A Republic of Men. Mark E. Kann
of their own.” English writers agreed that a “well-ordered family,” with an “orderly head” and “orderly members,” was “the basis of the entire social order.”10
On the other hand, the Whig attack on absolute kingship generated doubts about all absolute authority. Algernon Sidney, James Tyrrell, and John Locke vested familial authority in the traditional patriarch but they also sought to limit paternal power to prevent domestic tyranny. They experimented with the idea of marriage as a negotiable contract that could be terminated in divorce; they emphasized a husband’s duties toward his wife; and they declared adult sons to be fully free and equal men. Also, they allowed for occasional state intervention to prevent and punish patriarchal abuses and even contemplated instances when female sovereignty and filial rebellion were justified.11
Popular pamphleteers pushed further in this direction. Mary Astell compared tyrannical husbands to tyrannical kings and suggested that wives in families deserved the same rights that Whigs claimed for men in politics. Other writers complained of “foolish, passionate, stingy, sottish” husbands who thought themselves “free from all restraints.” They needed to be less authoritarian and more respectful and loving toward their wives. In the changing family, writes Lawrence Stone, “The authority of husbands over wives and of parents over children declined as greater autonomy was granted to or assumed by all members of the family unit. There were the beginnings of a trend toward greater legal and educational equality between the sexes. . . . Although the economic dependence of these women on their husbands increased, they were granted greater status and decision-making power within the family.”12 This emerging companionate ideal suggested a new model of husband-wife relations, plus a new understanding of father-son relations.
The Whig notion that fathers and adult sons were equals weakened paternal authority. Fathers had only a few years to leave an imprint on sons before the latter became autonomous men. Unfortunately, that imprint was often one of neglect and abuse. James Harrington reported that “innumerable children come to owe their utter perdition” to fathers who ignored them and thereby exposed them to excessive maternal indulgence. John Locke was particularly appalled by fathers whose poor parenting skills “weaken and effeminate” their sons. He proposed a theory of psychological fatherhood to strengthen intergenerational bonds, so that a father could train a son to mature into a proper heir and an “affectionate friend when he is a man.” The traditional patriarch’s strict authority over his sons was gradually transformed into mere influence over them.13
Gordon Schochet concludes that the Whig “rejection of absolute fatherly authority” was more symptomatic “of what was coming rather than . . . [of] what had already taken place.” What was coming finally arrived when Americans adapted Whig rhetoric to local conditions. In 1764, James Otis, Jr., resurrected a century-old line of questioning: “Are not women born as free as men? Would it not be infamous to assert that the ladies are all slaves by nature?” A decade later, Thomas Paine denounced men who abused patriarchal authority to play the “tyrant” and keep women “in a state of dependence” akin to slavery. He urged men to give more recognition and respect to women. The next year, Abigail Adams called it indisputable that men had been “naturally tyrannical” to women. She wanted husbands to “give up the harsh title of master for the more tender and endearing one of friend” and to treat wives not as “vassals” but as “under your protection.”14
In America as in England, Whig rhetoric generated skepticism of vast authority.
Whig rhetoric also called attention to a gap between the ideal of the traditional patriarch and the everyday reality of gender relations. Kenneth Lock-ridge agrees that traditional patriarchs were expected to control “all things in their households.” However, even within a context of domination and subordination, women were historical agents with “substantial power.” They had leverage over men during courtship as well as in their roles as mothers, household managers, laborers, religious activists, and widows who controlled family estates and minor children. The extent of women’s agency grew during the Revolution, when women assumed de facto family sovereignty, ran farms and shops, participated in America’s political and military life, and thereby blurred the boundaries between the masculine and feminine. For many men, women’s enlarged influence made them appear to be especially dangerous, destructive, and disorderly creatures.15
The gap between the patriarchal ideal and family reality expanded as republican values seeped into domestic culture. Criticism of husbands’ arbitrary power and abusive treatment of wives was common in eighteenth-century America. In 1743, for example, a poet castigated “the tyrant husband” who imposed “fatal bondage” on his wife. In 1759, Annis Boudinot Stockton declared, “Oh men behave like men,” to insist that husbands stop degrading their wives and instead cherish their virtues. The Revolution’s attack on tyranny in favor of benevolence weakened traditional patriarchal authority and strengthened companionate norms in marriage. Judith Sargent Murray wrote that men “usurped an unmanly and unfounded superiority” over women when they ought to strive for “mutual esteem, mutual friendship, mutual confidence, begirt about by mutual forbearance.” A husband’s respect for his wife was “as tender as it is manly,” implying that it was not the stern patriarch but the loving husband who epitomized true manhood.16
The dominant ideal was also undermined by economic trends that impaired paternal power. The traditional patriarch monopolized control of land and command of his children’s destinies. However, population growth, economic expansion, and commercial development destroyed this monopoly. Even affluent fathers suffered a diminished capacity to transmit land to sons when their settlements became densely populated. In Dedham, Massachusetts, for example, intensified land use fostered family dispersion. As wealth became more unevenly distributed, poor fathers without land to distribute or bequeath discovered they had little economic clout. They could not “control their sons by promising the gift of a farm later in life.” Finally, young men had options. Some settled western lands to achieve “what only total independence would recognize, the right to shape their own communities.” Others sought their fortunes in towns and cities where commerce opened up new opportunities for income. Many fathers became what scholars call “enlightened pater-nalists” or “friendly paternalists” who relied on Locke’s “subtle, psychological means” to maintain a grip on their posterity.17
The traditional patriarch’s authority was further eroded by an emerging separation of home and workplace. As men began to leave home to spend their days at separate workplaces, they gradually became part-time husbands and fathers who depended on their wives to manage their households and parent their children. Americans came to believe that men’s days in the marketplace “depleted” virtue whereas women and children’s time in the domestic sphere “renewed” it. With fathers and sons occupying different spatial and ethical worlds, fathers began to lose the capacity to guide their sons into manhood. Some critics questioned whether fathers tainted by social vices should educate their sons, and most agreed that mothers were increasingly responsible for promoting and protecting their sons’ virtue. Eventually, fathers’ parental authority was transferred to mothers.18
Some Americans reacted to the destabilization of the traditional ideal with what Lockridge labels “patriarchal rage.” A youthful Jefferson filled his commonplace book with quotations indicating a misogynist hatred for women allied to an ongoing fantasy “that men could reproduce without women.” Jefferson’s youthful rage matured into “the subtle and perverse misogyny of the new democratic age” manifested in the nascent doctrine of separate spheres which, Nancy Cott argues, was a means “to shore up manhood (by differentiating it from womanhood) at a time when the traditional concomitants and supports of manhood . . . were being undermined and transformed.” New England shoemakers put the doctrine into effect in the 1780s when they began to set up shops outside their homes, take male apprentices into their shops to teach them the entire production process, and recruit female relatives to perform limited functions from within their homes. Artisans reinforced their authority over production in “men’s sphere” and reaffirmed their prerogative to confine females, control their knowledge, and harness their labor