Modern Motherhood: An American History

Modern Motherhood

Modern Motherhood

An American History

JODI VANDENBERG-DAVES

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW BRUNSWICK, NEW JERSEY, AND LONDON

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Vandenberg-Daves, Jodi.

Modern motherhood : an American history / Jodi Vandenberg-Daves.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978–0–8135–6379–4 (hardcover : alk. paper)—ISBN 978–0–8135–6378–7 (pbk. : alk. paper)—ISBN 978–0–8135–6380–0 (e-book)

1. Families—United States—History. 2. Motherhood—United States—History. 3. Mothers—United States—History. I. Title.

HQ535.V36 2014

306.874'3—dc23 2013027195

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2014 by Jodi Vandenberg-Daves

All rights reserved

Visit our website: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu

To my children, Allison, Sylvia, and Brad Vandenberg-Daves

And to all mothers, past, present, and future

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I: Roots of Modern Motherhood: Early America and the Nineteenth Century

Chapter 1. Inventing a New Role for Mothers

Chapter 2. Contradictions of Moral Motherhood: Slavery, Race, and Reform

Chapter 3. Medicalizing the Maternal Body

Part II: Modern Mothers: 1890–1940

Chapter 4. Science, Expertise, and Advice to Mothers

Chapter 5. Grand Designs: Uplifting and Controlling the Mothers

Chapter 6. Modern Reproduction: The Fit and Unfit Mother

Figure Insert

Chapter 7. Mothers’ Resilience and Adaptation in Modern America

Part III: Mothers of Invention: World War II to Present

Chapter 8. The Middle-Class Wife-and-Mother Box

Chapter 9. Mother Power and Mother Angst

Chapter 10. Mothers’ Changing Lives and Continuous Caregiving

Conclusion

Notes

Index

About the Author

Acknowledgments

Years go by while a person labors over a book like this, about six years in this case, a significant chapter in a lifetime. I am extremely grateful to those who supported me along the way, contributed ideas, and made the often solitary journey less lonely. This project has been generously supported by the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse, the College of Liberal Studies (CLS) and my home department, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. A CLS Sabbatical Grant, a UW–La Crosse Faculty Research Grant, a UW–La Crosse Faculty Development Grant, a CLS Small Grant, crucial release time from teaching, and an atmosphere of constant encouragement in my department made this book possible. I want to especially thank Dean Ruthann Benson and my department chair, Deb Hoskins. At an institution with a heavy teaching load, it is a rare faculty member whose department chair asks her, What do you really need to get this book done? and then works with the dean to make it happen. Deb’s leadership and dedication to genuinely supporting the work of her colleagues are incomparable.

I also appreciate the support of Rima Apple, whose work I have admired for many years and whose perceptive critiques, suggestions, and kind encouragement of this project came at critical junctures. Special thanks, too, to Andrea O’Reilly and the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (MIRCI). Andrea’s leadership of MIRCI and her personal collegiality have nurtured my thinking about mothering and motherhood for more than a decade. Dr. Apple’s and Dr. O’Reilly’s works inform this book, as do the works of several generations of scholars whose names are scattered throughout my endnotes. This book is a tribute to the collective work of great historical and feminist minds, and I hope I have done them some justice in these pages. Among these scholars, a special note of thanks to Sara M. Evans, my Ph.D. adviser, who originally gave me a model of accessible historical writing, and to Norman Rosenberg, Peter Rachleff, James Stewart, and Emily Rosenberg, who first taught me how to think historically. Thanks also for the expertise of Leslie Mitchner, my editor at Rutgers University Press, who saw the potential of this book immediately and supported its development along the way. Special thank yous, as well, to Adi Hovav and Lisa Jerry, both of whom lent their significant talents as professional editors to the manuscript, improving it in many substantial ways.

