A Well-Ordered Fantasy
Over the weekend I read Washington Post reporter Hannah Knowles’s investigative piece, “Trump’s Second-Term Agenda on LGBTQ Issues Alarms Civil Rights Groups,” which got me digging around again in the Project 2025 document and newly alarmed about what a second Trump term would mean for LGBTQ rights and abortion rights. Much of the GOP policy agenda on queer rights returns to the idea, as the Project 2025 report states, that
family policies and programs under President Biden’s HHS are fraught with agenda items focusing on “LGBTQ+ equity,” subsidizing single-motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage. These policies should be repealed and replaced by policies that support the formation of stable, married, nuclear families.
In the chapter of that 900-page document that addresses changes to the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert Severino writes that “families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society.” I hear echoes in this statement of an idea of the family that goes back to the 1600s and 1700s among the Puritans of New England. We find a good summary in The Well-Ordered Family,” a 1712 collection of sermons by Boston preacher Benjamin Wadsworth. Wadsworth admonished servants to obey their “masters” and children to obey their parents. As for husbands and wives,
The husband’s government ought to be gentle and easy, and the wife’s obedience ready and cheerful. The husband is called the head of the woman. It belongs to the head to rule and govern. Wives are part of the house and family, and ought to be under the husband’s government. Yet his government should not be with rigor, haughtiness, harshness, severity, but with the greatest love, gentleness, kindness, tenderness that may be. Though he governs her, he must not treat her as a servant, but as his own flesh; he must love her as himself.
What Wadsworth is describing is a fantasy, domestic advice porn for the patriarchy-curious. For one thing, this relationship between husband and wife expressed a vision of partnership rooted in inequality; 250 years later, this sort of logic infused the conservative Christian case for “complementary” gender roles (which assigned women to the domestic, childbearing and childrearing zone). And for another, Wadsworth is admittedly describing an ideal, not the reality of his New England community. From the early 1600s through the mid-1750s, fornication (not sodomy!) was by far the most frequently prosecuted crime in both the New England colonies and the English settlements of the Chesapeake. Fornication referred to sex with an unmarried woman (the marital status of the man was irrelevant to the determination of the crime); adultery, less often prosecuted, referred to sex with a married woman.
Households functioned as units of local governance in early America. If a daughter became pregnant prior to marriage, a son got embroiled in a sex scandal, or a servant grew too “familiar” with a neighbor, locals might look to the male head of household to discipline his subordinates. Heads of households could also exercise their authority to get their dependents out of trouble: historians have found that young people caught in sex scandals in the 1600s and 1700s in New England fared better if they had a strong male authority who could negotiate with neighbors for a favorable resolution on their behalf, outside of or in addition to any formal legal channels. That power, of course, also left dependents at the mercy of their household patriarch. A cruel one, as I write in Chapter 3 of Fierce Desires, could make of home a hell. (And Black men in New England, enslaved and free, had much less power than white ones to intervene on a daughter or wife’s behalf.)
The idea that individual families are or should be the basic unit of social life—and that a “family” is very narrowly defined as a mother, father, and their biological children—flies in the face of centuries of change in Americans’ domestic habits and all we know from decades of sex research about actual sexual behaviors. The “stable, married, nuclear family” has always been an ideal, but the version of it that the authors of Project 2025 promote is perhaps the most extreme variation on a theme. Severino states as a norm what is instead a fiction of domestic tranquility that is not simply sexist but delusional.
Book Tour Updates!
Last week I was thrilled (thrilled!!) to participate in an event hosted by the House of SpeakEasy, a literary cabaret at Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater in New York City. It was wild, in the best way. (To see my 10 minutes of fame, scroll forward to minute 8 of the video below.)
All four featured authors that night had the same assignment: deliver 10 minutes of commentary on a theme, without notes. Our theme was “Moments of Clarity.” Going first in the lineup, I started the way I always do: with a historical example. In this case, I spoke about the sex researcher Alfred C. Kinsey, whose 1948 study on male sexual behavior and 1953 study about female sexual behavior fundamentally changed the way Americans talked about sex. Kinsey became a sex researcher somewhat accidentally. In 1938, colleagues of his at Indiana University asked him to teach the university’s first “marriage course.” These classes were becoming increasingly common at American colleges and universities in the 1930s. Kinsey began the way that instructors often do when preparing to teach a new class: he looked for the research that would help him write his lecture notes. But Kinsey was seriously annoyed by what he found: either anecdotal case studies or non-representative samples in purportedly scientific studies. Worse, he found a baked-in assumption in nearly all of these studies about what separated “normal” from “deviant” sex: male-female pairs, particularly married ones. Where was the science, Kinsey asked, to support the claim that this kind of sex was statistically (let alone culturally) “normal”?
TL/dr (or, read Chapter 12 of Fierce Desires): there was no research to support those claims, and Kinsey’s own research, which he launched in the mid-1940s with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, instead found extraordinary variation in Americans’ sexual behaviors. He found that variation is the norm. From data showing that about 37% of the men he interviewed had had at least one sexual encounter with another man, to evidence of high incidences of premarital, extramarital, solo, and queer sex among women, the “Kinsey Reports” revealed an American people having and enjoying many kinds of sex, only some of which was marital.
Kinsey spoke the language of science and statistics, but in writing Fierce Desires: A New History of Sex and Sexuality in America, I needed a different approach. The one I settled on was storytelling. And where Kinsey encountered a dearth of evidence when he started out, I grappled with a deluge, from oral histories and manuscripts in archives, to the shelves of books and articles by independent and academic historians. These stories did not bring me to any conclusions about what “mainstream” let alone “normal” Americans thought (or did) about sex. Instead, they reminded me, again and again, about how weirdly wonderfully different people are, and how important sexuality has become to self-expression.
New in print!
Check out a brand-new book by Marie-Amélie George, Family Matters: Queer Households and the Half-Century Struggle for Legal Recognition (Cambridge, 2024).
Sources on Household Governance
Morris, M. Michelle Jarrett. Under Household Government: Sex and Family in Puritan Massachusetts. Vol. 180. Harvard Historical Studies. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013.
Shammas, Carole. A History of Household Government in America. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002.
Whiting, Gloria McCahon. “Power, Patriarchy, and Provision: African Families Negotiate Gender and Slavery in New England.” Journal of American History 103, no. 3 (2016): 583–605.