Domestic Revolutions

A Social History Of American Family Life

Steven Mintz, Susan Kellogg

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 1989
• ISBN:
  9781439105108
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

An examination of how the concept of "family" has been transformed over the last three centuries in the U.S., from its function as primary social unit to today's still-evolving model. Based on a wide reading of letters, diaries and other contemporary documents, Mintz, an historian, and Kellogg, an anthropologist, examine the changing definition of "family" in the United States over the course of the last three centuries, beginning with the modified European model of the earliest settlers. From there they survey the changes in the families of whites (working class, immigrants, and middle class) and blacks (slave and free) since the Colonial years, and identify four deep changes in family structure and ideology: the democratic family, the companionate family, the family of the 1950s, and lastly, the family of the '80s, vulnerable to societal changes but still holding together.

CHAPTER I
The Godly Family in New England and Its Transformation

ON NOVEMBER 11, 1620, after an arduous nine-week voyage, 102 weary passengers aboard the Mayflower reached the rocky coast of Cape Cod. “They had no friends to welcome them,” wrote William Bradford, one of the original Pilgrims, nor did they have “any houses or much less towns to repair to.” All they could see before them was a “hideous and desolate wilderness full of wild beasts and wild men.” If they looked behind, all they could see “was the mighty ocean which they had passed and was now as a main bar and gulf to separate them from all the civil parts of the world.” By spring, half of the Mayflower passengers were dead.¹

For the Pilgrims, and for other, later, English settlers, one social institution was more important than any other in helping them to adapt to New World conditions. That institution was the family, and it performed many more functions than does its present day counterpart. It raised the food and made most of the clothing and furniture for the early settlers. It taught children to read, worship their God, and care for each other in sickness and in old age. It was a workplace, a school, a vocational training agency, and a place of worship, and it carried the heavy burden of responsibility for maintaining social order and stability. It was the cornerstone of the larger society, a “little commonwealth,” “a school wherein the first principles and grounds of government and subjection are learned; whereby men are fitted to greater matters in church and commonwealth.” It was a patriarchal institution, ruled by the father, who exercised authority over his wife, children, and servants much as God the Father ruled over his children or a king—the “father” of his country—ruled his subjects.²

A particularly full and vivid description of seventeenth-century family life is recorded in the diary of Puritan merchant and magistrate Samuel Sewall. During the seventeenth century, Calvinist theology inspired many religious persons to keep personal diaries, in which they recorded their spiritual self-examinations, inscribed their intimate thoughts and feelings, and took stock of the state of their soul. Samuel Sewall’s diary describes in minute and telling detail what one particular family’s life was like, from his first entry in 1673 to his final comments fifty-six years later, three months before his death.³

To read Sewall’s diary is to enter a period alien to Americans today; a period in which even newborn infants were regarded as embodiments of sin; an era in which parents were expected actively to intervene in such decisions as their children’s choice of a career or marriage partner. Sewall lived in a society in which life was colored by the inescapable presence of death—an environment still deeply affected by premature death, especially that of young children. In the late twentieth century, only fourteen of every thousand infants die during the first year of life, but in the seventeenth-century New England, one in ten died in healthy areas and nearly one in three in less healthy climes. Although one would think that under such circumstances parents might defend against the pain of infant mortality by distancing themselves from their children, Puritans were deeply attached to their infant children. Throughout his adulthood, Samuel was tormented by the very real possibility of losing a child. When a two-year-old daughter died, the family’s grief was manifest in “general Sorrow and Tears,” and Sewall reproached himself for not having been sufficiently “carefull of her Defence [sic] and preservation as I should have been.” After seeing seven of his fourteen children buried before they reached their second birthdays, Sewall was haunted by a recurrent nightmare that most of his children would die. As it was, only three of his offspring would survive him.⁴

Sewall’s diary reveals a society that believed that even newborns were innately sinful and that parents’ primary task was to suppress their children’s natural depravity. Seventeenth-century Puritans cared deeply for their children and invested an enormous amount of time and energy in them, but they were also intent on repressing what they perceived as manifestations of original sin through harsh physical and psychological measures. Aside from an occasional whipping, Sewall’s primary technique for disciplining his children was to provoke their fear of death, sin, and the torments inflicted in hell. After a neighbor’s nine-year-old child died of smallpox, Sewall tried to arouse his eight-year-old son’s conscience by reminding him of the “need to prepare for death.” Although the boy continued to chew on an apple, he later “burst out into a bitter cry and said he was afraid he should die.” And, after hearing sermons on Puritan religious doctrine, his fifteen-year-old daughter “burst out into an amazing cry,” convinced that “she should go to Hell,” since “her sins were not pardoned.” Months later Sewall records that his daughter was still subject to recurrent outbursts of tears, a consequence of fear that she was doomed to eternal damnation.⁵