It is especially humbling to sit down and thank the many people in my life who have carefully and generously read chapters and offered thoughtful and immensely helpful suggestions. Friend and colleague readers include Beth Cherne, Jaralee Richter, Louise Edwards-Simpson, Mahurq Khan, Elise Denlinger, Deb Hoskins, Christina Haynes, Terry Lilley, Sanna Yoder, as well as a number of members of the History Author Working Group (HAWG.) Over several years, HAWG provided me an encouraging and intellectually challenging space to workshop chapters as they evolved. Special thanks goes to HAWG member James Longhurst, whose keen editorial eye shaped this manuscript in many places, to Marti Lybeck, whose sense of the historical big picture is unparalleled, to Víctor Macías-González, who directed me to numerous resources and provided editorial advice and encouragement, and to Jennifer Trost, who kindly helped me with additional grant-seeking for the project.

Thanks, too, to kind departmental colleagues Andrea Hansen, Terry Langteau, James R. Parker, and Nizam Arain, to long-term career mentor, Sandi Krajewski, and to the many people across the UW–La Crosse campus who encouraged me in the process. I am very appreciative of the work of librarian Jenifer Holman, whose expertise proved invaluable throughout the research process, and to Saundra Solum for technical assistance. I am also grateful for the talents of Kelly Nussbaum, historical research assistant par excellence, and Taylor Goodine, whose skills with the English language made this a much better book. And thanks to all my hundreds of students of women’s history and the history of motherhood. Without their energy, ideas, and questions, this book would be much less rich and interesting. I also want to especially thank Elise Denlinger for sharing her family history with me and with the book’s readers and, while I’m at it, for years of friendship and support for all my endeavors. And thanks to my many friends at Jule’s Coffee House, where the vast majority of this book was written and edited, and to owner, Chris Kahlow, who let me occupy a booth for hours on end for the small price of the world’s greatest tea and scones.

For great meals, distraction, and fun along the way, special thanks to Kitty Howells, Sanna Yoder, Jaralee Richter, Beth Cherne, and their families, to Keely Rees, Christine Hippert, Karyn Quinn, Sharon Jessee, Shu Li and Stefan Smith, to Melissa Wallace, Kay Dailey, Janice Hansen and Heather Christiansen, part of my book group/life support group, to Karen Dame, Sue Kuncio, Kim Ruth, and Mary Zimmermann, the original moms in my maternal circle from the early 1990s and still so close to my heart, and to my dear friend from graduate school days, Louise Edwards-Simpson, a razor-sharp historical mind. Thanks also to my mother-in-law, Paula Daves, for many great conversations about motherhood, and of course to my own mother and father, Charlene and Leslie Vandenberg, who originally taught me what is most important about parenting, family, and the need for social justice. In addition to new conversations with my parents while writing the book, it has been a joy to connect my own mother to history. I especially thought of her as I wrote the chapter on resilience and adaptation because she is my model for both, and she has encouraged me with all her heart in my many endeavors. Thanks, too, to my supportive brothers, Chuck and Todd Vandenberg, their families, and to my wonderful Daves in-laws.

Besides professional editors, only one person read the book manuscript cover to cover. I could not have asked for a better research assistant and in-house editor than my daughter, Allison Vandenberg-Daves. Working with the person who first turned me into a mother, who also happens to be a gifted, incisive editor and historical thinker, was about as much fun as I had writing this book. It has also been a joy to share many thoughtful conversations about mothering and gender with my ever compassionate and questioning daughter, Sylvia, and my deep-thinking son, Brad, who teach me so much about the world as they grow up. Allison, Sylvia, and Brad Vandenberg-Daves grounded me, freed my mind from its ponderous writing mode, and, like they always do, made life worth living and motherhood worth writing about. In all this, they had help from their father, John Vandenberg-Daves. I owe so much to John’s support. His unflagging generosity, encouragement, patience, kindness and compassion, along with his sense of humor and keen intellect, have all informed the book and my career as a whole and have also been the foundation and fabric of my adult life.

