s attire but also wear an apron and a hair covering appropriate to a woman. “The court effectively created a new gender category for Hall,” she writes.

Davis grants that the intention was to inflict humiliation, but she does not accept that as the only interpretation. Her discussion invites us to see a tacit acknowledgment of Hall’s identity as both male and female, and, therefore, a victory for Hall’s “inventiveness and defiance”—the characteristics that, above all others, this book seeks to uncover everywhere. Did Hall experience the ruling as a victory and a progressive liberation? That seems doubtful, but, in the absence of documentary evidence about Hall’s life after the verdict, Davis permits herself a fanciful speculation. Perhaps, she writes, Hall moved into new geographical terrain, and encountered Indigenous communities who appreciated the expression of a two-spirit identity. The wishfulness of this scenario—in which Hall sheds the constraints of seventeenth-century society and, in the parlance of a queer high schooler newly arrived at college, finds their people—reveals at least as much about our cultural moment as the tattered documents of the Chesapeake reveal about Hall’s. ♦