by Wendell Garrett
 |
O Woman, if thy Husband be not so young, beautiful, healthy, so well temper'd and qualified as thee couldst wish; if he has not such abilities, riches, honours, as some others have; if he does not carry it so well as he should; yet he's thy Husband, and the Great God Commands thee to love, honour and obey him. . . . It may be thy discontent, fretting, scolding, quarrelling, makes thy Husband weary of the house, he can't abide to be at home, he has no quiet nor peace there; this makes him idle away his time, get into bad company, stay out late at nights, take to Tippling, Gaming and other ill practices; which tend to bring shame, poverty, misery on him, on thy self and Family.  aternal authority was at the center of the
notion of the "well-ordered family" that European settlers brought with them to the new world. These migrants set up
remarkably different societies, ranging from the compact theocratic communities of New England through the quasi-feudal
heirarchy of Maryland and the scattered farms and plantations of Virginia to the largely unorganized backcountry of the
Carolinas. Nonetheless, they all had to give a semblance of order to colonial society.
Surviving evidence suggests that death held considerable dominion over life
in the seventeenth century. Life expectancy at birth was just over thirty-five years, while those who survived to the age
of twenty-five could expect to live only into their early fifties. In colonial America mothers who lived through their
childbearing years bore an average of eight children, although it was probably rare for as many as six to survive into
adulthood. Since childbearing usually began within the first year and a half of marriage and continued until menopause,
couples rarely had many years free from child rearing.
With one of every two men and women dying before the age of fifty, to enjoy thirty
or more years of married life generally dictated two or more spouses. With little restraint on fertility this often
yielded families with a complex mixture of natural and stepparents and full and half brothers and sisters. Be that as
it may, the family was in many ways the social order of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in America. Families
carried out many of the tasks we today assume are the business of government. With the exception of a very small elite,
which employed tutors and sent their children to college, the young were taught by their families. Even in New England,
where early on schools shared the family's responsibility for teaching children, school years were few and the curriculum consisted
largely of the three Rs with a gloss of religious and moral instruction. It was still in the household that girls learned
the domestic arts and boys picked up the skills needed for farming or a craft. Everyone in a household lived in close
proximity to the extreme human experiences of birth, disease, dementia, and death.
By the late eighteenth century the dominion of death over the contours
of family life had relaxed somewhat with the gradual extension of life expectancy. Moreover, the ready availability of
land and the relative ease with which people could move to new settlements or beyond the fringes of settlement loosened the
hold of the patriarchal family. By the 1830s and 1840s there was a sense of cultural restlessness that exhilarated some
and terrified others. The pursuit of power and opportunity tugged one way, and the yearning for continuity, control and order
tugged the other way. Novelists from Nathaniel Hawthorne onward recurrently highlight this dilemma of Americans afire
with visions of what F. Scott Fitzgerald called "the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us."
by Wendell Garrett, Antiques, The Magazine, April 2001 |
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