The rates of pre-marital sex in the mid-eighteenth century were higher than we typically assume. Over 40% of married women gave birth less than nine months after the wedding, thanks to the belief (unapproved by the churches) that legitimate sexual relations could begin when the engagement did.

Mintz, Steven, and Susan Kellogg. Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life. NY: Free Press, 1988, 19.

adjective: Pregnant. A common euphemism for pregnancy back when pregnancy was something to be euphemistic about. The most famous modern usage of it is most likely the I Love Lucy episode, "Lucy is Enceinte" in 1952 where the sitcom was not allowing to use the word "pregnant" on air. That this was only fifty years ago is useful when considering the rhetoric of this passage from one hundred fifty years ago. The cultural mores of one generation have very firm roots in the previous'. Cultural values and taboos change slowly.

In noun form, it also means "a line of fortification enclosing a castle or town; also : the area so enclosed" which has nothing to do with cultural values but is pretty interesting.

Enciente

Due to a lessening of punishments for women who had children out of wedlock, by the middle of the 1800s fewer women kept their pregnancies and births secret. As evidenced by this paragraph, there was still a stigma attached to being an unwed mother, but it was no longer as harsh a sentence. This lead to a decrease in infanticide and an increase in children being left at foundling houses, as the mother no longer needed to go to such extreme measures to make sure no one knew her condition. This decrease in discrete infant deaths and the rise of children left for charity made the problem of illegitimate children far more visible.

Abortion and Infanticide

A woman who found herself unwillingly pregnant in the 18th century had few options. If the man would not marry her and she could not take legal actions against him, she would be left with the burden and shame of an illegitimate child in a society that placed a high premium on female chastity. A secret pregnancy and birth followed by infanticide was many women's solution to the problem.

The "Abandonment and Infanticide" article an encyclopedia on children cites the pre-revolutionary period as a particularly high time of infanticide. With the rise of the ideal of republican motherhood, however, "women were increasingly seen as the nurturers and primary educators of a new democratized citizenry, women’s political significance rose, and the ideal for American womanhood came to include education and patriotism." Additionally, the article cites a softening in the treatment of women pregnant out of wedlock that lead to a decrease in infanticide in favor of leaving children in foundling homes.

Abortion and Infanticide

A pillory was a device used in the physical punishment that dominated colonial justice in the eighteenth century. The prisoner' was entrapped in a metal or wooden frame on posts with holes for the head and the hands. It was primarily used as a public humiliation device, a somewhat milder version of the stocks, though prisoners in the pillory could still be whipped or mutilated if that was part of their sentence. The crowd often participated in the punishment as well by jeering and pelting the immobilized prisoner.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillory

In "Shifting the Scene of the Crime: Sodomy and the American History of Sexual Violence," author Stephen Robertson puts forward that the colonial and later American governments did not pass sodomy laws to criminalize homosexuality but all non-procreative sex acts. Due to the difficulty of proving that sodomy had taken place, those accused of consensual sodomy were rarely convicted of that particular crime. Instead, Robertson argues, sodomy laws historically were used to punish sexual violence. This claim is supported by the fact that the majority of sodomy trails are cases of sexual coercion or assault. The use of sodomy laws to specifically target homosexual activity is then a relatively recent phenomenon.

The specific language of this law, however, does indicate that the lawmakers were interested in specifically regulating male/male relations and conflate it with bestiality.

In 1778, Thomas Jefferson proposed a more moderate punishment for those convicted of sodomy: "Whosoever shall be guilty of Rape, Polygamy, or Sodomy with man or woman shall be punished, if a man, by castration, if a woman, by cutting thro' the cartilage of her nose a hole of one half inch diameter at the least."

The Virginia Legislature, perhaps not wanting to appear soft on crime, often to maintain the traditional punishment of the death penalty instead.

Thomas Jefferson, A Bill for Proportioning Crimes and Punishments

According to the National Archives, "In 1780, £1,000 would have the same spending worth of 2005's £62,850.00" or about $101,000.

This line from Othello comes when Iago is convincing Othello that his wife Desdemona is being unfaithful by suggesting the opposite. When Iago suggests that Desdemona was just giving Cassio an innocent kiss, Othello delivers these lines that mean basically that you cannot claim innocence when you succumb to temptation if you purposefully put yourself in the path of temptation.

In this book, this quote is a response to a doctor who supposedly has slept with a hundred women in the course of his work as a physician. Offering this quote in response to this shows that Samuel Gregory considers this behavior reprehensible but not surprising. This indicates that relations between men and women at this point before doctors replaced midwives was so sexualized and regulated that the author considered that sex was the only outcome that could arise from the sexes intermingling.

The context in Othello

Barred from most public work, one of the few areas women could step out was in occupations that conformed to the image of women as nurturers--nurses and midwives belonging in that category. Nurses would become a larger factor about a decade after this book when the Civil War started and both the Union and the Confederacy would need nurses to tend their soldiers. Women could operate in the public sphere and still be valued if--as the midwives do here--their public occupation fit their private duties.

Hancock, Cornelia. A Union Nurse, Cornelia Hancock, Describes the Aftermath of the Battle of Gettysberg, 1863. 7 July 1863. In Major Problems in American Women's History, 205. Edited by Mary Beth Norton and Ruth M. Alexander. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007.