Jonathan Edwards With Adolescence on His Hands Too, Part II

A Form of Adolescence found in Early 1700s New England, way before Stanley Hall’s 1905 “Adolescence”

Also from a bit earlier in the book….

“Edwards’ most lengthy exposition in his catalogue of vices had to do, predictably, with the indulgences of the young. The fault lay first with all parents. Family government and education, the keystone of the old Puritan social system, had fallen badly in decline. Parents, he observed, were reacting against what they felt were too strict upbringings.

The most notorious result was the ‘amazing’ impurities tolerated among the young in recent years. Not only was lasciviousness encouraged by nightwalking and similar frivolities, but New England parents allowed practices of ‘bundling’ in which parents allowed young people to spend the night in bed together partly clothed…

...Bundling, which was supposed to be a way of getting acquainted without sexual intercourse, did not always work as advertised. Pregnancies before marriage were rising dramatically in New England. Even in well-churched Northampton, where premarital pregnancies were rarer than in some parts of the region, the figure had recently risen to one in ten first children born within eight months of marriage. Premarital sex was commonplace. Even when it resulted in pregnancy, so long as the couple married, there was no longer much stigma involved.” pp. 130-131

From, Jonathan Edwards—A Life by George Marsden, Yale University Press, 2003

G. Mark Sumpter