Puritan-era New England conjures up images of scarlet letters, “sadd-colored” jackets buttoned to the neck, and dour, tight-lipped ancestors with names like Humiliation and Abstinence. Not exactly the most fertile ground for young love to bloom—or so you’d think. Some of the things young people in colonial North America were up to might have made their Victorian descendants faint dead away.
A common (if controversial) dating practice was “bundling,” in which a suitor could spend the whole night in bed with his sweetheart—fully clothed or separated by a “bundling board”—while her parents snoozed away in the next room.
“Their courtships commenc[ed] where ours usually finish,” Washington Irving wrote in 1809.
In theory, it was all quite innocent. As Reverend Samuel Peters explained in 1781, “I am no advocate for temptation; yet must say, that bundling has prevailed 160 years in New England, and, I verily believe, with ten times more chastity than the sitting on a sofa.”
Still, bundling didn’t always remain perfectly chaste, as a popular song of the era suggests:
Some maidens say, if through the nation, Bundling should quite go out of fashion, Courtship would lose its sweets; and they Could have no fun till wedding day […] A bundling couple went to bed, With all their clothes from foot to head, That the defence might seem complete, Each one was wrapped in a sheet. But O! this bundling’s such a witch, The man of her did catch the itch, And so provoked was the wretch, That she of him a bastard catch’d.
As historian Richard Godbeer explains, both religious doctrine and law expected that couples should abstain from sex until after the marriage ceremony. But institutional prohibitions didn’t necessarily coincide with social behaviors. Plenty of people “believed that sex became morally and socially acceptable once a couple committed to each other,” he writes. Those who didn’t wait for marriage weren’t viewed as “rejecting morality so much as following a time-honored popular moral code that distinguished between premarital and casual sex.”
In fact, according to Godbeer, some 30–40 percent of brides in New England were pregnant when they walked down the aisle. Bundling, he argues, was actually a rather conservative practice. It allowed parents to keep track of their daughter’s suitors; if she did happen to get pregnant, there’d be ample witnesses to their courtship, making it easier to put pressure on the relevant parties to get married.