Bundling; Its Origin, Progress and Decline in America

In 1869, Henry Reed Stiles risked his reputation to defend a custom that 19th-century America had tried to forget. Bundling, the practice where unmarried couples courted through the night in the same bed, fully clothed, was once a blessed part of rural American life. By Stiles's era, it had become an embarrassment that polite society preferred to shroud in silence. This slender volume represents one man's attempt to drag the practice into the daylight of honest historical inquiry, armed with evidence from colonial records, European parallels, and the testimony of those who remembered the old ways. The backlash was swift: the book was banned in Boston in 1872. Stiles documents the practical origins of bundling, sparse firewood, vast distances between farmhouses, the communal architecture of colonial homes, before tracing how an innocent custom came to seem licentious to later generations. What emerges is not merely a historical curiosity but a window into how societies rewrite their own pasts, and what gets lost when embarrassment replaces understanding.