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Virgins on the cutting-room floor
Excerpt from Chapter Ten: To Go Where No Man Has Gone Before
Despite what would grow into two distinct cultures, the New England Puritans and the early Virginia settlers shared a vision in which civil and religious organization were one and the same. In the Holy Commonwealth, where ecclesiastical and civil principles of government were, by definition, not distinct categories, it became possible to prosecute and punish as civil crimes acts whose primary offense was to morality. In the northern colonies, as we have seen, this often took the form of fornication prosecutions, but other behavior problems, such as violations of the Sabbath, could also earn a legal response. But the laws of the southern colonies soon changed to accommodate conditions peculiar to that region, namely the formation of plantations, the demographics of immigration, and the institution of slavery.
Where Massachusetts Bay Colony was formed primarily of households, the mid-Atlantic colonies rapidly filled with plantations and farms. In New England, colonists lived in physically small communities where houses were close together and there was a great deal of daily contact between community members. Along the Chesapeake, plantations were separated by large distances, so that often people only saw their neighbors at church and knew little of their daily comings and goings. People who emigrated to Massachusetts typically did so in order to participate in the social and religious culture of the colony as much as they did to seek their economic fortune, and so there were relatively few indentured servants and no slaves. The mid-Atlantic colonies, by comparison, attracted many economic migrants who paid for their passage by contracting for indentured servitude, and additionally imported thousands upon thousands of African slaves. Life among the large, far-flung plantations of the Chesapeake region was a very different experience than the life-in-a-Protestant-fishbowl experience of the densely packed New England towns.
In some ways, culture of the plantations can be likened to the medieval manorial system: a relatively small number of landowning households, each headed by a paterfamilias who controlled a sizeable physical domain worked by people occupying vastly lower social stations, all of whom came legally under the paterfamilias' control. The way the law worked in the mid-Atlantic region often recalled a feudal model too. Free men—those neither indentured servants nor slaves—were rarely prosecuted for moral crimes like fornication. Those whose sexual liberty represented a threat to the class system, on the other hand, frequently found themselves facing fines, floggings, or, depending on who they were and who they'd been sexual with, worse.
Where run-of-the-mill fornication proceedings were concerned, the Virginia government's approach rapidly became rather laissez-faire. Realizing that stiff penalties were failing to discourage moral offenses like fornication and adultery, the state legislators responded in a fashion their Massachusetts brethren never would've dreamt of doing: in 1696 many penalties for such offenses were lowered substantially. Throughout the seventeenth century, as many as 30% of Virginia brides were pregnant at their weddings, without much threat of a Massachusetts-style postmarital fornication hearing when their babies were born "prematurely." Even rape was infrequently prosecuted, except when the cases involved trespass of either class or color lines in a direction that compromised women who were at the top of the race/class hierarchy.
On the surface, this might seem to suggest that virginity was not much of a concern to the Virginia planters, or at least not as much of one as it was for their neighbors to the north. On the contrary, protecting and preserving virginity and all its semantic and psychological trappings was of paramount concern—for women of a particular color and class. For others it effectively failed to exist except as something which could, and very well might, be preyed upon.
Class and race organized and stratified Virginian culture in a way that was generally unwritten and ruthlessly enforced. At the top of the pyramid were wealthy European and European-descended free white men; at the bottom, enslaved African and African-descended women. In between came everybody else, with black slaves occupying the bottom and most thoroughly disenfranchised tier, indentured and free poor white men taking up the middle ground.
Hovering just below the men at the top were their wives and daughters. These were the women for whom virginity was the most overwhelming concern, the bearers of the next scions of the elite white class around whom the Colonial and early National south revolved. The wealthy white women of the plantations ideally embodied the classic Protestant mode of female chastity: spotless virginity before marriage, absolute monogamy afterwards, their conduct from birth to grave a seamless show of moral rectitude, utterly beyond suspicion. This was no mere piety or sanctimonious respect for virginity at work. It was a success strategy in a world where a lady's honor was a bargaining chip of substantial importance when negotiating possible marriage partners from among a fairly limited pool of elite men. As the ornaments of their families, they were expected to uphold a tradition of gentility, graciousness, Godliness, and hospitality that reflected not only their social standing in their communities but their economic ability to devote their time to niceties .
An appearance of angelic sexlessness was an integral part of this image. Although sexual attractiveness in the form of beauty and lavish dress were of great concern, there was little chance that an elite woman would, or could, admit to sexual interests or desires. Her sex life was meant to be conducted with the greatest reluctance and decorum, and solely within the precincts of marriage. A great deal of emphasis was placed on protecting these women's honorable reputation, to the extent that insults to female chastity might lead to deadly duels fought by their male relations.
Of course, no similar restrictions applied to the men. Just as they were at the top of the socioeconomic ladder, white men and particularly white moneyed men were at the top of the ladder of sexual privilege as well. The further a woman was from being an unsullied flower of white Southern womanhood, the more likely their husbands were to consider her fair game. As the secret diaries of Virginia governor (and founder of the state capitol of Richmond) William Byrd disclose, wealthy and powerful men commonly engaged in sex with their servants and slaves. White servants had a certain ability to resist such advances, or at least to manipulate them to their advantage in some way, perhaps using sex as a way to get a more prestigious position in the household, or preferential treatment. But those who did not give consent were not necessarily spared.
