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Family in Society
by Martinson, Floyd M. (Floyd Mansfield), 1916-2000
First published by Dodd, Mead & Company, Inc. (New York, USA), 1970. LCCN 78-108037.
This edition by Books Reborn, July 2001.
Copyright © 1970 Dodd, Mead & Company, Inc.
xi, 395 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.
301.42/0973 HQ535 .M38
This edition of Family in Society has been OCR scanned from the 1970 edition for publication on the Internet. Pagination and layout of this edition closely mimics that of the 1970 edition, so references to specific pages of that edition remain valid here. The original copyright holder, Dodd Mead & Company, ceased business around 1989. It is assumed that the copyright on this volume reverted to Floyd Martinson at that time. Copyrights owned by Floyd Martinson were inherited by his widow, Beatrice Awes Martinson, after his death in 2000. Beatrice Awes Martinson has given permission to Books Reborn for this book to be made available to the public on the Internet. She retains all rights to this work.
The experiences of human life are almost limitless. To write meaningfully about the complicated world of human experience one must find ways of bringing order into the data, ways of focusing on and highlighting certain experiences. This is the purpose of a perspective. Viewing the American family in sociological perspective, then, this book is an attempt to describe and analyze the American family within the context, first, of its involvement with society and, second, of its involvement in the lives of individuals.
Thus, in the following chapters the family is viewed not as an isolated phenomenon but as a unit significant and essential to society. The family is a social system that is responsive to the cultural and social milieu in which it operates. By limiting the scope of the analysis of the family to one society--American society--we avoid the oversimplification that might result from a comparative analysis of the family in a large number of societies.
The comparative method utilized in intersocietal or cross-societal description and analysis of family structure and function tends by its eclecticism toward the danger of superficiality in family-to-family comparisons. In the process of such comparison the unit of comparison, in this case the family, is "freed" from the social and cultural milieu in which it is formed and in which it operates. Comparative analysis of this sort is markedly useful in assessing the breadth of human ingenuity in handling the sex-marriage-family functions, but it does little to aid the student in understanding the role of the family within society. Hence there are some advantages in intrasocietal comparisons--comparison of the goals of the society with the goals of the family; comparison of the structure and functions of the family with that of other subsystems in the society (the polity, the economy, the school, the church--along with consideration of the interplay between the family and the other social systems); and comparison of the contemporary family in situ with earlier forms of the family in situ during precedent periods of history. As Ruth Benedict points out in Patterns of Culture (1934), aspects of family living are not special items of human behavior with their own generic drives and motivations which have determined their past history and will determine their future, but are the occasions "which any society may seize upon to express its important cultural intentions." From this point of view the significant sociological unit to utilize in understanding aspects of family life is not the family per se but rather the society in which family functions are performed. The study of the family or any other social system requires attention to the unique social forces that influence, determine, and perhaps dominate adaptive social systems, such as the family.
Contemporary students of the family thus have taken a cue from earlier researchers who studied the family from the institutional point of view and who analyzed the "family in community." It should be noted, though, that American family sociology, in contrast to European family sociology, still appears to be disproportionately oriented toward treatment of the family as a closed system, not a social system in situ.
We must avoid taking a monolithic view of American society, however. American society has often been pictured as an extreme example of lack of integration. Its "huge complexity" and rapid changes from generation to generation make inevitable a lack of harmony between its elements that may not occur in simpler societies. As we have said, though, by limiting the scope of our analysis to one society we may avoid some of the danger of oversimplifying a complex society. As Oscar Lewis experienced, based on intensive studies in Mexico, "the more homogeneous (and I might add superficial) the picture we get of a single society, the more contrasting will it appear in comparison with other societies. On the other hand, the more we know about the range of behavior within any society, the more readily can we perceive the cross-cultural similarities as well as the basic human similarities." To paraphrase Benedict, one society understood as a coherent organization of behavior is more enlightening than many touched upon only at their high points.
For many students of the family it may be relatively more valuable to understand the family in the society in which they will live and work than to be familiar with data about other societies, especially if knowledge of other societies is gained at the expense of thorough analysis of their own society.
There is also some question as to the value of emphasizing such universal aspects of the family system as the nuclear family. We are tempted to say that to study the family in any society is to study a universal phenomenon; but to assume that all societies are alike in that they have a recognizable nuclear family system consisting of husband and wife, parents and children, and existing more or less as an autonomous or private social system, disengaged in part from the other social entities, may be to cloud rather than clarify the nature of existent primary groups. Certain essential functions will of course persist. However, we cannot speak with certitude regarding structural family systems resembling our own nuclear family.
While today the small group stands in the focus of sociological research, most of this research has been done in the United States and by Americans. Studies from other societies (India and Turkey, for instance) do not necessarily corroborate the American results. This may be due to different experimental conditions, but it is not improbable that the small group does not play the same role in these societies, and that consistency of results in American studies are the result of strong conformist tendencies in American society.
There is another reason for restricting the present study to the American society. The American family has existed for over three hundred years of recorded history in a society whose basic polity has been characterized more by evolution than by revolution. In other words, to study the American family sociologically is to study the family in and of one of the oldest continuous sociopolitical systems possessed of a recorded history. To understand the American family it is necessary to see it not only in horizontal (contemporary) perspective but also in vertical (historical) perspective. The contemporary American family is an emergent out of the past and bears the marks of the past.
This is a sociology, not a history of the American family. We do not trace the development of the family in each epoch of the history of this country. Only selected epochs in the development of the family and society are considered. The American family has gone through various periods in time that can be viewed as "natural experiments." Since the family sociologist is handicapped in his research by the limited opportunity which he has to conduct experiments, he must, therefore, take advantage of the varied "experiments" which nature and society provide. He can do this either by focusing his attention on the past and contemporary family experiences in a society with a long history or by focusing on family experiences of a variety of societies.
An advantage of studying the family experiences in America is that America has had a variety of "natural experiments." Our technique is to "take soundings" at significant epochs or at times of "disturbing or prodding" events that have affected the family. In this way American experience, historical and contemporary, provides partial answers to a number of questions (or "hypotheses") about the family. What happens to the family under a totalitarian, legalistic oligarchy? Puritan New England, and especially the Massachusetts Bay Colony, provides one answer. What happens to the family if personal freedom and democracy are exalted as core values of the society? The period beginning with the birth of American independence is instructive here. What happens if every vestige of personal freedom is removed and persons are treated as chattels? Slavery and its aftermath in America addresses these questions. What happens to the family in a society characterized by rapid change from a rural-agricultural to an urban-industrial economic system? The experiences of migrant and immigrant families in America around the turn of the century are pertinent. A last "natural experiment" is the experience of the family in a society characterized by bigness in most social systems and by national community--the contemporary American scene. This receives major emphasis in the present study.
But this is only one-half of the sociological perspective employed herein. The perspective employed deals not only with interchanges and transactions between the family and society (macrosociology), but also with the internal workings of the family (microsociology), the individual in the family, organization and activity within the family, and relationships between family members. Here the emphasis is on the relationship of the individual to the family and the other socio-sexual systems (dating, mate selection, and marriage), procreation and socialization in the family, and the adjustments involved as the individual leaves his natal family (family of orientation) and establishes his own heterosexual unit (family of procreation).
A final section of the book deals with crises situations in marriage and the family and with resolution of these crises either in restoration or dissolutionment of the respective social systems.
It should be pointed out that family and society receive major emphasis when the family in earlier epochs of American society is considered, while a more balanced emphasis on "macro" and "micro" aspects of family life characterize the contemporary chapters. This split in emphasis occurs out of necessity. In the first case we are dependent on the record kept by historians and others, not by sociologists. In the latter case, we have available the vast resources of contemporary sociological and other social scientific research to draw upon.
Appropriate sociological concepts for the two perspectives are introduced in the text at points when they seem to the author to be most appropriate to the discussion. Teachers wishing to introduce all of the concepts at the beginning of the course will find them conveniently listed in the index.
For the teacher wishing to compare American family experience with that of other societies there are a number of books written from a comparative or cross-cultural perspective that can be utilized as supplementary texts. They include the following: Victor A. Christopherson, Readings in Comparative Marriage and the Family (New York: Selected Academic Readings, A Division of Associated Educational Services, Incorporated, 1967); William J. Good, Readings on the Family and Society (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1964); H. Kent Geiger, Comparative Perspectives on Marriage and the Family (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968); M. F. Nimkoff, Comparative Family Systems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965); William N. Stephens, The Family in Cross-Cultural Perspectives (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1963).
THE FAMILY UNIT containing father, mother, and child is referred to as the nuclear family. In many societies, the nuclear family is part of a larger unit of kinsmen living together.1 But even when larger groups of kinsmen live together, time and space is commonly reserved for at least minimal interaction of the nuclear unit.
The network of which the nuclear family is a part varies from society to society. It may include a group of relatives who live together with the nuclear family and are subordinate to the same authority, as in the case of the traditional Chinese family, in which a patriarch, his wife, his unmarried daughters, his sons, his son's wives, their children, and their children's children for as many generations as possible live together as a cohesive unit. This is called an extended family. It may include a number of families who habitually camp together, as the bands of the American Cheyenne Indians. It may involve a group of agricultural families living in a concentrated cluster of homes at the center of or in close proximity to the source of livelihood--cultivated lands, pastures, and forests. The latter is a more common type of settlement in Europe than in the United States. It is referred to as an agricultural village, dorf (German), or mir (Russian).
In Middle West America, where the land was plotted in rectangular sections with each family living on a farm, the local social network included a number of farm families on adjoining farms who associated informally with one another. This type of settlement has been referred to as a neighborhood, or, if it is a larger grouping clustering around a village as a trade center, it is referred to as a community.