Introduction

Reading cultural pronouncements on mothers from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, we might think that no force on earth was more noble or more powerful than the mother. In 1795, New York Magazine told American mothers that, quite simply, the reformation of the world is in your power. Several decades later, the Reverend William Abbott flattered American mothers that their influence outweighed that of all earthly causes. We know, of course, that women could not vote at the time and therefore had limited direct impact on the larger public world. Still, Sarah Josepha Hale insisted, If the future citizens of our republic are to be worthy of their rich inheritance, they must be made so principally through the virtue and intelligence of their mothers. Hale edited an early American women’s magazine, Godey’s Lady’s Book, for forty years, and her views on the role of mothers in shaping society were significant.¹

The idea here was that mothers had a unique and singular influence on their children. Their child-rearing mattered not only in the development of their children’s individual character but also in the preservation and advancement of what was good and noble in the young nation’s civic and religious life. The bond between mothers and children was sacred. Gentle and pure mothers guided innocent children, who were malleable to feminine guidance and inspiration. Why does an infant love its mother better than any other friend? asked an anonymous mother who wrote to The Mother’s Magazine, which answered: Because her voice is gentlest, her eye beams with fondest affection; she soothes his little sorrows, and bears with his irritability with the tenderest and untiring patience. These silken threads are harder to burst than the iron chains of authority. In early nineteenth-century women’s magazines as well as in messages from the pulpit and from other cultural commentators, a new middle-class family ideal emerged. Mothers would nurture, as their feminine nature suited them, and they would be appropriately confined to the domestic sphere of the home. Fathers, venturing into the bustling affairs of life, would earn a living while their wives formed the moral fiber and good habits of their children.²

These idealized concepts were invented by white, middle-class Americans on the East Coast at a time when most of the American population could not afford such a neat division of labor and approach to mothering. Most people lived in families that required everyone’s labor for family survival, and flexibility of roles was necessary. Nonetheless, the new ideals of civic and moral motherhood were the first steps in creating middle-class mothers’ modern identities, and these ideals would eventually impact a much broader segment of society. Modern mothers would be self-consciously gifted with—and burdened by—the idea that they had a unique influence on their children. At least initially, their influence was thought to depend upon their virtue, their watchfulness, their confinement to the home, and their constant availability.

As we fast forward into modern times, we see women’s lives undergoing vast changes, as they increasingly pursued higher education, worked outside the home for longer phases of their lives, and gained the right to vote and access to contraception and abortion. Still, throughout American history, motherhood—with its lofty ideals and its complex and sometimes gritty realities, has lurked behind nearly every debate about women’s place in society, women’s psyches, and even the future of the nation’s moral rectitude.

In our new millennium, alarm bells continuously ring about mothers and motherhood: Can they do it all and still raise good kids? What do we make of the raging ambivalence mothers often express today, the feeling of being torn between being a mother and being a self? And can we actually trust women with mothering, especially with reproductive decisions? Meanwhile, the media serves up continuous stories of bad mothers, defined in a plethora of ways: mothers who neglect their children, breastfeed them too long, consume them with their own needs, use drugs during their pregnancies, or fail to supervise adolescents who turn out to be budding criminals.

These seemingly disparate debates and judgments about maternal behavior and roles are connected by some core tensions between mothers and society as a whole. We continue to expect mothers’ influence to trump all others. Yet, over time, as women both expanded their roles into the public and gained new rights within the family American society grew more ambivalent about female power, both private and civic. It was one thing to talk in flowery terms about mothers at home shaping little minds in the early years of an exclusively male-governed American nation. It has been quite another matter to integrate into civic life female voters, officeholders, professionals, and empowered public decision makers who now make up roughly half the American workforce and who are also, in most cases, mothers.

At the same time, women have been expected to accomplish the task of rearing each new generation, even as public policy has given them few new resources. The conditions in which women have raised children are vastly shaped by social inequality, especially around race, gender, and class. It is easier to point to extremes of maternal behavior than it is to address the structures that make mothering so difficult to accomplish in our society, especially for those with less privilege. Mothers’ adaptations and sacrifices are supposed to make up for the shortfalls of our social safety net and structures that have not caught up to women’s modern lives: inflexible workplaces, schools with decreased funding, inadequate access to health care, and exponentially expanding income inequality, to name a few.

Added to all this is a more modern dilemma, one that was not acknowledged by Americans living in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: In part because of the conditions of modern life, mothers often find themselves wrenched between the demands of caregiving, on the one hand, and the requirements of self and society, on the other, a recipe for the chronic ambivalence that shapes contemporary maternal identities. We are continually told that no job is more important than motherhood and that all women are essentially maternal. Yet there seem to be a million ways to fail at this crucial job and an abundance of complex claims on women’s time.