The father in early New England felt free to intervene in his children’s lives and to control their behavior. This included the right and duty to take an active role in his child’s selection of a spouse. He had a legal right to determine which men would be allowed to court his daughters and a legal responsibility to give or withhold his consent from a child’s marriage. When a suitor wanted to woo one of Sewall’s daughters, the young man had to have his father write to secure the magistrate’s consent, for fear that Sewall would sue him for inveigling his daughter’s affections. Sewall openly expressed dismay when one daughter refused several suitors, and he did not hesitate to scrutinize one prospective husband to determine if he had courted other women. Even after they had married, achieved economic independence, and set up homes of their own, Sewall felt it was still his right and duty openly to criticize his children. When one son was thirty-nine years old, Sewall was still warning him against spending his time in taverns and was interfering in his son’s domestic arrangements.⁶

Sewall, like other seventeenth-century colonists, viewed marriage as a property arrangement rather than an emotional bond based on romantic love. He prided himself on his industry in bargaining over marriage settlements for his children, and after one daughter’s death, he proceeded to haggle with her father-in-law over the return of her dowry. When Sewall himself chose a wife, he took a calculating, mercenary approach to marriage. Less than four months after his first wife’s death, he had already decided to marry again. He courted a certain Widow Denison, and the two proceeded to bargain over the size of the allowance Sewall would give her. “I told her I was willing to give her Two [one hundred] and Fifty pounds per anum during her life,” he recorded, but the widow preferred the more generous allowance made in her husband’s will. Subsequently the jurist courted and married another widow, who died after less than a year of marriage, and speedily searched for a third wife. The most persistent object of his affection was another widow, Mary Gibbs, and in their love letters financial bargaining plays a conspicuous role. He demanded that she “give Bond to indemnify me from all debts contracted by you before the Marriage,” and in return he promised her “40 pounds per anum during the terms of your natural Life in case of your survival.”⁷

Samuel Sewall’s diary provides us with a window on early colonial American family life. The colonial family differed profoundly from the contemporary family in its definition of family functions and responsibilities, its conception of childhood, its attitude toward love and marriage, and its division of domestic roles. It is impossible fully to understand this early American family without closely examining the ideas of the people who most clearly defined its ideals, the New England Puritans.

Structure and Development of Puritan Family Life

In 1629, eight years after the Pilgrims arrived in Plymouth, an advance guard of four hundred English Puritans set up a self- governing commonwealth in Salem, Massachusetts. They undertook this “errand into the wilderness” in order to create a pure and godly commonwealth, “a Modell of Christian Charity,” which would serve as an example for the reformation of England. In New England—a barren wilderness without such relics of Catholicism as bishops, ecclesiastical courts, priestly vestments, and elaborate rituals—they hoped to create a new and undefiled social order that conformed strictly to the teachings of the Bible.

In 1630 seventeen ships carried another thousand passengers to Massachusetts Bay Colony, and within the year, Puritans had established settlements at Boston, Cambridge, Charlestown, Dorchester, Roxbury, and Watertown. By 1640, when the English Civil War cut off further Puritan emigration, an additional fifteen or twenty thousand colonists had journeyed to New England.

The roughly twenty thousand Puritan men, women, and children who sailed to Massachusetts between 1629 and 1640 carried with them ideas about the family utterly foreign to Americans today. The Puritans never thought of the family as purely a private unit, rigorously separated from the surrounding community. To them it was an integral part of the larger political and social world; it was “the Mother Hive, out of which both those swarms of State and Church, issued forth.” Its boundaries were elastic and inclusive, and it assumed responsibilities that have since been assigned to public institutions.⁸

Although most Puritan families were nuclear in structure, a significant proportion of the population spent part of their lives in other families’ homes, serving as apprentices, hired laborers, or servants. At any one time, as many as a third of all Puritan households took in servants. Convicts, the children of the poor, single men and women, and recent immigrants were compelled by selectmen to live within existing “well Governed families” so that “disorders may bee prevented and ill weeds nipt.”⁹

For the Puritans, family ties and community ties tended to blur. In many communities, individual family members were related by birth or marriage to a large number of their neighbors. In one community, Chatham, Massachusetts, the town’s 155 families bore just thirty-four surnames; and in Andover, Massachusetts, the descendants of one settler, George Abbott I, had by 1750 intermarried into a dozen local families. The small size of the seventeenth-century communities, combined with high rates of marriage and remarriage, created kinship networks of astonishing complexity. In-laws and other distant kin were generally referred to as brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, mothers, fathers, and cousins.¹⁰