As a part of a kinship system, a system composed of blood relatives, their spouses, and their offspring, the nuclear family has contacts with persons and groups beyond the limits of the local community. In societies where the larger kinship system is regarded as a major and significant unit of association, many functions on behalf of the nuclear family and its members are carried on outside the local community. These functions are supervised by an official of the larger kinship group. Life-crises observances--as birth, marriage, death--are frequently carried on by this larger kinship group. While the choice of a marriage partner in our society involves the two persons immediately concerned in the choice, in some societies choice is totally out of the hands of the prospective marriage partners and is regulated by representatives of the larger kinship group. A most common task of the kinship group is the regulation of the selection of marriage partners. For example, Nahas reporting as recently as 1956 indicates that most marriages in Iraq are arranged by parents or by elders rather than by the marriage partners themselves.2
Kin groups play a relatively smaller role for nuclear families in modern industrialized societies than they do in some primitive societies, but nonkinship systems--social, political, economic, educational, and religious--involve the family and its members in many social patterns. In American society with its vast communications network and rapid, convenient transportation, a family might be said to be in touch with the whole society.
Sexual expression is never free from social control. Some prohibitions, such as the prohibition of sex relations between blood relatives, are universally in force. There are prescriptions as well as proscriptions, for sexual cohabitation is necessary to the perpetuation of the race. Offspring are born, and these must be nurtured and tended. Families deal with basic human needs--sexual, economic, reproductive, educational, disciplinary. Without provision for meeting these needs human society would cease, and human life would cease as well. With few exceptions--"so curious and contrived that they emphasize the ubiquitousness of the institution of the family"--all human societies structure a nurturant relationship between adults and dependent children.3
In small, isolated primitive societies, the kinship system in itself can meet most of the basic individual and social needs. In such societies there may be little economic, political, or religious activity outside of families. But in complex societies differentiated structures emerge to meet basic and acquired needs. Market, government, and school take their places alongside the family in meeting the needs of individuals and groups.
Changes in society necessitate changes in its various systems. When a nation declares war, for example, the family, the economy, the school--in fact all systems of society--are affected. It is logical to assume that changes in the whole will affect changes in the parts more than changes in the parts will affect the whole. Family, in American society, is not a dominant system, hence it is apt to be more affected by rather than affecting. The family operates within a social milieu which helps to bring the family into being, to support it, to shape it, and often even to destroy it.
No people are without a past--a history, survivals,4 and traditions. Certain activities come to be regarded as right and proper, and certain ways of carrying them out become standardized solutions to collective problems. These accepted activities and procedures become normative for the society. One is applauded when he follows the norm and punished when he does not; in other words, sanctions are applied. Thus man interprets all of his environment in ideological terms. He gives his environment meaning in terms of the why, the what, and how of life. Availability of a thing is not enough; whether or not one will utilize it and how he will utilize it depend on the meaning attached to it.
Family life is dependent on the culture of the society of which the family is a part. In American society a particular family system, the monogamous nuclear family, came to be recognized as a crucial element. No system in American society has been more circumscribed by normative patterns than has the family.5
One question that has concerned social scientists, especially American sociologists, is what happens to the family--this small, adaptive, vulnerable part of the total social structure--in complex societies characterized by rapid social change. More specifically, what has happened to the American family during the rapid emergence of America as a complex society? This question cannot be answered as satisfactorily as we might like with available evidence, but it can be answered in part, and the question and its answers are crucial to an understanding of the American family.
There are students of the family who say that the Western family, and particularly the American family, has shown signs of disintegration that are actual and absolute. Sorokin develops the theme that the family has become more and more unstable until it has reached the point of disintegration.6 He predicts that the family as a sacred union of husband and wife, or parents and children, will continue to disintegrate until the differences between socially-sanctioned marriages and illicit sex-relationships disappear. He sees the functions of the family decreasing until the family will become "a mere incidental cohabitation of male and female," while the home becomes "a mere overnight parking place mainly for sex relationships."7
Other sociologists speak of loss of function when explaining what happened to the American family.8 The loss-of-function sociologists point out that the family at one time performed many functions on behalf of its members, on behalf of the community, and on behalf of society, and that it has gradually lost these functions. Historically, the family was both an important productive unit (making soap and clothing and processing food) and an important protective unit (against wild animals and savages). Not only has the family lost these and other functions; it has not taken on any significant new ones. Hence the family's relative importance in society has declined, say these sociologists.
Still other sociologists recognize that social change has taken place but view change as having had a favorable effect on the family. Burgess sees the emergence of a type of family characterized by adaptability--a family that can adapt not only to changing conditions but also to divergent personalities with diversity of cultural backgrounds.9 Adaptability, Burgess asserts, makes for stability in the long run. Not a stability brought about by external pressures--public opinion, norms, law--but a stability brought about by the "strength of the interpersonal relations of its members, as manifested in affection, rapport, common interests and flexibility." But flexibility of personality is not in itself sufficient to ensure family adaptability to a changing society, according to Burgess. Family members must be culturally and educationally oriented to the necessity of making adjustments. Adaptability is more than favorable attitudes toward adjustment; it requires knowledge and skills of adaptation. Education and counseling based upon social science research are seen as the best means of preparing family members for the adaptations necessary to good adjustment in a changing society. Along with disintegration and loss of function, the adaptability point of view can be supported with empirical evidence and it does illuminate a part of the situation.10
Blood and Wolfe in a survey of empirical data conclude that the American family has not for many decades been highly integrated and authoritarian in structure. They conclude that the patriarchal family--a family ordered under a strong, authoritarian father figure--was already weakened by 1912 and "died a sudden death in World War I."11 They find the family today to be like a corporation that "makes its decisions in staff conferences but executes them through technical experts," with husband and wife having clearly differentiated roles.
Miller and Swanson call this type of family the "colleague" family because it resembles coworkers rather than companions--interdependent, but each with distinct and mutually recognized competencies.12 To label the contemporary pattern as "colleagueish" may be to describe only one emergent family type, however; the American family in its variety escapes any easy monolithic category.
Other sociologists see the American family not as disintegrating but as improving. More of the population is marrying; marriages--when death rate and divorce rate are considered together--are lasting longer; more people are remarrying; divorce-rate increase has been checked, at least for the present; more and more couples are establishing homes of their own and are having children.13 America is seen as a family-affirming society, and the American people by their actions as family-affirming people.
In answering the question "what has happened to the nuclear family in our rapidly changing society?" perhaps it would be more accurate to use less evaluative terms than "disintegrating" or "improving" and to use instead terms more in keeping with a sociological tradition. Differentiation (the transfer of family functions to other more specialized social systems) is a characteristic of societies that are increasing in complexity. As we have already pointed out, there are so-called primitive societies in which the kinship system does carry out many functions, and influences the carrying out of many more. But in highly complex urban and industrialized societies more functions are transferred to other social structures, such as the market: government, school, and church. These systems are not extensions of the kinship system but are innovations in the society with specialized structures for specialized activities. Education at mother's knee comes to be displaced by new educational structures--the elementary school, the secondary school, the vocational school, the university, and in-service training in industry. To say that the family has thereby lost the educational function may be to prejudice the data with an interpretation that fails to do justice to the fact that there are many functions which the family simply cannot perform effectively. America may have developed a new type of nuclear family, "one in which the family is more specialized than before, but not in any general sense less important, because the society is dependent more exclusively on it for the performance of certain of its vital functions."14
It is instructive in a review of theories of family change to review the early over against the later of one of the sociological "prophets of doom," Carle C. Zimmerman. In his Family and Civilization (1947), Zimmerman quoted with approval Sorokin's gloomy predictions about the family. Zimmerman concluded that, "There is little left now within the family or the moral code to hold this family together. ... The United States as well as the other countries of Western Christendom, will reach the final phases of a great family crisis between now and the last of this century."15 Theoretically, the family could stay as it was, decay further, or show a "resurgence of Victorian morality." But to Zimmerman it was already so completely atomized that it produced no stable social body in which to solidify. Yet he assumed that Americans had the intelligence and the educational and propaganda agencies necessary to bring about a reinstatement of the family if the "learned classes" understood the basic meaning of the family to society.
Two years later, in 1949, Zimmerman published an extension of the same argument. But Kinsey's data on the sexual behavior of American males had been published by then, and Zimmerman saw a hopeful and optimistic sign in the "puritanical" behavior of the intellectual classes. Zimmerman wrote, "This is the first time in Western history when we have had a family crisis in which the intellectuals have not been to a much greater extent than the other classes the leaders in the new freedom from restraint."16
Later Zimmerman noted that the family system had begun "some changes of its own" toward a stronger socially-creative family unit. Zimmerman saw this "ethical good," or "civilization-adequate" family as isolating itself and surrounding itself with a buffer of other families of similar ethical views. "In essence, 'good families' now surround themselves with similar families and the world of the child seems 'good.'"17 Hence in the span of his observation of American family life, Zimmerman after predicting a great crisis observes a hopeful trend: the "good" families slowed the tide of family disintegration if not in fact turned that tide.
What has happened to the family in America with its history of rapid change? Is it disintegrating (Sorokin)? If disintegrating, has the disintegration been slowed or perhaps even brought to a halt (Zimmerman)? Has the family lost most of its important functions (Ogburn)? Should the changes in the American family be viewed as social differentiation rather than as loss of function (Parsons and Bales)? Has the family adapted to rapid social change (Burgess; Blood and Wolfe)? Is the condition of the family improving (Parsons and Bales; Landis)? The reader may wish to withhold judgment about the effects of change until the family's place in American society has been described and analyzed in subsequent chapters.
A variety of networks of human relationships are structured to meet human needs; the family is one of these networks. Besides the family, there are governmental, economic, educational, social, and religious structures. A society operates through the various differentiated structures in meeting the needs of people. The more complex the society the greater the variety of specialized social structures. It is important that these specialized social structures be integrated with each other and with the society as a whole. Families are bound together with other social structures into larger groupings--bands, neighborhoods, villages, communities, kinship groups. The family performs a vital part of the functions necessary to individual and group life.
The family is affected by the nature and the rate of social change in society. Some behavioral scientists see the family as disintegrating as a result of the direction and rapidity of social change. Others see it as achieving a new vitality and stability.
