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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. . The MIT Press and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the editors of The Journal of Interdisciplinary History are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Interdisciplinary History.Sexual expression is a basic human drive and its control, a ubiquitous feature of all societies. Although all cultures prescribe sexual intercourse within marriage, in Western and especially American society sex has been proscribed without. Since behavior obviously does not always conform to norms, essential to uncovering the history of sex is some objective measure of the extent of non-marital intercourse. As Schumpeter once put it, "we need statistics not only for explaining things but also in order to know precisely what there is to explain."I Since children are a measurable, if not inevitable, result of intercourse, premarital pregnancy-operationally defined as the conception, before marriage, of the first postmaritally born child-provides an index of change in sexual behavior. This measure has the advantages of coverage (since nearly all adults marry), reliability (since the births are legitimate and more likely to be recorded than illegitimate births), objectivity (since its measurement depends on the matching of records collected for other purposes), and sensitivity to change in the underlying phenomenon (since premarital pregnancy is a relatively minor violation of the prevailing ban on nonmarital intercourse).What has to be explained in the white American premarital pregnancy record is the cyclical pattern of troughs in the seventeenth century (under Io percent of first births) and mid-nineteenth century (about Io percent) and peaks in the second half of the eighteenth century (about 30 percent) and in contemporary America (between 20 and 25 percent) (Fig. i) . This cycle cannot be explained away by changes in the variables intermediate between premarital coitus and

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