Parenthood

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PARENTHOOD

The birth and early development of the United States were accompanied by fundamental transformations in the way people thought about and practiced parenting. The political, economic, geographic, and cultural forces shaping the new nation profoundly affected conceptions about gender, and thus about motherhood and fatherhood.

the colonial backdrop

In the British colonies of North America, fatherhood and motherhood were shaped by the attitudes and economic arrangements of a preindustrial and agrarian society. Especially in the New England colonies, such attitudes were also shaped by Calvinist Protestantism, which assumed the innate depravity of children. The colonial economies rested on the foundation of the independent household, which was typically headed by an adult white male and included servants and apprentices as well as blood kin. Such households, sustained through the labor of all household members, were large, with eight or more children not uncommon. Because males were thought to possess greater powers of intellect, moral discipline, and emotional self-control than were women, fathers were recognized as the primary parents. Fathers were responsible for ensuring the physical, spiritual, and moral well-being of their dependents and for providing their sons and apprentices with education, moral values, and the skills necessary for work in farming, handicrafts, or business. Because the village workplace was typically not far from home, most fathers exercised an active role in domestic governance. Fathers also influenced their children's marital choices and helped them achieve economic security through their control and disbursement of family property. Mothers, meanwhile, were responsible for rearing young children, training their daughters in home maintenance, and performing such household tasks as cooking, washing, and spinning. Mothers were presumed to have a tendency toward emotional overindulgence of children such that their parenting was often considered dangerous to a child's spiritual and moral development. Therefore custody of children generally went to fathers in colonial America's rare cases of divorce.

parenting in transition

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a series of overlapping and mutually reinforcing political, economic, intellectual, and religious developments transformed motherhood and fatherhood. A new power dynamic emerged between fathers and mothers, resulting in the emergence of ideals and practices of parenting often called "modern." Enlightenment thinking had emphasized that the young mind was basically good, rational, and impressionable. Such ideas reshaped Western thought and challenged arbitrary patriarchal authority, pointing toward more democratic family relationships. Parental affection, the encouragement of independent judgment, and an emphasis on voluntary and reason-based filial obedience were increasingly perceived to be the bases of domestic and social stability. Similarly, republican political ideology and the American Revolution that it inspired disparaged monarchical tyranny, encouraging fathers and mothers alike to foster in their children the independence and love of virtue necessary for good citizenship in the new republic. By the early nineteenth century, Romanticism had generated a "sentimental" approach to family relations, which exalted affectionate and emotionally intense family relationships and idealized the mother-child relationship in particular. Meanwhile, a growing challenge to orthodox Calvinist theology, evident during the burst of religious revival activity that characterized the early

nineteenth century, discouraged the stern and emotionally reserved exercises in will-breaking often employed by traditional Calvinist fathers. The new thinking stressed that humans had an innate capacity for morality, the development of which required nurture—understood as the natural talent of women—and an overall gentler parenting style.

The changing physical and economic realities of the new nation reinforced these shifts. Ongoing population growth, out-migration to newly opening western areas, and the abandonment in American law of customary English inheritance practices reduced (though by no means eliminated) fathers' ability to enforce their authority through their control of property. The expansion of market capitalism and growth of industrial production in the early nineteenth century, especially in northern urban areas, eroded the premodern household economy, creating a new white middle class. Fathers in this emergent middle class were defined as breadwinners whose primary parental responsibility was to provide income. In pursuit of that income they were often separated physically, and therefore psychologically, from their families for significant amounts of time. Although this development enhanced fathers' economic authority and even lent it something of a mystique, it also enhanced mothers' responsibility for day-today household governance. At the same time, the demise of the preindustrial economy magnified the importance of the family's psychological and emotional functions over its traditional economic ones and prompted a gradual decrease in family size (from an average of 7.04 children for white women in 1800 to 5.42 in 1850). Smaller families in turn allowed a more intensive approach to parenting. Commentators and authors of parental advice literature increasingly identified mothers, insulated from the amoral world of economic and political activity, as naturally pious beings solely able to ensure the morality of their children and husbands. Mothers remained legally subordinate to their husbands and retained many of the household tasks of their colonial forebears, but by about 1830 the Victorian apotheosis of the mother had begun and, at least for the white middle class, motherhood, morality, and homemaking had become closely identified. For both fathers and mothers of the white middle class, parenting became—and to a considerable degree remains increasingly focused on educating children and preparing them for middle-class careers and marriages.

regional, racial, and class variations

For Americans outside the northern white middle class, experiences of race, class, and region counteracted and muted to a considerable degree the impact of the various forces described above. Thus different patterns of fatherhood and motherhood emerged. Southern planters, for instance, shared with middle-class northerners the emerging ideals of gentle parenting, romantic sentimentalism, mothers' moral guardianship, and republican citizenship. However, the presence of slaves and accompanying ideologies of racial hierarchy perpetuated older patterns of patriarchal household leadership, gave mothers responsibility for slaves' children as well as their own, allowed white women to use house slaves to mitigate their own child rearing responsibilities (though they were often mistrustful of their black servants' care), and tied the ideal of the moral, self-sacrificing mother to the requirements of the slave economy.

For slaves themselves, parenthood was shaped by the realities of bondage and, to a degree still debated among scholars, by the legacies of their West African cultures. Many slave women, though often described by whites as lacking the nurturing instincts "natural" to white women, considered motherhood sacred and integral to their identities and mothers as central to family structure. Although some scholars have suggested that reduced fertility was common among slave women in the Caribbean islands, slave populations in the United States began experiencing natural increase by about 1750, and slave women began experiencing increased pressure to reproduce after the new nation withdrew from the international slave trade in 1808. Indeed, slaveowners' often manipulative encouragement of slave motherhood probably explains the fact that slave women tended to have their first children at age eighteen, about two years earlier than southern white women. Yet slave women also became mothers to ensure their own security, to reduce the likelihood of their being sold away from their families and friends, or to augment their family's rations of food and clothing—a point underscored by the fact that they typically had to care for their children in addition to their regular workload.

Reliable statistics on birthrates among slave women do not exist, but research does indicate that about one-third of slave families—a significantly higher proportion than among white families—were female-headed. This does not mean, however, that slave fatherhood was of negligible importance or fit the white-perpetuated stereotypes of alienation, absence, and irresponsibility. In fact, research has revealed that paternal presence, involvement, and leadership in a two-parent setting were the norm in slave families. To be sure, slave fathers lacked property rights, breadwinner status, and legal control over their children, and lived apart from their families more frequently than did white fathers; but they provided love and attention for their children, served as male role models, transmitted family customs and culture, hunted and fished to supplement their families' modest food allotments, passed on survival and craft skills to their children, and sought to insulate their families from the harshest aspects of slavery and racism.

Working-class parents were usually unable to realize the middle-class ideals of the breadwinner father and homemaker mother. Even when they aspired to achieve middle-class status, father, mother, and children alike were forced to work as a buffer against financial uncertainty. The need for income from all family members tended to perpetuate older patterns of family functioning, with large family size (although, as in the case of African Americans, precise birthrate statistics are lacking) and traditional patriarchal dominance remaining long after these characteristics had begun to fade from middle-class family life. Because men were paid more than women, fathers generally provided most of a working-class family's income. However, their economic vulnerability and the increasing obsolescence of traditional artisanal skills undermined their economic leadership and domestic authority, and the employment of mothers and children often sparked tensions and power struggles among family members. With more mothers at work, children spent more time away from direct parental supervision, preventing the working-class home from becoming the haven of sentimental nurture idealized by middle-class writers.

Yet the ideals and practices of white middle-class parenthood provided a powerfully influential model for nonwhite and non-middle-class groups in the new nation. White middle-class men and women themselves, viewing their parenting as normative and as the key to national economic strength and social stability, began by the 1820s to form voluntary organizations—and would later enlist the state—to export their standards of domestic life beyond their own race and class. Meanwhile, African Americans, working-class Americans, and others outside the northern white middle class, although in some instances strenuously resistant to white middle-class values, gradually followed the pattern of reduced fertility and drew decisively on white middle-class domestic visions of breadwinning fatherhood and homemaking motherhood as they began in their fledgling unions and other activist organizations to define their agendas for social change in the young Republic.

bibliography

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Bret E. Carroll

Encyclopedia of the New American Nation