Joan Aldous and Reuben Hill. International Bibliography of Research in Marriage and the Family, 1900-1964. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1967.
Robert C. Angell. The Family Encounters the Depression. New York: Scribners, 1936.
Norman W. Bell and Ezra F. Vogel. A Modern Introduction to the Family. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1960.
Robert O. Blood, Jr., and Donald M. Wolfe. Husbands and Wives: The Dynamics of Married Living. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1960.
Gunnar Boalt. Family and Marriage. New York: McKay, 1965.
Elizabeth Bott. "A Study of Ordinary Families," Studies of the Family, ed. Nels Anderson. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1956. Pp. 29-68.
Ernest W. Burgess. "The Family in a Changing Society," American Journal of Sociology, LIII (May, 1948), 417-422.
Ernest W. Burgess and Paul Wallin. Engagement and Marriage. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1953.
Harold T. Christensen. "Development of the Family Field of Study," Handbook of Marriage and the Family, ed. Harold T. Christensen. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964. Pp. 3-32.
Joseph F. Folsom. The Family and Democratic Society. New York: Wiley, 1934.
Börje Hanssen. "Dimensions of Primary Group Structure in Sweden," Studies of the Family, ed. Nels Anderson. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1956. Pp. 115-156.
Börje Hanssen. "Group Relations of Peasants and Farmers," Studies of the Family, ed. Nels Anderson, Vol. III, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1958. Pp. 57-92.
Daniel R. Miller and Guy E. Swanson. The Changing American Parent. New York: Wiley, 1958.
George Peter Murdock. Social Structure. New York: Macmillan, 1949.
W. F. Ogburn. Recent Social Trends. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1933.
Talcott Parsons. The Social System. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1951.
Talcott Parsons and Robert F. Bales. Family, Socialization and Interaction Process. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1955.
Margaret Park Redfield. "The American Family: Consensus and Freedom," American Journal of Sociology, LII (November, 1946), 175-183.
John Sirjamaki. "Culture Configurations in the American Family," American journal of Sociology, LIII (May, 1948), 464-470.
Clark E. Vincent. "Familia Spongia: The Adaptive Function," Journal of Marriage and the Family, XXVIII (February, 1966), 22-36.
Morris Zelditch, Jr. "Cross-Cultural Analysis of Family Structure," Handbook of Marriage and the Family, ed. Harold T. Christensen. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964. Pp. 462-500.
Carle C. Zimmerman. Family and Civilization. New York: Harper, 1947.
Carle C. Zimmerman and Lucius F. Cervantes. Successful American Families. New York: Pageant, 1960.
WHAT HAS HAPPENED to the family during the period of rapid emergence of America as a complex society? One obvious and important piece of evidence is that it has survived. Not only has it survived emigration from Europe, Africa, and Asia, it has also survived Puritan colonialism, the American Revolution, slavery, the Civil War, industrialization, urbanization, the great depression of the 1930s, and numerous wars. Its survival has not been without modification in form and function, but the important point is that the family has survived at all.
In the interactions of human life, even in a society composed historically of a plurality of disparate elements, a society with a common culture emerges. America is such a society; though the elements which make it up have been varied, a common culture has developed during America's long history as a social system. America's three and a half centuries may be a short time in the life span of a civilization, but it is a long span of time under one continuous political system. In these three and a half centuries a culture has developed which contains patterns sufficiently diversified and yet sufficiently integrated to enable the American people to fulfill the basic requirements of personal and group life. The test of the unity of the society was met during the Civil War when the centralized government of the country prevailed. Developments of the 1950s and 1960s, in attempting to extend recognition and opportunities to American minorities, have brought some aspects of the common culture into serious question and have provided the national government with one of its greatest challenges.
Historically speaking, the patterns of family life in America are numerous and varied. There are rural and urban families; Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant families; immigrant and native-born families; Negro and white families; and other patterns ad infinitum. No one would question that there are both cultural and functional differences in these families. However, to the extent that the family is a dependent part of society and adaptive more than dominant, it follows that trends toward uniformity of cultural patterns in the nation as a whole are reflected in uniformity in the family system. Uniquely American cultural configurations become part of family life even in the families of recent immigrants, particularly as the breadwinner and the children become involved in community life. New patterns of behavior bring conflict between parents and children in the immigrant home, but a bend toward American culture is likely to emerge.
The American family as it emerges has gone through a variety of "natural" experiments--experiments which nature and society provide. By taking soundings at significant epochs--times of disturbing and prodding events in history--we can provide partial answers to a number of questions about the family in a dynamic society.
The several chapters that follow deal with family life in a few selected critical periods in American history. In each chapter we attempt to answer certain questions within the limits of the data available. What was the nature of the society during the critical epoch? What ideological principles, activities, and procedures became normative for society and for the family? What part did the family play in society? What was the internal nature of the family? What was the relationship between the family and the individual? As well as giving the reader an understanding and appreciation of the family in American society at certain critical periods in its history, it is the aim of these chapters to show what the impact of these periods has been on the development of the contemporary American family. The four periods chosen are (1) the colonial period, which left a heritage of religious and moralistic values in personal and family life; (2) the revolutionary period, which fostered the development of a libertarian and democratic tradition; (3) the period of slavery, which placed a significant minority of the American population in bondage and continues to influence the character of American life at the present time; and (4) the period of emergence of America as an industrialized urban nation, which established the family as an adaptive (rather than a dominant) system in American economic and political life. In point of time there is overlap between the periods. This is especially true of the period of slavery, but the impact of slavery on the family is so unique that it must be treated as a separate unit.
OF THE SOCIAL EXPERIMENTS that have been tried in America, Puritanism was one of the most significant. It has been referred to as "the fullest amalgam of religion, economics, and politics within a single mold that Americans ever achieved."18 Never before and never since has the family operated under a stricter polity nor under more stringent attempts to apply that polity to family life. It should be noted, however, that although Puritanism was a dominant way of life, it was not the only one that existed during the colonial period. Puritanism and minority ways of life coexisted within the society at the same time, and there were also regional differences in family types during the period.
The large group of Puritans who landed at Salem in Massachusetts Bay was controlled by capable members of the British middle class, men of trade and commerce who came from the urban centers of Great Britain. Among them also were squires, yeomen, and not a few who had attended British universities. Tocqueville observes that these men possessed, in proportion to their numbers, a greater mass of intelligence than was to be found in any European nation.19
From its start in 1630 the Massachusetts Bay settlement, unlike many of the colonies, was a family settlement. The Puritans and their descendants became the primary leaders of the emerging American society during the colonial period--and the colonial period occupies nearly half of the entire course of American history from the founding of the first colony in 1607 to the present time. Thus these early settlers "established Puritanism--for better or worse--as one of the continuous factors in American life and thought."20
The concept of a covenant was the master idea of Puritanism.21 It was believed that God agreed on a way of life with a group of men and that they were in turn committed, as a political system, to a specifically enunciated political program carrying out the dictates of the covenant with God. The Massachusetts Bay colonists believed they had made such a covenant. No activity was seen as falling outside its holy purposes. So concerned were they with the rules of morality that Puritan theologians set about defining and cataloging them--frugality, industry, liberality, and parsimony. None of these virtues were new; what was new about them was their double orientation--towards God, who exacted obedience from his elect; and toward the world, in which obedience was to become manifest by a man's devotion to his calling or occupation.22
The Puritan's calling provided him with seemingly contradictory norms. He was to be diligent in his "worldly businesses," while at the same time being "dead" to the world. Puritanism emphasized the duty of work in this world, at worldly tasks. Through working the Puritan escaped the temptation to which the idle were susceptible. The Puritan's work was never done, for it was labor itself, not any of its products, that God commanded.
New England did not lend itself readily to the establishment of large family estates. The land was rocky and the terrain uneven. In addition, the short summers were not conducive to extensive agriculture. Land was distributed to persons in small plots, with each person holding title to his land. This meant that the majority of family heads were free entrepreneurs. This enhanced the father's role in the eyes of other family members.
Such outside labor as was used by the farm family was usually obtained in the neighborhood and was seasonal. On special occasions--such as barn raisings, house raisings, or the building of a public facility such as a school or meeting house--all able-bodied members of the community might turn out and help. The demanding nature of the settlement is evident in the use made of children as laborers. Many of these were neglected or needy children. "Friendless boyes and girles" twelve years old and older were in demand.23
In the seventeenth century the term "servant" was applied to anyone who worked for another in whatever capacity, whether in agriculture, commerce, or industry, as well as in the work of the household. The servant was family-free in terms of his own commitments; but his life as a servant, whether voluntary or involuntary, was not a pleasant one. The servant was required to do whatever the master expected of him and not to do anything without the master's consent. However, a good Puritan did not treat his servant harshly, if there were other means available to him. His religion did not permit it, and most of the servants were only temporarily in servitude, eventually becoming the equals of their masters as free persons in the community.
Puritan society was a totalitarian society run by a theologically-inclined oligarchy devoid of democratic inclinations as we think of them today. Puritans exercised rights of sovereignty in naming magistrates, enacting laws, and making police regulations, as "if their allegiance was only to God."24
Characteristic of the legislation of the period is the code of laws promulgated by Connecticut in 1650. The laws were borrowed almost directly from the text of the Old Testament. Sorcery, adultery, fornication, rape, and blasphemy were to be punished with death; disobedience of a son to his parents could also meet with the same penalty. The legislators in their concern with orderly conduct and good morals in the community constantly invaded the domain of conscience.
The Puritan value system provided a major role for the family; indeed, the Puritan believed that God in creating systems of control began with the family. The chief problem of the state was to see that family heads did their duty. The assumption upon which Puritan leaders acted was that the state was made up of families rather than persons. A commonwealth results from "many familyes subjecting themselves to rulers and laws."25
Taking care to bring everyone under the authority of a family ruler, the state did its utmost to support such rulers in the proper exercise of their authority. The strict punishments prescribed for disobedient children were extended to include servants. Protection was given family governors from outsiders who might undermine their power. For example, a tavern-keeper or anyone else who entertained children or servants without the consent of their parents or masters was punished.