All these tensions reflect the complex history of the evolution of modern motherhood, the subject of this book. Beginning with the development of a unique role for mothers in children’s development, as suggested in the high-minded prose of early American commentators, the modernization of motherhood added new layers over time. The forces of modernization—industrialization, scientific expertise, and an expanding government—complicated motherhood ideals without ever fully dislodging the notion of an irreplaceable maternal effect on children. As motherhood modernized, it intertwined deeply with the idea of a private nuclear family. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, motherhood was caught up with science and medicine as well. Mothers’ job descriptions became medicalized: the good mother would learn how to deal with and defer to an ever-expanding and often contradictory field of advice from medical experts.

An expanded government also became involved in mothers’ lives. Public policy initiatives have ranged from prohibiting birth control information to promoting the sterilization of unfit mothers to providing small provisions for worthy impoverished mothers without male support. As the job description of mother became more complex, discussions of modern motherhood also distinguished between good mothers and bad mothers by reinforcing and sometimes exacerbating class, race, and other inequalities among women.

Again and again, Americans have infused motherhood with cultural and political significance. Early American political and social theorists considered mothers crucial to maintaining the integrity of the American experiment in self-government, and religious leaders have instructed mothers about their moral place in society. Organized women, whether or not they were actual mothers, have also used the mantle of motherhood in support of movements for abolition, suffrage, peace, environmental regulation, abortion rights and restrictions, among many others. With each new generation, social reformers have used the idea of mothers’ special interest in children and presumably selfless nature to influence public debates and sometimes public policy. For example, female health reformers expanded women’s reproductive and health choices by claiming the nation needed healthy mothers. Suffrage activists claimed mothers needed the vote to clean up American society and expanded government services and regulation to protect vulnerable women and children.

As feminist writer Adrienne Rich pointed out in the 1970s, motherhood has long been an institution, a fundamental one to American society. Motherhood has provided both a critical reference point for social, political, and religious agendas of all sorts and a field on which Americans have wrestled with their ambivalence about female power, social justice, the needs of families, and even the social order. As an institution, motherhood includes not only the laws that define and constrain a society’s definition of legitimate forms of maternity and that control access to reproductive rights and to resources generally, but also the ideologies that define good and bad mothers in relation to cultural values.

In tandem with motherhood as an institution, a history of mothering has also contributed significantly to social change. Mothering includes the practices of caregiving and educating, the integration of maternal labors with other necessary and desired pursuits, and the instilling of values in children from generation to generation. Mothering has necessarily been shaped by motherhood, but mothering also has a life of its own. When we look at the patterns of social history, we see how mothers’ lives have departed from the ideals of institutional motherhood. Mothers have adapted, resisted, and moved in their own ways, within and sometimes under the radar of the limits imposed by society, thereby forcing gradual changes in society and values. For example, over time, mothers have more or less continuously increased their participation in the labor force, changing the face of labor itself and pushing against a cultural ideal of the mother at home. And women’s exercise of reproductive options gradually redefined female identities.³

Who were the agents of transformation in developing modern motherhood? And how much power did women exercise in all these causes and debates? In some respects, mothers themselves modernized by joining the workforce, limiting their family size, and demanding new resources for maternal and child health and education, to name a few examples. In other ways policy makers, physicians, religious leaders, advice columnists, and moral crusaders shaped modern motherhood. (And sometimes, of course, these categories overlapped.) As medical professions consolidated and enlarged their reach, those claiming specialized medical or psychological expertise had an increasing impact on the way women mothered. With the expansion of magazines, newspapers, and eventually radio, television, and the Internet, popular culture and consumerism did much to shape the ideals to which mothers were supposed to aspire and the morality lessons they were supposed to learn. Meanwhile, millions of conversations about mothering and millions of day-to-day decisions existed within this tableau. Interactions between mothers and fathers, mothers and grandmothers, neighbors, other relatives, and community members all provide part of the powerful but often invisible historical patterns of mothering.

Method and Approach of This Book

This book explores the development of modern motherhood ideals as they connected to how women actually did the work of mothering and thought about their identities as mothers. I use questions about modern motherhood to focus what is really a larger exploration of how motherhood and mothering have changed over the course of American history. I have borrowed and given a new forum to stories others have collected. Although I have gathered and interpreted selected primary sources, the principal contributions I make in this book are to put into conversation, synthesize, and provide a narrative framework and analysis for the disparate strands of maternal history. Social historians have been working on close studies of specific times, places, and themes related to motherhood for several generations now. This book pulls together the knowledge, insights, and perspectives of literally hundreds of specific studies as well as a number of larger surveys of women’s history, children’s history, and histories of American families. It is the product of my review of more than a quarter century of women’s history scholarship focused on or somehow connected to motherhood.

The range of sources that informed this book is vast, though it was not possible to make it comprehensive. Even as I write, new and exciting work is emerging in this field. Still, this book represents a significant representation of what we know about the history of mothering and motherhood, especially from the nineteenth century until the present. Readers will certainly notice gaps: there are long and frustrating silences in history. Histories’ stories have seldom been written from the perspectives of busy mothers, who often did not have time to write about their experiences and whose work was quite often taken for granted and not considered worthy of story or study. Especially for the earlier periods covered in this book, we often know more about the ideals of motherhood than about the realities of ordinary mothers’ lives.

This dearth of firsthand information also reflects women’s differences: who had the privilege of literacy, and who did not? Who had the leisure to write, and who was encouraged to do so? Whose aspirations for motherhood were catered to in popular advice literature? And whose stories have so far been written by historians? The history of white middle-class women has been well documented in the scholarly literature. This group left behind more records than other populations and received more commentary in the dominant culture, whether from the pulpit, in the magazines, or on television. African American women’s stories are the next most researched. Thankfully, the multicultural story broadens out much more near the beginning of the twentieth century, a time of expanding access to literacy, and more sources emerge to detail the lives of immigrant women, Asian American, Hispanic, American Indian, and working-class and poor women in general.

Some areas remain understudied, even for the twentieth century. Much more work is needed, for example, on diverse Native American mothering practices. Historians must also consider more detailed work on the role of religions other than Protestant Christianity in American mothering. Similarly understudied are historical patterns in same-sex parenting and the multifaceted roles of grandmothers and stepmothers as caregivers. To the extent that these topics are still underresearched, I hope the framework I develop to think about culture, race, and class in mothering and motherhood can lead my readers, including historians working on new material, to ask new questions. In that way the next survey of the history of American motherhood will be richer and more complete. In providing richer detail on the topic of motherhood, stories of fatherhood and parenthood generally can also be better researched.⁴ For now, I invite readers to learn from what decades of historical research on mothers and motherhood has been able to uncover, while asking their own questions about what else we need to explore.

Organization and Themes

This book is organized roughly by chronology and also by theme. It begins by examining the emergence of republican moral motherhood as early American middle-class ideals. Part one addresses these origins from the American Revolution roughly through the nineteenth century, as Americans invented a special role for mothers in moral development, in contrast to their colonial forebears. Nineteenth-century Americans also became fascinated with scientific ideas, especially related to maternal health, and these ideas began to compete with earlier religious worldviews. The first steps toward modern motherhood were entwined with middle-class identity, and, given the long duration of slavery, these American motherhood ideals were deeply racialized. Over time, dominant culture ideals, including a sentimentalized, nonbreadwinning mother, would increasingly impact most American mothers, whether or not the ideals made sense for their life circumstances.

In part two of the book, I address the promises and pitfalls of modern motherhood in what the commentators of the day were calling modern times, roughly 1890 to 1940. Mothers in this period experienced the gifts of modern science through better maternal and infant health, increasing both mothers’ and children’s chances for survival. Yet mothers also endured the charge that their maternal instincts were no longer capable of guiding them in their mothering roles. A growing cadre of experts in medicine, psychology, and social work reached out to women while offering advice, reassurance, and sometimes chastisement. These experts fostered new psychological expectations for motherhood and encouraged women to measure their mothering against ever-changing notions of what was normal for themselves and their children. Here, as throughout American history, race and class shaped women’s access to the benefits of modern life and helped define their positions vis-à-vis the ideals of modern motherhood.

As American mothers developed new experiences with scientific expertise, their family lives were also transformed. Rapid industrialization, urbanization, and immigration created new roles, new vulnerabilities, and new opportunities in this modernizing period. By the early twentieth century, the legal rights of fathers to control the labor, behavior, and resources of their children and their wives had greatly diminished, and the state showed a greater willingness to intervene in family life by usurping some traditional prerogatives of fathers. Women were demanding new public roles and freedoms, such as the rights to vote and to access birth control. It was an era full of social and cultural confusion, rapid economic change, and the hope of scientific progress.

In part three, I examine the power of gender ideology, from the rigidly defined gender roles that shaped motherhood after World War II to the challenges posed to mother-care traditions by Second Wave feminism. Simultaneously, this section of the book explores the impact of major changes in women’s working and reproductive lives since the Second World War. I argue that ultimately women have been able to wrest some control over the conditions in which they mother, in part by taking modern ideals to their logical conclusions: good mothers limit the number of children they have by exercising reproductive and relationship choices, and good mothers take care of their families both morally and materially by pursuing education and participating in the labor force. Finally, after a long unequal relationship with the mostly male experts who advised mothers, some mothering knowledge has again become diffuse and decentered from expert points of view. Especially since the birth of the Internet, the experts compete with a vast arena of information and perspectives, even as scientific, expertise continues to influence many areas of mothering. We see a proliferation of possibilities for maternal identities in an era that has questioned scientific and expert certainty and created an information (and opinion) revolution.

History is about continuity as well as change, and nothing has been more continuous than the fact that women—mothers or not—are still significantly underrepresented in the centers of political and economic power. The underrepresentation of women’s voices has meant that mothers have been burdened with an inadequate social policy structure and little power to shape the conditions in which they mother their children. This structure not only hinders their work as mothers but also limits their access to the public achievements that have been historically defined as male preserves. This is particularly true when it comes to women’s participation in the labor force. Most mothers now work outside the home, but the lack of paid maternity leave and other care-giver-friendly policies makes the task of raising children while working extremely difficult. Despite expanded roles for fathers in child care, the incomplete revolution in gender roles has combined with a continued emphasis on mothers as the primarily available and present parent, which leaves modern mothers overscheduled and often overwrought. Meanwhile, women’s access to a hard-fought right, to control when and whether they become mothers, is being painfully rehashed in both political discourse and attempts to mandate new forms of surveillance of the maternal body.

Nevertheless, the historian’s long view cautions me against jumping to conclusions about the impact of recent changes in modern motherhood and how these will or will not reshape old patterns. So much has changed so quickly that most of us can plainly see the difference between our own lives and those of our mothers. In terms of mothers’ increased labor force participation alone, these changes have been revolutionary. Very few mothers are confined to the sealed domestic sphere imagined by nineteenth-century moralists. Even those who stay home with children are often connected to the broader world via technology. Throughout history, both individually and collectively, mothers have been nothing if not resourceful. The ideals of motherhood have moved women and men to action in the name of a more just society on many occasions. I hope that through the voices and perspectives of mothers in history, this book will inspire the social imagination of those who value the contributions of mothers, caregivers, and women generally to our society and our future.

Part I

Roots of Modern Motherhood

Early America and the Nineteenth Century

Chapter 1

Inventing a New Role for Mothers

To understand the historical significance of modern motherhood, it helps to take a brief look backward to the essentially premodern world of mothers in the English colonies. Ideas about mothers as unique moral guardians only emerged at the time of the American Revolution. Before that, the nation’s Puritan ancestors, who left us the most voluminous records about seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century family life, held starkly different views. For them, mothers had no special place in the moral and spiritual education of their children. Fathers were considered the morally stronger of the two parents. According to one Puritan minister, Persons are often more apt to despise a Mother, (the weaker vessel, and frequently, most indulgent). Because a mother was sometimes overmoved by her tender & motherly affections, to quote another colonial commentator, she was not as capable as a father of exercising the stern authority Puritan children were thought to require.¹

