History in the United States
How the country named, judged and eventually stopped punishing sex outside marriage.
All topics · 10
Fornication in Puritan New England: Crime, Court and Punishment
New England's Puritan colonies treated fornication as a crime under laws shaped by Scripture. In Plymouth Colony, a sample of court records from 1633 to 1643 shows 19 fornication convictions, punished by whipping, the stocks, fines or a bond for good behavior. In the 1660s, fornication convictions equaled drunkenness convictions, at 35 each.
View the topic →
Were Scarlet Letters Real? Shaming Punishments in Colonial America
Yes, in some cases. Plymouth Colony's 1658 law ordered convicted adulterers to be whipped and to wear the cloth letters "AD" on their clothing, and a 1694 Massachusetts law required a capital A two inches long. Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850) turned this kind of penalty into the story of Hester Prynne.
View the topic →
A History of Fornication Laws in the United States
There was no single date. Fornication laws came from colonial codes and survived statehood: North Carolina's cohabitation statute dates to 1805, Georgia's to laws of 1833 and South Carolina's to 1880. Courts and legislatures dismantled them piecemeal. Since Lawrence v. Texas (2003), the remaining statutes are considered unenforceable against consenting adults in private.
View the topic →
Race and Fornication Laws: From Pace v. Alabama to McLaughlin v. Florida
In Pace v. Alabama (January 29, 1883), the Supreme Court upheld an Alabama law punishing interracial adultery or fornication with two to seven years in prison, far more than the ordinary offense. It reasoned that both partners received the same penalty. McLaughlin v. Florida (December 7, 1964) struck down an interracial cohabitation law and rejected Pace's view of equal protection.
View the topic →
The Mann Act and Caminetti v. United States: Policing Unmarried Couples
In practice it could. In Caminetti v. United States (January 15, 1917), the Supreme Court held that the Mann Act's ban on interstate transport for an "immoral purpose" covered taking a woman from Sacramento to Reno as a mistress, with no money involved. Since 1986 the law, 18 U.S.C. § 2421, refers instead to prostitution or criminal sexual activity.
View the topic →
When an Idaho County Prosecuted Teenagers for Fornication
One well-documented case came in 1996, when the Gem County prosecutor in Idaho revived a fornication law that the press dated to 1921 against pregnant teenagers and their boyfriends; press estimates ranged from about six to ten young people charged. The offense carried up to six months in jail and a $300 fine. Idaho repealed the law in 2022.
View the topic →
The Kinsey Reports and Premarital Sex in Postwar America
Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), built on thousands of interviews, reported that sex before marriage was far more common than Americans admitted: about 85% of men and roughly half of women in his samples. Later federal survey data put the figure at 95% by age 44.
View the topic →
Bowers v. Hardwick: The 1986 Ruling That Lawrence Overturned
In Bowers v. Hardwick (June 30, 1986), the Supreme Court upheld Georgia's sodomy law 5-4, finding no constitutional right to the conduct at issue. Georgia's own Supreme Court struck the law down under the state constitution in 1998, and in 2003 Lawrence v. Texas expressly overruled Bowers, undermining laws that punish private sex between consenting adults, fornication statutes included.
View the topic →
Massachusetts and Fornication: From Bible Commonwealth to Repeal
Yes, for more than three and a half centuries. A colonial law of 1642 let judges punish fornication by ordering marriage, a fine or corporal punishment. By 1972, as Eisenstadt v. Baird recorded, it was a misdemeanor carrying a thirty-dollar fine or three months in jail. Chapter 155 of the Acts of 2018 repealed it, along with adultery.
View the topic →
Utah's 1973 Fornication Law and Its 2019 Repeal
Utah repealed Code § 76-7-104, its 1973 law making sex between unmarried people a class B misdemeanor, through Senate Bill 43 in 2019. The House passed it 41-32 and Governor Gary Herbert signed it on March 27, 2019; the repeal took effect May 14, 2019. A separate bill, House Bill 40, repealed adultery and consensual sodomy that year.
View the topic →