Since colonial officers (selectmen) relied heavily upon the family, they took care to see that family rulers were worthy of their responsibilities. Men who did not deserve to have charge over a family could be prevented by the courts from setting up households. The selectmen themselves regularly inspected families to see that parents fulfilled their educational and regulatory duties. Parents found negligent might have their children taken from them and placed with someone more worthy. When Robert Stockpiles, a family man of Dorchester, was presented before the court for negligence in his calling and not submitting to authority, he was ordered to "put forth" his children.
The system of state supervision of the family might appear as an odious interference with liberty. It doubtless was odious to the unregenerate against whom it was directed, but a good Puritan father looked upon it as an indispensable support to his authority. Rather than interfering with his private rights it provided him with the power to maintain them. There was no reason for conflict between the state and the governor of a well-ordered family; the avowed purpose of both was the same.
As settlements grew, it became more and more difficult for the selectmen and constables to supervise the government of all the families, and in later years a group of officers for the specific purpose of inspecting and reenforcing family government was established. In interchanges between the governmental system and the family system, government was clearly dominant. The family was a significant, though adaptive social system.
The church was established as a tax-supported system working in cooperation with the governmental system of the colony. It was an authoritarian system claiming a monopoly on religious truth. Religious freedom was denied. The church possessed both requisites of civil control--influence and power; the minister as the official representative of the church often came to be a leader in the community.
The congregation made heavy demands on the family and supposedly had high regard for it. The parent-child relationship was a crucial one, religiously speaking. Membership in a believing family came close to being regarded as a prerequisite to membership in the congregation.
Ministers did their best to make it difficult for the unregenerate servant to enter a godly family; they advised the heads of families not to hire ungodly servants lest their children be corrupted by contagion, and they condemned marriages of church members with the unregenerate. Thus, while the unregenerate were admonished to get into godly families, the heads of godly families were admonished to keep such influences out of their families!
The congregation could censure and admonish all families, but it could employ the threat of excommunication only in dealing with its members. The records indicate that these weapons were freely used to reform family disorders. Congregations, as well as the state, adopted the practice of home inspections. The First Church of Boston voted unanimously "that the elders should go from house to house to visit the families and see how they are instructed in the grounds of religion."
Despite close cooperation between the autonomous local congregations and the state, ecclesiastical and civil functions were distinctly separated. The civil government had authority to punish the wrongdoer, but it could never excommunicate a person. The functions of the "tithing man," the colonial visitor of homes, were beyond the jurisdiction of the churches. He was appointed by the parish, not by the congregation, and he had no official role in the enforcement of church discipline.
In interchanges involving the religious system and the family system, it was again the family system that played the adaptive role.
Each agricultural village had facilities near the center for a village green, a meetinghouse, a schoolhouse, a burial ground, the minister's house, pillories, stocks, a signpost. That is, there were facilities for community services: economic, governmental, educational, religious. Plots of land large enough to provide for a house, a barn, other outbuildings, a kitchen garden, and a somewhat larger garden in back were available to each family. Outside this cluster of public buildings, homes, and outbuildings stretched the tillable land, meadows, pastures, and woodland. In new settlements strips of land were distributed among the settlers by lots with each receiving some of the best and some of the poorer land. Communal pasture lands were under the supervision of herdsmen hired by the villagers.
The tithing man not only visited families, he also kept a close check on single persons entering the village. The concepts of a closed community and an open family are helpful in appreciating the nature of the Puritan family in the New England village, in that the tithing man had free access to the family while at the same time keeping the community closed to "undesirable" persons.26 The town of Dorchester, for instance, passed an ordinance requiring that "the tithing men in their several precincts should inspect all inmates that do come into each of their precincts, either single persons or families, and to give speedy information thereof unto the selectmen from time to time or to some of them that order may be taken about them."27
Despite precautions, Puritan villages were not as pure in terms of population composition as the true believers would have liked. They had not imagined that the immigration from England would bring such "a hoard of average, lusty Elizabethan Englishmen." In the total population of the Bay colony there were perhaps more unregenerate than regenerate. The regenerate controlled the positions of power in the community and in the congregation, however.
Community influences on the family were not as wholesome as the regenerate would have liked. Drinking to the point of intoxication became a problem, and ministers in New England thundered at the practice from the pulpit. The colonists were known to consume liquors on all important occasions--"baptisms, weddings, funerals, barn raisings, church raisings, house raisings, ship launchings, ordinations, perambulations, or 'beating the bounds,' and meetings of commissions and committees, and in taverns, clubs, and private houses."28 Taverns, which also doubled as inns, were to be found in all the colonies, in towns, on the traveled roads, and at the ferry landings. Laws against intoxication were enacted at an early date.
There were houses of almost every description. In the country districts small houses of one story were common; they were made of roughhewn or sawn flat boards, had few windows and no panes of glass, were unpainted and weatherstained. Another common type was the frame house, a story and a half high in front and one story high in the rear, with a single pitched roof that sloped from the front of the house to the rear. There were four rooms and a hall on the first floor, with a kitchen in back, and three or four rooms on the second floor. The Puritans were not given to luxury; this is reflected in their houses. The ordinary farmhouse "was hardly so well built, so spacious, or so warm as that of a well-to-do contemporary of Charlemagne."29
There was great diversity in the household effects of colonial homes. Chairs, bureaus, tables, bedsteads, buffets, cupboards were in general use. Some people had silverplate, mahogany, fine china, and copper utensils; others owned china, delftware, and furniture of plainwood with perhaps a few silver spoons, a porringer, and an occasional mahogany chair and table; still others, and these by far the largest number, used only pewter, earthenware, and wooden dishes with the simpler essentials--spinning wheel, flatirons, pots and kettles, lamps and candlesticks--but no luxuries.
An interesting phenomenon in the New England community was the large number of half-finished houses. Apparently a man would build the first section of a house for occupancy by his family, and, when his son married, the remainder of the house would be finished for his use. Family dwellings had to be fairly large since households commonly contained members who were not of the immediate family. In the household of a prosperous Massachusetts merchant might be found unattached relatives, boys apprenticed to him, both male and female indentured servants, and wage employees who worked for him, ate at his table, and lived under his roof.
The equipment of the average New England country household included not only the household furnishings but also shoemaker's tools and shoe leather, surgeon's tools and apothecary stuff, salves and ointments, branding irons, pestle and mortar, lamps, guns and perhaps a sword, harness and fittings, occasionally a still or a cider press, and outfits for carpentering and blacksmithing.
Tasks performed within the home reflected the family's economic relationships with external systems. The internal activity of a home was governed in part by the requirements of the interchanges with other systems in the community and in part by the kind and amount of goods obtained in these interchanges. In the case of the Puritan family there was very little economic interchange. The family was a major and virtually independent production unit. Nine-tenths consisted of farmers who performed most tasks for themselves. All family members worked, labor dividing along sex lines with men employed in the fields and women carrying on the housework and caring for the children.
Ideally, every morning and every evening in a godly Puritan home the father led his household in prayer, in scriptural reading, and song. At mealtime thanks were offered to the Lord. Sabbath-day services commonly lasted two hours or more, but devotions in the home were reasonably brief. The proper Puritan kept work and worship in balance; by and large weekdays were for work.
Besides the daily rituals, once a week children and others in the home were to be catechized in the grounds and principles of religion, or at le ast to be taught some short orthodox catechism. This religious instruction was not a mere formality; parents were expected to try to make religion understandable, meaningful, and significant in the lives of their children.
The father was obligated to seek the salvation of the souls under his charge, servants as well as children. Cotton Mather wrote in his diary on April 21, 1700: "This day, my Servant, was offered unto the Communion of my Church. But in the Account that she gave to the Church of her Conversion, she Declared her living in my Family to have been the Means of it, and that she should forever bless God for bringing her under my Roof. Others of my Servants formerly (almost all that ever lived with me) have joined unto my church when they have lived with mee; and blessed God for their Living in my poor sinful Family."
Woman's place was in the home. It was her duty to "keep at home, educating all her children, keeping and improving what is got by the industry of the man." She was to see that nothing was wasted or prodigally spent; that all had what was suitable in due season. Bearing and caring for children, processing food and fiber, and managing a large household left little time or energy for her to contemplate her place in society. Nevertheless, the number of women that performed the numerous tasks unaided by servants while bearing and rearing many children was probably not much greater than it is today.30 The number of children who did not survive infancy was great and adult unmarried women, unpaid servants, or other kindred living with the family assisted with the household tasks.
There can be no question of the situational factors that led to authoritarianism, but this is not adequate to explain the authoritarianism of the New England Puritan family. The law prescribed the death penalty for disobedience of children to parents, following the precepts of Mosaic law; the father was the representative of the oligarchy in the home. "The sway of the housefather, though in the main just, became in theory despotic."31 But so far as is known, the death penalty was never imposed for the crime of disobeying parents.
Women had a role subordinate to that of men. Married women could not hold property of their own. Legally, the wife's personality was largely extinguished, for her personal property became her husband's and he was responsible for her behavior. In Puritan theology the souls of men and women were equal but few would advocate social equality. Modesty, meekness, compassion, and piety were regarded as "solid feminine virtues." A good wife was expected to submit to her husband's authority, meet his needs, and cater to his whims. When a wife of the first governor, John Winthrop (who married four times), lost her mind, her Puritan women friends attributed the calamity to "her desertion of her domestic duties and meddling in a man's sphere."32 In similar vein, Governor Winthrop believed that the young wife of the Governor of Connecticut had gone insane by giving herself wholly to reading and writing. Had she "not gone out of her way and calling to meddle in such things as are proper for men, whose minds are stronger, etc., she had kept her wits and might have improved them usefully and honorably in the place God had set her."