Today spousal ties are emphasized, and obligations to kin are voluntary and selective. Three centuries ago the kin group was of great importance to the social, economic, and political life of the community. Kinship ties played a critical role in the development of commercial trading networks and the capitalizing of large-scale investments. In the absence of secure methods of communication and reliable safeguards against dishonesty, prominent New England families, such as the Hutchinsons and Winthrops, relied on relatives in England and the West Indies to achieve success in commerce. Partnerships among family members also played an important role in the ownership of oceangoing vessels. Among merchant and artisan families, apprenticeships were often given exclusively to their own sons or nephews, keeping craft skills within the kinship group.¹¹

Intermarriage was also used to cement local political alliances and economic partnerships. Marriages between first cousins or between sets of brothers and sisters helped to bond elite, politically active and powerful families together. Among the families of artisans, marriages between a son and an uncle’s daughter reinforced kinship ties.¹²

In political affairs the importance of the kin group persisted until the American Revolution. By the early eighteenth century, small groups of interrelated families dominated the clerical, economic, military, and political leadership of New England. In Connecticut and Massachusetts, the most powerful of these kinship groups was made up of seven interrelated families. The “River Gods,” as they were known, led regional associations of ministers, controlled the county courts, commanded the local militia, and represented their region in the Massachusetts General Court and Governor’s Council. Following the Revolution, most states adopted specific reforms designed to reduce the power of kin groups in politics by barring nepotism, establishing the principle of rotation in office, prohibiting multiple officeholding, providing for the election of justices of the peace, and requiring officeholders to reside in the jurisdiction they served.¹³

Unlike the contemporary American family, which is distinguished by its isolation from the world of work and the surrounding society, the Puritan family was deeply embedded in public life. The household—not the individual—was the fundamental unit of society. The political order was not an agglomeration of detached individuals; it was an organic unity composed of families. This was the reason that Puritan households received only a single vote in town meetings. Customarily it was the father, as head of the household, who represented his family at the polls. But if he was absent, his wife assumed his prerogative to vote. The Puritans also took it for granted that the church was composed of families and not of isolated individuals. Family membership—not an individual’s abilities or attainments—determined a person’s position in society. Where one sat in church or in the local meetinghouse or even one’s rank at Harvard College was determined not by one’s accomplishments but by one’s family identity.¹⁴

The Puritan family was the main unit of production in the economic system. Each family member was expected to be economically useful. Older children were unquestionably economic assets; they worked at family industries, tended gardens, herded animals, spun wool, and cared for younger brothers and sisters. Wives not only raised children and cared for the home but also cut clothes, supervised servants and apprentices, kept financial accounts, cultivated crops, and marketed surplus goods.¹⁵

In addition to performing a host of productive functions, the Puritan family was a primary educational and religious unit. A 1642 Massachusetts statute required heads of households to lead their households in prayers and scriptural readings; to teach their children, servants, and apprentices to read; and to catechize household members in the principles of religion and law. The family was also an agency for vocational training, assigned the duty of instructing servants and apprentices in methods of farming, housekeeping, and craft skills. And finally the Puritan family was a welfare institution that carried primary responsibility for the care of orphans, the infirm, or the elderly.¹⁶

Given the family’s importance, the Puritans believed that the larger community had a compelling duty to ensure that families performed their functions properly. The Puritans did not believe that individual households should be assured freedom from outside criticism or interference. The Puritan community felt that it had a responsibility not only to punish misconduct but also to intervene within households to guide and direct behavior. To this end, in the 1670s, the Massachusetts General Court directed towns to appoint “tithingmen” to oversee every ten or twelve households in order to ensure that marital relationships were harmonious and that parents properly disciplined unruly children. Puritan churches censured, admonished, and excommunicated men and women who failed to maintain properly peaceful households, since, as minister Samuel Willard put it, “When husband and wife neglect their duties they not only wrong each other, but they provoke God by breaking his law.” In cases in which parents failed properly to govern “rude, stubborn, and unruly” children, Puritan law permitted local authorities to remove juveniles from their families “and place them with some master for years … and force them to submit unto government.” Men who neglected or failed to support their wives or children were subject to judicial penalties. In instances in which spouses seriously violated fundamental duties—such as cases of adultery, desertion, prolonged absence, or nonsupport—divorces were granted. In cases of fornication outside marriage, courts sentenced offenders to a fine or whipping; for adultery, offenders were punished by fines, whippings, brandings, wearing of the letter A, and in at least three cases, the death penalty.¹⁷

The disciplined Puritan family of the New World was quite different from the English family of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that had been left behind. In fact, it represented an effort to re-create an older ideal of the family that no longer existed in England itself.

English family life in the era of New World colonization was quite unstable. Because of high mortality rates, three-generational households containing grandparents, parents, and children tended to be rare. The duration of marriages t...