Regulating Passion

"Sexuality was critical to how individuals experienced, learned, and contested their place in early America. Regulating Passion shows the sweeping changes that affected the social and political morass centered on sexual behavior during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Massachusetts -- even as patriarchy remained important to those configurations of power. Charting the government's and society's management of sexuality, Kelly A. Ryan uncovers the compelling stories of the individuals charged with sexual crimes and how elites hoped to contain and exploit 'illicit' sexual behavior" -- publisher's description.