The husband's authority was strictly circumscribed, however. Lawfully, he could not strike his wife, nor could he command her to do anything contrary to what were regarded as the laws of God. She held a place of honor in the home; she was parent to the children and mistress to the servants. In relation to these members of the household she stood in a position of authority equal to that of her husband. The case of Daniel Ela and his wife Elizabeth is a case in point. When Daniel told his wife Elizabeth that "shee was none of his wife, shee was but his Servantt," the incident was reported to the authorities; and in spite of Elizabeth's protest that she held no charges against her husband, the county court levied a fine against Daniel.
A great deal of the integration of the Puritan family was perpetrated by external conditions rather than internal activity. The integration of the family was also advanced by strictures on communal pleasures that were considered to be morally dangerous.
That the demands of a primitive agriculture and the severity of Puritan religion and moral standards caused strained relationships in the family is to be expected. We have indications of the tense situation that developed as the Puritan father attempted to carry out the requirements of parenthood, especially the requirements that he be responsible for the souls of his children. Both Cotton Mather and Judge Samuel Sewall report problems in this regard. An entry in Cotton Mather's diary indicates the dedication and intensity he felt as he attempted to carry out his religious function as a Puritan father, indicating also the unreasonableness of the task and the release from tension that the situation produced through the shedding of tears.
Cotton Mather writes in his diary on a Lord's Day as follows:
I took my little daughter, Katy, inty my Study; and there I told my Child that I am to dy shortly, and shee must, when I am Dead, Remember every Thing, that I said unto her.
I sett before her, the sinful and woeful Condition of Her Nature, and I charged her, to pray in secret places, every Day, without ceasing, that God for the Sake of Jesus Christ would give her a New Heart, and pardon Her Sins, and make her a Servant of His. ...
At length, with many Tears, both on my Part, and hers, I told my Child, that God had from Heaven assured mee, and the good Angels had satisfied mee, that shee shall be brought Home unto the Lord Jesus Christ, and bee one of His forever. ... But I therewithal told her, that if she did not now, in her Childhood seek the Lord, and give herself up unto Him, some dreadful Afflictions must befall her, that so her Father's Faith may come at its accomplishments.
I therefore made the child kneel down by mee; and I poured out my Cries unto the Lord and Hee would lay His hands upon her, and bless her and save her and make her a Temple of His glory. it will bee so; it will bee so!33
There is some value in making a distinction between individual and person in that "individual" is a generic term applicable to biological organisms, human and animal, while "person" is a specific term applied only to human beings. If this distinction is accepted, it can be argued that the human infant at birth is more correctly designated as "individual" than as "person," thus reserving the term "person" for human beings who have been shaped by the socialization process. ("Socialization" is a term that denotes the process by which a human being learns to adjust to the way of life, or life style, in a society by acquiring patterns of behavior of which his associates, particularly his adult associates, approve. This process normally begins in the family. It continues in the school and in association with playmates and other children and adults.)
Children were "providential accidents," but they were prized both for religious and practical reasons. While there were many births, there were also many deaths. The infant mortality rate was high even in advantaged families. Only two of Cotton Mather's fifteen children survived him and only three of Judge Sewall's fourteen children outlived their father.34
In spite of the high infant mortality rate, the colonial family proved to be remarkably adequate in adding to the population. Families with ten children were fairly common, and families with twenty or more children were not unusual. Most of the large families were the offspring of at least two mothers, however.
The demands of Puritan theology and the demands of the environment complemented each other; for the theology saw idleness as a source of sin for children as well as for adults, and the demands of nature called for long hours of labor by the children. Harsh as the pattern of piety, rigid discipline, and hard work might appear, it did match the times. In the world that children could expect to enter as adults, labor was in demand and capital was scarce. Thus, it was somehow consistent with prevailing conditions when the will of the headstrong child was broken. All children were taught that it was wrong to find fault with their meals, their apparel, or their lot in life.35
Children, it was believed, were born evil; since the stain of original sin defiled the soul of the newborn, he was promptly taken to the church on the Sabbath to be baptized. The fear of Hell was greater than the fear of pneumonia or other children's diseases that might be aggravated by so early exposure.36 The Puritans also believed that children were born without knowledge. They assumed, however, that much of the effect of both evil and ignorance could be overcome by training and education. If parents performed their duty, the child could be led away from the evil to which he was naturally prone. Evil nature could be curbed and disciplined into right behavior only if training started early. The pious parent had to fill his children's minds with knowledge and he had to make them apply knowledge to right action.
The basic personality of the child was not formed as a result of intensive contacts between parent and child alone. Puritan farm children living in the New England village had extensive contacts with many people within the larger household and outside of it. The personality of the Puritan child was influenced by his kin, by others of the household, and by neighbors in the village.
Beyond the usual teaching of skills, the Puritan family was responsible for teaching the child a calling. According to law, every father had to see that his child was instructed "in some other trade profitable for themselves, and the Commonwealth if they will not or cannot train them up in learning to fit them for higher imployments."37 Puritan children often lived outside the parental home. A boy chose his calling between the ages of ten and fourteen, and if it was to be a trade the training was gained through an apprenticeship of seven years to some master of that trade.
Children left the parental home not only to live with the masters to whom they were apprenticed; they frequently went to live with a schoolmaster. Judge Sewall's granddaughter attended boarding-school in Boston at the age of nine. Children also made long stays in the homes of friends, and not always voluntarily. There was a precedent in England for the practice of placing children outside the home, one justified on the grounds that children learned better manners when they were brought up in another home. The Puritans continued the practice. They felt that God gave them through birth to their natural parents and as Reverend Deodat Lawson put it, children belonging to God rather than to man were in reality "put out" by God for purposes of training and education when they were placed in the parental home. Hence, by extension, children were "put out" whether they were in the parental home, in the home of kinfolk, or in another home. Rather than putting disobedient children to death, as the law allowed, the selectmen or the court placed them until they came of age with families who would more strictly supervise their upbringing.
It was "common practice in diverse places for young men irregularly and disorderly to watch all advantages for their evil purposes, to insinuate into the affections of young maidens by coming to them in places and seasons unknown to their parents for such ends, whereby such evil hath grown amongst us to the dishonour of God and damage of parties," according to a Massachusetts law of 1749.38 We learn from a Massachusetts statute that there was "a loose and sinful custom of going or riding from town to town ... ofttimes men and women together, upon pretence of going to lectures, but it appears ... merely to drink and revel in ordinaries and taverns, which is in itself scandalous, and it is to be feared a notable means to debauch our youth and hazard the chastity of those that are drawn forth thereunto."39 Later Jonathan Edwards told of young men in Northampton who had become "addicted to night-walking and frequenting the taverns, and leud practices," and how they would "get together in conventions of both sexes for mirth, and jollity, which they called frolics; and they would spend the greater part of the night in them."40
Sunday night "dating" apparently grew out of the way in which the Sabbath was celebrated. It was customary in New England to celebrate the Sabbath from sundown on Saturday through sundown on Sunday, and this gave rise to the practice of celebrating the close of the religious services by company-keeping on Sunday evenings. The various families of the church would call on each other, and apparently the young people went so far as to keep company apart from the rest of their respective family.41 In some parts of Connecticut it was reported that courtship was carried on in the living room in the presence of the family; while an early English traveler said of Boston that on the south there was a small but pleasant common, where the gallants, a little before sunset, walked with their maidens till the nine o'clock bell rang.
A custom in New England as well as in New York and other Middle Colonies was that of bundling, which involved the couple courting while in bed, with the mutual understanding that innocent endearments should not be exceeded. The couple courted in bed apparently for considerations of convenience and privacy. There is some evidence that the custom was practiced particularly among the less privileged classes "whose limited means compelled them to economize strictly to their expenditure of firewood and candle light."42 Precautions were taken against undue physical stimulation or involvement--they were fully clothed; in some instances the girl was expected to don additional clothing when bundling; and beds were sometimes equipped with a center partition separating the bed partners.
Bundling was regarded as a gross licentious practice by the Puritans, but how common the practice was and how commonly it led to sexual involvement is not known. Burnaby, a visitor to Massachusetts Bay Colony, told of such a custom (under the title of "tarrying") which he observed took place between the permission to "pay court" and the banns. Another observer attributed different motives to young men and young women; women bundled with chaste purpose, but "in time the men had their way."43
It is possible that those who introduced bundling were influenced by the Dutch custom of "queesting," for there does not seem to be evidence of bundling in Old England. In Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and Germany there were comparable customs.
Puritan proscriptions on sexual behavior were difficult if not impossible to enforce. Sexual irregularities both before and after marriage were common. Lord Dartmough, secretary for the Colonies, referred to the commonness of illegitimate offspring among the young people of New England as a thing of accepted notoriety. There were a number of contributing factors. Settlers had brought from England a fund of coarse sensuality, perhaps only veneered with asceticism.44 It was difficult to keep adults in subjection in a pioneering area where the cooperation and the labor of each person was so sorely needed. Even young ladies enjoyed a relatively large amount of liberty. The need for laborers brought "undesirables" into the communities. Lastly, the form of sexual indulgence that developed may have reflected the stern morality that did not allow for a class of prostitutes. If fornication was common, apparently prostitution was exceedingly rare in the colonial period.
All of the above were contributing factors no doubt, but observers have generally agreed that there were norms built into the very structure of Puritan society that contributed to the problem. First, the New England Puritans had preserved an ancient English usage--that of the precontract or betrothal--and in some instances gave it a legal status. This ceremonial betrothal preceding marriage often took place before a witness, and after the ceremony the terms "husband" and "wife" could be used. An understandable confusion regarding the privileges and obligations of the new status existed. Indeed, a greater leniency toward the betrothed was reflected in the law. For fornication between the betrothed the punishment was usually one half, or less than one half, what it would have been if the couple had not been betrothed. It is possible that bundling involving Puritans had its chief significance as an adjunct of precontract.
The Puritans tried to do everything in their power to prevent sexual behavior outside of the marriage bonds. Private morals were brought under the purview of the magistrate. It was ordered that all single persons who merely for their pleasure took journeys, especially in mixed company, "shall be reputed and accounted riotous and unsober persons, and of ill behavior ... and shall be committed to prison for ten days, or pay a fine of forty shillings for each offense."
There was also the "seven months rule," aimed at couples who had committed fornication after precontract but before marriage, who had, however, married before the birth of their child. This rule called for the couple to humble themselves before the congregation by making confession of the fact that they had had sexual intercourse prior to marriage. Added to the humiliation of public confession in church was the fact that subsequently these cases usually came before the county court for trial and the infliction of a penalty.
The fear for the welfare of their offspring no doubt drove many couples to confess. By the "seven months rule," children born in less than seven months after marriage were refused baptism and were thereby put in period of eternal damnation, unless the parents made public confession before the congregation.
Casual and illicit behavior involving unmarried young people led to laws governing mate selection. Massachusetts law specified that "whatsoever person from hence forth shall endeavour, directly or indirectly, to draw away the affection of any Mayd in this jurisdiction, under pretense of marriage, before he hath obtained liberty and allowance from her parents or Governors or in absence of such of the nearest magistrate, he shall forfeit for the first offense five pounds, for the second toward the partie ten pounds, and be bound to forbeare any further attempt and proceedings in that unlawful design, without or against the allowance aforesayd. And for the third offense upon information of complaint by such parents or Governors or any Magistrate, giving bond to prosecute the partie, he shall be committed in prison ... untill the Court of Assistants shall see cause to release him." In other words, an indeterminate sentence for the third offense! The courts were not without employment under this statute. The Puritans believed that God was concerned with mate selection and that the power to dispose of a son or daughter in wedlock was a gift of heaven.
Where love is highly controlled by society, as it was among the Puritans, it does not enter prominently into mate selection. This generalization seems to apply to the New England Puritans, for Puritan love differed radically from the romantic conception. Romantic love would have seemed idolatrous and blasphemous to the orthodox Puritan. The love which they embraced more closely resembled that characteristic of the rationalistic model, wherein the affections are subservient to the will under the guidance of reason. It was held that where passion and affection ruled, there man was deprived of sense and understanding.
It was expected that there would be a personal element in mate selection, however. Parents could not merely contract for a spouse for their offspring. A young man was expected to seek and obtain the consent of a prospective bride, although the parents frequently determined or helped to determine what young lady he should seek to win. There was even greater control over the activities of a daughter, and parents commonly determined what young man should be given a chance to court their daughter. The usual factors governing consent to court were the character and personality of the young man, his religion, and his ability to provide for a wife and family.
The diary of Judge Sewall provides a case study in parental involvement in courtship and mate selection. It is reported that Judge Sewall superintended the whole procedure of lovemaking for his daughters with never-flagging zeal; on the other hand, as one of Judge Sewall's letters to his daughter Betty shows, he was anything but a ruthless autocrat overriding the sensitivities of his daughter.
Mr. Hearst waits upon you once more to see if you can bid him welcome. It ought to be seriously considered, that your drawing back from him after all that has passed between you, will be to your Prejudice; and will tend to discourage persons of worth from making their Court to you. ... I do not see but the Match is well liked by judicious persons, and such as are your Cordial Friends, and mine also.
Yet not withstanding, if you find in yourself an imovable incurable Aversion from him, and canot love, and honour and obey him, I shall say no more, nor give you any further trouble in this matter.
According to the record, Betty Sewall married Mr. Hearst the following year.
The Puritan father exercised his authority in the negotiations over financial arrangements accompanying marriage. The boy's parents might withhold their approval if a girl's dowry was not large enough. The "higgling of dowries" was one of the most "singular practices" of New England life.45
Young people had recourse from family decisions in regard to mate selection. First of all, parents could not insist that a child marry someone whom he disliked--the reason being that the child would then not be able to love his mate, which was a duty of a Puritan spouse. Sternness in matters regarding courtship must not be confused with injustice. The court allowed appeal to be made if the parent or guardian withheld his consent through any sinister or covetous desire.
The adult who remained unmarried was no less under the surveillance of the selectmen and their representatives, the tithing man, than were families. Spinsters were looked upon with disapproval, and an "ancient maid" of twenty-five or thirty years of age might be disparagingly referred to as a "thornback." Single, unattached men were viewed with suspicion if not with contempt. The law made no distinction between men and women in ordering that they live in licensed families so that a family governor might "observe the course, carriage, and behavior, of every such single person."46
Outside of domestic service, marriage and parenthood was the major, if not the only, career open to a young woman. Wives and mothers were in short supply; marriages were formed early and widows were wooed almost at the bier of the departed. Apparently colonial society admitted women into the world of work outside the home but more out of necessity than out of conviction. Outside and inside the home men were predominant, in spite of the fact that women were found serving as proprietors of taverns, shops, grocery stores, hardwares, and in the professions of teaching, nursing, and writing. Though women engaged in all of these activities, the total number of women wage earners in New England (outside of domestic service) was small.
Bachelors and "thornbacks" were not the only family-free adults who caused the tithing man anxiety. He also kept a watch on married persons who were living apart from their spouses. It was conceivable that one's spouse might be living in the old country and that courtship might then take place between such a married person and some single person in the colony. Living apart from one's spouse was frowned upon even if a person was circumspect in his behavior and even if there were grounds for living apart. The case of Abraham Hagborne shows the extremes to which the courts would go. Hagborne had come to the colony forty-two years before; he lived with his wife for fourteen years until she left for England. He then sent for her to return to America and provided for her transportation; yet when she did not comply the court "was pleased to require him to depart the Countrie and repayre unto his wife."
Old England had no clear-cut marriage norms to offer the Puritans at the time they left to establish homes in a new land. English marriage law was in an anomalous and chaotic state. The Protestant Reformation had brought no real change in the canonical conception of the form of wedlock.
On the one hand was the church (with state support), trying to enforce ecclesiastical rights and to secure publicity by requiring banns, parental consent, and registration. On the other hand was common-law marriage, entered by private agreement without any of the ecclesiastical or legal safeguards.
The continuity of English marriage law and custom in the New England colonies is striking. But so are the innovations.47 There was a strong reaction in favor of temporal power in matters regarded in England as pertaining to the spiritual jurisdiction. In no respect was the change more remarkable than in the administration of matrimonial law and in the conception of the marriage contract. The Puritans regarded marriage not as a sacrament but as a civil contract in which the intervention of a priest was unnecessary and out of place.
Governor Winthrop, in commenting upon an important marriage that was to be solemnized at Boston in 1647, expressed the prevailing sentiment. "We were not willing to bring in the English custom of ministers performing the solemnity of marriage, which sermons at such times might induce, but if any ministers were present and would bestow a word of exhortation, etc., it was permitted." Generally, early colonial law required that all marriages should be celebrated before a justice of the peace or other magistrate. This emphasis on civil marriage helps to explain why the marriage ceremony commonly took place at home instead of in the church.
So intent were the Puritans in emphasizing the secular character of marriage that in the statutes the words "holy" or "sacred" as applied to marriage seldom, if ever, appeared. "Honorable" or some similar epithet was usually the strongest term employed. There does not seem to have been any direct legislation regarding matrimony for many years. A positive legal sanction may well have been deemed superfluous while public opinion was united.
The demands as well as the opportunities afforded by pioneer life contributed to marriages being universal, early, and repeated. Andrews reports that a Miss Sarah Hext married John Rutledge when she was fourteen years of age and that she was the mother of seven children before she was twenty-five; that Ursula Byrd married Robert Beverley, had a son, and died before she was seventeen; Sarah Breck was only sixteen or seventeen when she married Jonathan Edwards, as was Hannah Gardiner when she married Doctor McSparran.
The record left in diaries, correspondence, and books attests to the fact that Puritan married life was not without its pleasant side. Such expressions as "my dearest Life," "my only beloved spouse," "my chief love" were not uncommon in letters exchanged by spouses. Nevertheless, the highest love was reserved for God himself; no human object of interest, even one's spouse, could take his place. To prize one's spouse too highly was idolatry, in that it ultimately endangered one's love of God. Governor Winthrop saw fit to qualify his expression of love for his wife in the words, "My only beloved spouse, my most sweet friend, and faithful companion of my pilgrimage, the happye and hopeful supplye (next Christ Jesus) of my greatest losses."
The course of love--even Puritan love--did not always run smoothly. The colonists were a litigious people; and members of even some of the best families did not hesitate to bring their matrimonial difficulties into court. Sometimes a jilted lover sued his fickle sweetheart; in other cases a forlorn maiden sought satisfaction from her unfaithful betrothed spouse. The Puritans believed that human depravity so deprived man of control of his affections that it was not easy for him to properly love proper objects. Court records reflect broken promises, cruelty, adultery, desertion, and divorce.
Since the Puritans had rejected the sanctions of the sacramental theory of marriage and had established marriage as a civil right, marriage could be dissolved by the civil authorities; and many petitions for divorce were entertained by the courts. Puritan thought on divorce has been referred to as the most liberal of the times. Dissolution of the bond of matrimony was granted for such causes as breach of the marriage vows, cruelty, or desertion. However, as long as a couple were lawfully married, the church required that they live together despite disagreements between them.
Originally, death was the penalty prescribed for adultery and at least two persons were condemned and executed for it in Massachusetts. Generally, though, the courts shrank from pronouncing sentence according to the limit of the law and satisfied themselves with lesser punishments, such as imprisonment, banishment, or whipping. Eventually the scarlet letter was substituted for the death penalty--a capital A "of two inches long and proportionate bigness, cut out of cloth of a contrary color to their clothes, and sewed upon their upper garments, on the outside of their arm, or on their back, in open view." But the magistrates seemed to hesitate to prescribe the letter, too, thus giving the accused benefit of a more lenient interpretation of the law. In some cases the juries declined to convict for the offense charged, though the evidence seemed clearly enough to sustain a verdict.
