ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the process by which a community intent on securing its own political legitimacy constructed a new model of gender that redefined the feminine as inherently 'disorderly'. The relationship between religion and politics in the revolutionary era has been the subject of much scrutiny, directed for the most part at tracing the ideological, rhetorical, and institutional links between religious dissent and political rebellion in the years between the Great Awakening of the 1740s and the war for independence. As historians of religion have rightly pointed out, revival seasons were just that—seasons—in which conventional religious structures were overturned for a brief moment before being reasserted in somewhat altered form. Celebrated as these cases were, they nonetheless represented extreme instances of the potential for the sexual libertinism implicit in the more individualistic ideology of the Awakening.