Being a member of the gentlemanly class brought with it a certain immunity from consequences, even for rape. In any event it was unlikely that a member of the lower classes would attempt to press charges in a case they would almost certainly lose. Slaves had no legal protection from rape. As chattel, and furthermore as legal non-persons, they had no legal ability to resist when it came to white men's demands for sex. For a Virginia planter, the world thus consisted of two types of women: women of his own class, to whom sexual access was strictly limited and heavily regulated, and women of every other class, to whose bodies he could often insist on having access. Virginity became inextricably tied to class and race. Only elite white women could expect that the society they lived in would value their virginity highly enough to protect it further than they might be able to protect it themselves. For other women, any value placed on virginity was limited to whatever paltry protection their skin color and class could buy them.
Little is known about what the culture of virginity was like among non-elite and enslaved Southerners. Whites could, to some degree, attempt to emulate the elite in prizing premarital virginity, but at the same time poor white women were vulnerable to sexual abuse by rich white men. Slaves, furthest down on the socioeconomic ladder, had no workable recourse against sexual abuses. The forced emigration of slavery and the frequent reality of sale and relocation destroyed family and community ties. Refusal to comply with the requests of an owner or master, or attempts to fight them, could be answered with violence, sale, or murder with no consequence to the white person in question. In his remarkable 1789 autobiography, former slave Olaudah Equiano (he purchased his own freedom in 1766) depicted this abuse in simple, uncompromising prose: "It was almost a constant practice with our clerks, and other whites, to commit violent depradations on the chastity of the female slaves. ...I have known our mates to commit these acts most shamefully to the disgrace, not of Christians only, but of men. I have known them to gratify their brutal passion with females not ten years old." English-born Georgia plantation wife and noted literary journalist Fanny Kemble also wrote affectingly of the routine rape, harrassment, and other sexual use of slave women by white men.
One result of this sexual split in the culture, and specifically of the sexual availability of slave women as opposed to the sexual inaccessibility of elite white women, was the development of a myth of innately promiscuous blackness versus inherently virginal whiteness. Men, particularly white men, grew to expect that not only would black women be sexually available, but that they were, just as indigenous women were imagined and perceived to be, "naturally" more sexually expressive than white women, primitives who were free of the "civilized" morality that made white women so virtuous.
Sex across the racial border was both common and strictly regulated. White men could have sex with black women without penalty. Any child of an enslaved mother was by law born a slave, regardless of the color or identity of the father. But sexual relationships between white women and non-white men (marital ones being, of course, illegal) drew severe penalties. A white woman who bore a child sired by a black or mulatto man in Virginia could be sold into indentured servitude, as could her child. Maryland's anti-miscegenation law held that any white woman who actually married a black slave was to serve her husband's master—effectively making her both black and a slave—until her husband's death.
These philosophies were also enforced through Draconian laws concerning black-on-white rape. Of eighteen rape cases brought in Virginia local and general courts between 1670 and 1767 in which a white plaintiff accused a black man or men of rape, only two cases were dismissed and at least twelve of the accused black men were executed. Until 1769, when the punishment was officially restricted to those convicted of rape or attempted rape, black men who committed any sexual acts (including consensual ones) with white women could be sentenced to castration for their crime. The punishment of castration was justified by the long-held belief that just as black women were "naturally" more sexual than white women, black men were sexual supermen who could hardly control their lusts and who had unnatural urges to specifically defile white women. These beliefs also contributed to the popularity and psychological potency of lynch mobs. Capital punishment was not always prescribed as the official penalty for black men who had sex with white women, but lynch mobs could often be counted upon to carry out executions which the courts did not or could not demand. Tellingly, lynchings often included the disfigurement or amputation of the victim's genitals.
The cruel racism of this system, and particularly the inequality and inhumanity of its punishments, has become legendary. Its effect on contemporary American ideas of virginity has never been specifically studied. But the traces of a colonial history do not vanish with statehood, and the dynamics of institutionalized slavery do not simply evaporate when emancipation arrives. They linger on in the everyday lives, thoughts, literature, and laws of a country and its people. In the U.S., anti-miscegenation laws were not the subject of Supreme Court review until 1967 (Loving v. Virginia). Even then, the last American state to overturn its anti-miscegenation law, Alabama, did not do so until November 2000. The old notion of innate black promiscuity still persists in the stereotyping of urban African-Americans particularly as "welfare queens" and "baby daddies," and has shown up even in recent public school sex education curricula such as the controversial Sex Respect program. The colonial- and early Federal-era assumptions that brown skin and promiscuity go hand in hand and that virginity is a status to be expected of well-off white women but not black or poor ones are still very much with us in the twenty-first century. Even what seems like very old history can, as we have seen, cast a long shadow when it comes to cultural assumptions and sex.
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