The law with regard to incest was similar to that for adultery; persons guilty of incest were forced to wear an initial letter as in the case of adulterers. In Massachusetts, for instance, exactly the same penalty in the same words was imposed for the punishment of incest as for adultery, except that in the case of incest the capital letter I was to be worn.
While the adulterer might evade punishment by the civil authorities, he could be fairly certain of summary excommunication if the church found out about it. The rule against adultery apparently furnished the basis of more ecclesiastical prosecutions than any other provision in the Decalogue.
What was the effect of the Puritan family upon its individual members? This is somewhat difficult to determine because of lack of empirical evidence. Hatch and Hatch have made an ingenious attempt to test the effect of Puritanism using historical and contemporary data available for one family over a number of generations. They attempt to show by reference to the persons in this highly integrated Puritan family how consistent abandonment by the person of his own desires and ascetic controls from outside leads to disturbances in the integration of the person, in his relationship with others, and in his relationship to work.48
Members of this family never forgave themselves for falling short in any respect; they regarded love or passion as dangerous. The men of the family thought that their wives and children had their reward in being related to a successful man. The lack of strong affection between husband and wife seemed to be compensated for by both parents centering their affection on the children.
This case does not prove but it does illustrate the thesis that personality difficulties were inherent in the Puritan system. Members of the family were schooled from childhood to live for future rewards; there was little regard for the uniqueness of the person. There was an indefinite deferment of feeling. "When they come to the end, few of the family have ever done anything they wanted to do. They have conscientiously done what they did not want to, and they have very little to show for their trouble except their secret rage."49
Almost from the beginnings in America signs of the eventual failure of the Puritan experiment were evident. The system was a rigid system not prepared for the modifications that a new situation demanded. Out of this system came much of the intolerance that left a stain on the pages of early New England history. The Salem witchcraft outbreak, for instance, was a logical outcome of the long policy of repression that hanged nonbelievers and destroyed independent thought in its attempt to imprison man "in a strait jacket of Puritan righteousness."50
Puritanism held so uncompromisingly to its principles that it alienated the adherents it needed. It found itself engaged in an impossible task; growing democracy and liberalism in a virgin, well-endowed land could not be stifled.
Some reasons for the failure of the Puritan experiment were closely related to a dedication to the family as the basic social and religious system. The Puritan strategy was to depend on the family as the basic system responsible for providing covenanted citizens for the state. When it became apparent that their children did not convert easily, they intensified the campaign; they wrote, they preached, they prayed, they threatened. It became clear that religious commitment was not hereditary!
Today, the major designs of the Puritan social system are nothing more than museum pieces capable of titillating the minds of the historically curious. What, if any, was the legacy of New England Puritanism to American society in general and to the American family in particular? In a nation made up of successive waves of immigrants, there is some advantage in having been an early arrival in the land. There is always the possibility that the culture of the early arrivals will become established and will gain prestige, and that the culture of the later arrivals will be expected to modify in the direction of the established culture. This is in part the story of the American experience. Aspects of Puritan life that remained were a spirit of religion and a rigid moralistic pattern of personal life.51 Puritanism also "protected" early American society from some of the more democratic social aspects of the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation. Furthermore, Puritanism drew sharp lines around the family and in a sense strengthened it, as opposed to the reform influences in Europe that tended to unsettle it. Theoretically, both the Renaissance and the Reformation exalted personality at the expense of the social systems, including the family. These reform movements called for a self-reliant man always conscious of his rights, not always conscious of his duties. Since the first wave of reform to strike the American shore was Puritan, for better or worse some of the impact of the more personalistic tendencies of the reform movements in Europe were modified or at least postponed.
Another of the lasting effects of Puritanism is to be found in the penal codes of the United States and in many of the states. These made a negative impression on some European visitors, Gustave de Beaumont, for instance, and have been an exasperation to American social reformers.52 Beaumont, visiting America in 1831-32 wrote, "This austerity appears not only in daily habits but in laws as well. ... Puritanism, dominant in New England, influences nearly all the states of the Union: thus, the penal code punishes with imprisonment any intimacy between unmarried men and women.53
Since the colonial period occupied nearly one half of the course of American history from the founding of the first colony to the present, aspects of Puritan thought became one of the continuing factors in American culture. The Puritans covenanted with God in forming a society; indeed, many of the rules and statutes of the social order were taken verbatim from the Old Testament. Their society was at first a totalitarian one run by a theologically-inclined oligarchy.
The Puritan social system provided a major role for the family, for it was believed that God in creating systems of control began with the family. Both state and church put heavy demands on governance in the family. The state expected the family head to maintain order and discipline; the church expected him to assist in the religious conversion of his children and to supervise their religious education and devotional life. Observers from both state and church invaded the privacy of the home to check on the performance of family functions. The man deemed unfit to superintend his children could have them "put out" under worthy governance. Children also left the home at an early age as apprentices or to receive a formal education.
The Puritans believed in free choice of mates, but youthful indiscretion led to various kinds of parental control and legal statutes. Punishment for illicit sexual behavior was severe. Marriage was a civil rather than a religious contract. Expressions of affection were not unknown to Puritan marriage, but to prize one's spouse was idolatry; the highest love was reserved for God. Marriage could be dissolved by civil action, and many petitions for divorce are on record.
Puritanism was religious rather than humanistic; personal needs and desires were not indulged. The individual lived to serve here and to enjoy his reward in the hereafter.
Puritanism failed as a social system. A spirit of religion; a rigid, moralistic pattern of personal life; and some puritanical federal and state laws continued as survivals after the death of Puritanism as a social system.
Henry Adams. The United States in 1800. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, Great Seal Books, 1955, consisting of the first six chapters of Volume I of Adams' History of the United States of America During the First Administration of Thomas Jeflerson; first published in 1889.
Charles M. Andrews. Colonial Folkways: A Chronicle of American Life in the Reign of the Georges. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1919.
Panos D. Bardis. "Family Forms and Variations Historically Considered," Handbook of Marriage and the Family, ed. Harold T. Christensen. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964. Pp. 403-461.
Gustave de Beaumont. Marie or Slavery in the United States. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1958; first published in France in 1835.
Arthur W. Calhoun. "The Early American Family," The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, CLX (March, 1932), 7-12.
Arthur W. Calhoun. A Social History of the American Family. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1945; first published in 1917-19.
George R. Clay. "Children of the Young Republic," American Heritage, XI (April, 1960), 46-53.
Sidney Ditzion. Marriage, Morals and Sex in America: A History of Ideas. New York: Bookman Associates, 1953.
Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick. "A Meaning for Turner's Frontier," Political Science Quarterly, LXIX (September, 1954), 321-353; and LXIX (December, 1954), 565-602.
David L. Hatch and Mary G. Hatch. "An Unhappy Family: Some Observations on the Relationship between the Calvinistic Ethic and Interpersonal Relations over Four Generations," Marriage and Family Living, XXIV (August, 1962), 213-223.
Karl H. Hertz. "Max Weber and American Puritanism," Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, I (Spring, 1962), 189-197.
George E. Howard. A History of Matrimonial Institutions, Vol. II. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1904.
Florence R. Kluckhohn. "Family Diagnosis: Variations in the Basic Values of Family Systems," Social Casework, XXXIX (February-March, 1958), 63-72.
Manford H. Kuhn. "American Families Today: Development and Differentiation of Types," in Howard Becker and Reuben Hill, Family, Marriage, and Parenthood (2nd ed.). Boston: Heath, 1948. Pp. 131-168.
Herman R. Lantz, Raymond Schmitt, Margaret Britton, and Eloise C. Snyder. "Pre-Industrial Patterns in the Colonial Family in America: A Content Analysis of Colonial Magazines," American Sociological Review, XXXIII (June, 1968), 413-426.
Don Martindale. American Society. Princeton, N.J.: Van Nostrand, 1960.
Nathan Miller. "The European Heritage of the American Family," The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, CLX (March, 1932), 1-6.
Perry Miller (ed.). The American Puritans: Their Prose and Poetry. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Anchor, 1956.
Perry Miller. The New England Mind: From Colony to Province. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953.
Edmund S. Morgan. The Puritan Family: Essays on Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth Century New England. Boston, Massachusetts: Trustees of the Public Library, 1944.
Emil Oberholzer, Jr. Delinquent Saints: Disciplinary Action in the Early Congregational Churches of Massachusetts. New York: Columbia University Press, 1956.
Henry Bamford Parkes. The American Experience: An Interpretation of the History and Civilization of the American People. New York: Knopf, 1947.
Vernon Louis Parrington. Main Currents in American Thought. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1930.
Herbert Wallace Schneider. The Puritan Mind. New York: Holt, 1930.
John Sirjamaki. "Cultural Configurations in the American Family," American Journal of Sociology, LII (May, 1948), 464-470.
Alexis de Tocqueville. Democracy in America. New York: Knopf, 1951; first published in France in 1835.
Frederick Jackson Turner. The Frontier in American History. New York: Holt, 1920.
Robin M. Williams, Jr. American Society (2nd ed.). New York: Knopf, 1960.
FOR THE FAMILY, the period of national emergence was in some ways threatening because some of the ideological tendencies of the times were to lead to family experimentation the likes of which America had never seen before and has not seen since. The period is one of emergence from regional to national perspective; from dependence on England to political independence; from conservative, highly articulated rules to liberal, vague, abstract principles of freedom and democracy. What bridges the gap? How do we get from a Puritan theocratic model of society to an ideology stressing personal dignity, freedom, and democracy?
This is not the place to trace the intricate themes that make up America's social and intellectual history; but unless some of the major themes are briefly sketched, Puritan culture and the Puritan family become meaningless even as catalysts for the unique American cultural and family systems that emerged. Not that the colonies had been totally Puritan in culture and polity nor totally without models of freedom and democracy, but Massachusetts Bay and its "satellite" colonies provided a massive Puritan influence beyond their numbers and beyond their region.
