Sexuality In Colonial America

Sexuality, sterilization, and birth control all have a long history that has led to the current laws and approaches on these topics. These issues have caused many conflicts among societies and people in general. Sexuality revolves around a person’s orientation or preference. The main purpose for sexual relations was reproduction. “An accurate portrait of sexuality in the colonial era both incorporates and challenges the puritanical stereotype (D’Emilio & Freedman: 1 &2). Sex in the colonial era was considered as a duty and a joy within marriage, with hopes of procreation. Their were attempts to socialize children to make sure they waited until marriage to have sex. A young person growing up in Colonial America learned about sexuality from

Bell was another significant case that had a lot of impact on this topic. Buck v. Bell was about Carrie Buck who was mentally ill. This case shows that poor white women are also mixed in with black women as burdens on our society. The superintendent of the state colony of the Epileptics and Feebleminded wanted to perform the operation of salpingectomy, cutting of the fallopian tubes, which would sterilize her (Buck v. Bell 1927: 205). The Supreme Court ruled that the “feebleminded” shouldn’t be allowed to produce children. There were three major points of the eugenicists toward the “socially inadequate.” The social, moral, physical, and mental qualities are transmitted in predictable patterns by the mechanisms of genetics, that the human race can be improved by selective mating, and that disease, crime, poverty, and other social issues can be stopped by discouraging or preventing the reproduction of socially inadequate individuals (Lombardo 1996: 3&4). New classes might be added, and races might be brought in with such regulation and the worst forms of cruel government practices would be performed (Buck v. Bell 1927: 202). The court ruled that Carrie should be sterilized in order to keep societies

The birth control, Envoid was released in 1957 which was approved as the first oral contraceptive, which coincided with the baby boom and changing awareness, attitudes, and norms about women’s rights and roles (Bailey 2010:100). Under the Michael and Willis Model, the birth control pill would affect births and outcomes by lowering marginal cost of averting births and by decreasing monthly chance of conception (Bailey 2010:104). The US Supreme Court’s 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut decision, struck down Connecticut’s ban on the use of contraceptives, changed enforcement and cooperation across the United States (Bailey 2010: 101). After this ruling, state legislatures actively changed their laws to permit sales of contraceptives to married women (Bailey 2010: