Women in Stuart England and America by Roger Thompson

Author:Roger Thompson [Thompson, Roger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Social History, Modern, 17th Century, United States, Colonial Period (1600-1775), Reference, General
ISBN: 9781136226731
Google: c432BAMAk90C
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-05-07T03:36:01+00:00

Chapter 7

The Family

'The whole of our history and of our civilisation depends on the family. And yet the historian . . . has so far ignored its humble history.' So wrote the eminent economic historian, Joan Thirsk, as recently as 1964.1 It is paradoxical that historians are currently responding to this challenge, just at the time when the family as an institution is being seriously questioned.

Any study of the seventeenth-century family must start with the awareness that individualism was then only beginning to bud. For many Englishmen the family was the smallest recognisable unit of society. They identified not through the individual ego, but through membership in a family group. The effects on outlook were subtle but profound—as though modern man were permanently a member of a rowing eight, lacking any meaningful identity if parted from the rest of the crew.

This chapter looks at the specific question of parental control within the 'little commonwealth'. Were American colonial parents more permissive than their English counterparts? If the evidence suggests that they were, the results for women would be extremely important. Greater parental permissiveness might well argue that the mother played a greater role in family government than in a more patriarchal, authoritarian society. Daughters more permissively raised would thereby develop considerably greater independence than those kept firmly under the parental thumb. Such independence would affect the daughter's outlook when she graduated to being a wife and an adult member of her community.

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