In 1758 Jonathan Edwards died and his death signaled Puritanism's loss of validity. Samuel Johnson, Edwards' intellectual successor, disillusioned with the Puritan philosophy, substituted human happiness for the glory of God as the chief end of man. This change in philosophy helped to pave the way for the humanitarian revolt against Puritanism.54 As Puritanism crumbled, free thinkers, liberals, Whigs, "new lights," and "independent reflectors" flourished. To exalt vindictive justice at a time when the liberals were preaching a benevolent God was unpopular doctrine.
Self-reliance found expression in the beliefs of Jonathan Mayhew and Charles Chauncey. Mayhew declared that true religion was comprised of a love of liberty and country, and the hatred of all tyranny and oppression. Chauncey saw the whole human race as made for happiness. Such ideas expressed the spirit of a revolutionary generation. Mayhew, Chauncey, and others like them were educated men of English descent fighting for their rights as Americans. Through the writings and lectures of liberal thinkers the prosperous, confident, commercial Yankees were able to disregard or at least to rationalize the Puritan pretense of their utter dependence on God and transform their theology into a Declaration of Independence.
It was left to Benjamin Franklin to separate the Puritan ethic from its theological sanctions and to attempt to preserve the ethic without the theology. Franklin held that the old-fashioned Puritan virtues of frugality, industry, and the rest were necessary if one wanted to succeed, but he made no attempt to prescribe what the end of life should be. He merely established the personal discipline that was necessary to success. Edwards and Franklin represent opposite poles of Puritan thought. Edwards attempted to induce New Englanders to lead a godly life; Franklin succeeded in teaching Americans to lead a sober but not necessarily a godly life.
Unitarianism also supported the nascent humanitarian trend.55 It regarded authority as the prop of the weak, dogma as the body of a faith that is dead. The Unitarian was a seeker, open-minded and free. He did not regard himself as the sole custodian of truth as had the Puritan.
The new philosophy received additional support from Emerson and the transcendentalists. To a Unitarian human nature was excellent; the transcendentalist saw it as divine. The transcendentalists were romantics; authority, dogma, and creed were swept away by faith in an indwelling divinity, with intuitive sanctions. They saw nature as sinless and man as a sinless being; they elevated him to a dizzy eminence.56
Perfectionism was an even more extreme and permissive philosophy of the day. If its logic were followed, perfectionism would have made short shrift of political parties, of loyalty to government, of the political state itself.
The new philosophy can perhaps be summed up best in the thought of Thomas Jefferson, among the leading politically influential philosophers of the age. Assumptions of Jefferson include the following: man is basically good; he can be counted on to act rationally; the masses of men, if given freedom of choice, will choose the wise and good. Jefferson's was a faith in personality and not a faith in social systems. The latter were to serve man to the end that his human capabilities might be fully developed.
In 1782, when Great Britain conceded the independence of America, probably as many as a third of the whole American population had Loyalist (British imperialistic) inclinations and involvements. The Loyalists included many of the aristocratic families in New England; New York, and Pennsylvania.57 Because of their loyalty to Great Britain their property was confiscated, and they were deprived of political and legal rights. An estimated eighty thousand Loyalists went into exile during the war. Shiploads of families whose heads included some of the most cultivated persons in America were driven from their homes to seek refuge in "Hell, Hull, or Halifax." State legislatures, in an attempt to democratize the ownership of property, divided Loyalists' estates into small farms and either sold them or distributed them to soldiers in the form of bounties. The prospect of an elite dynasty of aristocratic families gaining positions of political and economic power for the family system was markedly curtailed with the defeat and emigration of the Loyalists.
Other wealthy families of the Atlantic seaboard and the South, though not Loyalists, were also out of sympathy with democratic principles. These monied classes believed that their rights would be endangered by any democratic system of government based on outright majority rule. They hoped to work out a framework of government appropriate to the families of farmers and planters, especially those interested primarily in agriculture and not in land speculation. The theory of the equality of all persons could not be reconciled easily to the European aristocratic practices of entail (settling property inalienably on a person and his descendants) and primogeniture (giving an explicit right of inheritance to the firstborn). In English law, it was the eldest son's right to receive all the real estate possessed by his father to the exclusion of all women and younger male descendants, except for what aid he might extend to them.
The holders of large estates did not prevail; Virginia, in 1776, was the first state to abolish entail, and before the end of the eighteenth century primogeniture had been abolished generally. In America, land was too abundant to require that estates remain intact for economic reasons, and emerging democratic principles frowned on making land an "ensign of nobility." Entail and primogeniture never had popular support in America; but their demise, legally, along with the defeat of the Loyalists, dealt a serious blow to the prospect of the family becoming a dominant social system in American society.
An important factor contributing to the division of American families into isolated nuclear units with small holdings was the law governing the alienation of land in areas beyond the original colonies. The rectangular survey was adopted as a way of dividing the virgin land in the West. This provided for the division of land into townships consisting of thirty-six sections of one square mile each. The sections were divided into farms of 160 acres each. This system provided an almost infallible method of describing property; but the gridiron pattern contributed to a dispersion of land with modest holdings for each family.
Not that the influence of economically powerful family dynasties was lost entirely, however. Besides families of wealth who had supported the Revolution rather than the Loyalist cause and hence had been spared from both financial ruin and exile, there was a new group of speculators and merchants who grew rich on the war effort. Inflation and general disorder created an atmosphere in which shrewd and unscrupulous entrepreneurs could profiteer off speculation in land, currency, and government contracts. Fortunes were made and a nouveau riche emerged to replace partially the Loyalist aristocracy, an aristocracy less cultured and less public-spirited, however.58
In the period of unrest and torment that ushered in the birth of the new nation, when all major social systems were being subjected to critical reappraisal, it is to be expected that the family would also undergo reappraisal. There were, both in Europe and in America, groups who were looking for a social and intellectual climate wherein they could experiment with community and family systems.59 Before enthusiasm for family reform subsided about the middle of the nineteenth century, most of the logically possible types of marriage reforms had been aired and a number had been tried out in practice. Among them were the Shakers' concept of celibacy; the Mormons' practice of polygamy and celestial marriage; the Oneida Community's practice of male continence; and Robert Dale Owen's emphasis on birth control.60
What were the major issues of community and family systems that were being debated, researched, and experimented upon? The major issue was the question of equal rights. The egalitarians thought equal rights would solidify the family; the upholders of benevolent authoritarianism thought that an organization without a leader would disintegrate.
Some crucial questions were being raised. Up to what point could a person be permitted to exercise his freedom? Who was to be responsible for setting the standards of propriety and morality? Does the person himself decide whether monogamy or polygamy is the best marriage system? Should marriage as a system be retained or abolished?
Two among many examples of experimental family and community systems of the times were New Harmony, established by Robert Owen, and the Oneida Community, established by John Humphrey Noyes.
Robert Owen asserted that the architects of the American Revolution had intended the family reforms that he would detail; their hesitancy had been due only to the fact that they did not want to endanger their immediate objectives. Owen told his hearers that man, up to that hour, had been a slave in all parts of the world to "a trinity of the most monstrous evils that could be combined to inflict mental and physical evil upon his whole race." He was referring to private property, "absurd and irrational systems of religion," and marriage "founded on individual property combined with some of these irrational systems of religion."61
Owen saw as destructive of human happiness the very social systems which other social leaders considered essential to civilization. In 1827, he published his proposals for improving the social system. His principles of marriage were designed to overcome the difficulties of the prevailing system. The couple desiring to be married were to give notice of their intentions in writing to a community committee. They were to repeat their notice three months later with the signatures of two witnesses affixed. The secretary of the committee was to call a community meeting on the following day, at which the parties would declare themselves husband and wife. If the marriage did not turn out to their satisfaction, they could utilize the same procedure to undo it, for they were responsible only to each other.
Owen was of the opinion that no law could successfully stimulate love or extinguish hatred. "Love," said Owen, "withers under constraint; its very essence is liberty: it is compatible neither with obedience, jealousy, nor fear; it is there most pure, perfect and unlimited, where its votaries live in confidence, equality, and unreserve."
Robert Dale Owen, who carried on the work of his father, Robert Owen, was a thinker, serious researcher, and writer in his own right. In a world bent on progress Robert Dale Owen viewed constancy of any kind, including marriage, as no virtue. He did not regard man as perfect but as a pliable creature who learned from experience; he needed freedom to correct his errors. Some persons would find their happiness in a permanent marriage while others would find happiness in change. Under a free system there would be more real and less affected constancy.
Part of Robert Dale Owen's ammunition for his attack on prevailing monogamous marriage came from a report of the New York Magdalen Society, an apparently reliable source. It was asserted in the report of the Society (c. 1830) that there were 20,000 women engaged in prostitution in New York City. Owen, allowing for possible error in the figures, pointed out that even if there were only 10,000 prostitutes in all, with three visits daily per prostitute, this would mean 10,000,000 contacts annually. Owen used the report as evidence supporting his call for sex education and the need for marriage and divorce reform.
Owen's Moral Physiology, or A Brief and Plain Treatise on the Population Question, was ahead of its time in recommending population adjustment through birth control. Owen questioned the emphasis the Christian church had put on propagation as the first if not the sole purpose of sex in marriage and emphasized personal and mutual happiness as the goal of marriage. This was not a new idea even in 1831, but no one had attempted to couple it with specific, albeit inadequate, instruction in birth control. Though the little treatise was condemned, as were others of Owen's writings, 1,500 copies were sold within five months. One female correspondent assured Owen that nine-tenths of his women readers would approve of the book though they would not dare to admit it openly.
But this first, largest, and best-known of the utopian communities begun by Robert Owen on a 20,000-acre tract at Harmony, Indiana, was doomed to failure almost from the start. Owen did not give necessary attention to the detail of organization nor did he screen the applicants for admission to the community. Due to wide publicity and the general invitation extended by Owen to one and all to come, the community became a mixed collection of nonconformists without the necessary unifying convictions of a carefully structured social system.62