Chastity Tools in Puritan New England June 2, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern , trackback
This image is a twentieth-century reconstruction of three items crucial to love-making in seventeenth-century New England. (The source is David Hackett Fischer’ Albion’s Seed, p.80 a long book that can be read as well by dippings as by hours of earnest reading: the artist was Jennifer Brody.) Now take a moment and puzzle over this collection of chastity enforcers. Can you identify any of them? Can you work out their purpose? All were to protect young couples from themselves, but also, as Fischer points out, earned some privacy for poor put-upon teens, and so were popular.
The courting stick was as long as eight feet with a widening at either end. In early phases of courtship you would sit Martha on one side of the fire, Matthew on the other, and allow them to communicate their ‘chilly telephonic lovemaking’ while they were in the company of their respective families. One source referred to the courting stick as a ‘baton of propriety’. However, once Martha and Matthew had declared their love, they could graduate to unchaperoned forms of conversation and this brings us to the board.
The board was placed in the centre of beds during bundling: bundling, of course, is that custom, explored previously on this site, whereby young couples could share beds together in courting, as long as their family and the community thereabouts had guarantees of proper behaviour. The board, by placing a simple barrier between male and female, meant that though words might be exchanged, and perhaps kisses (?), there would be no other physical contact. That at least was the theory.
The last object is a bundling stocking. If reading the description of the bundling board, you thought, ‘well, that’s not going to stop two eighteen year olds who are made for each other’, Beach would pull out this long woolen condom. The young girl was tied into the stocking (perhaps also the man?), and this lust windsock became an early modern chastity belt. There was no getting in; or if there was it would have been hellishly difficult to put the thing back on in place and for your mother-in-law not to notice: cue Matthew being dragged downstairs by his ear. A bundling board might not keep the couple safe from each other, particularly if we factor in the human gift for acrobatics when fired by desire. But the bundling stocking looks good but for all the most determined paramours.
Other forms of early modern ‘protection’: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