A Look Backward: Colonial Mothers under English Patriarchy

There is in all children . . . a stubbornness and stoutness of mind, arising from natural pride, which must in the first place be broken and beaten down, noted one Puritan minister. The stated goal of breaking the child’s will appears in a great deal of colonial sources about family life. For example, Susanna Wesley, an English woman, wrote to her grown son on the eve of his departure to Georgia in 1732, insisting that in order to form the minds of children, the first thing to be done is to conquer their will and bring them to an obedient temper. Such conquest was, in her view, the only strong and rational foundation of a religious education without which both precept and example will be ineffectual. Parents, especially fathers, commonly used whipping or caning as the physical discipline necessary to prepare a child for subservience within a patriarchal social order. Children were considered miniature adults, as is evident from seventeenth-century paintings that depict an adult face—and head/body proportion—on young children. Even babies were set forth on the path to early self-control: Puritans swaddled their babies with wooden rods and encouraged walking at an early age.²

Colonial parents loved and treasured their children, as is amply evidenced. One of the very few women writers of the period, Anne Bradstreet, frequently makes that point in her poetry. For example, she lamented the limits on a mother’s power to keep her beloved children safe from harm:

Great was my pain when I you bred,

Great was my care, when I you fed,

Long did I keep you soft and warm,

And with my wings kept off all harm,

My cares are more, and fears than ever,

My throbs such now, as ’fore were never:

Alas my birds, you wisdom want,

Of perils you are ignorant.

Puritan minister Cotton Mather, who saw eight of his fifteen children die before reaching adulthood, poignantly acknowledged parents’ pain in losing children at a time of very high infant and child mortality. We have our children taken from us . . . the Desire of our Eyes taken away with a stroke.³

Still, there is no denying that children were considered economic assets in the colonial world. In the English colonies this was most obviously true for enslaved African children, most of whom began field labor around age ten.⁴ It was also true for the thousands of poor English children shipped overseas to work in the cash-crop colonies of Maryland, Virginia, and points farther south. Even in the Northeast, where more children lived in intact families and family labor prevailed, children’s labor was sorely needed. Because of this economic reality, people did not talk about innocent children, but rather about children whose wills needed to be broken.

At the same time, Puritan religious thought found even babies tainted with original sin. For all these reasons, socializing children into a religious worldview and teaching them to work for the family were tasks assigned to the father, at least in theory. By English and colonial law, fathers ruled their families, including their wives, their children, and their servants. The English common-law tradition of coverture meant that married women were legally covered by their husbands. Without legal identity of their own, wives were simultaneously defined as economically dependent. Married women had no rights to either the property they brought into the marriage or any money they earned while married, and they had no legal rights to their children. They could not sign contracts in their own names and could not make their own wills unless and until they were widowed. Widows were customarily entitled to only one-third of a husband’s estate. The will of New England goodwife Judith Coffin’s husband instructed one of their sons to take spesshal care of Judith and provid for har in all Respectes. The other sons were instructed to also pay a yearly maintenance sum for their mother’s upkeep. But in practice, many widows struggled to survive on the good graces of sons to whom most of the family’s wealth had been bequeathed.⁵

Fathers’ rights in the family were especially strong in New England. Here, a healthful climate made possible a strong patriarchal family structure in which a father would be likely to live long enough to exercise his rightful authority. Puritan fathers led their households, including children and servants, in learning both religious education and the good lawes of the Colony. They also guided their sons in finding vocations, and their consent to their children’s marriages was a legal right. At a time when land was the basis of the next generation’s livelihood, fathers’ control of property gave them a powerful voice in the occupational plans of their sons and the timing and selection of their daughters’ husbands.⁶ Fathers, especially those who had the most wealth and status to protect and control for the next generation, were ideologically invested with civic responsibility as well as moral and familial leadership.

In colonial New England, the town fathers policed the behavior of children through their laws and established themselves as the ultimate disciplinarians in cases where a son was Stubborn and Rebellious, and will not obey [his parents’] voice and chastisement. In Massachusetts, town fathers assigned themselves the tasks of overseeing particular families to ensure that community norms were enforced. In actuality, women informally policed a great deal of community behavior. But when informal mechanisms failed, the hand of the law was clearly male, patriarchal, and not particularly concerned with what more modern Americans would consider a sphere of familial privacy.⁷

In practice, too, the socialization of children was a widely shared task, certainly not reserved exclusively for, or even assigned primarily to, mothers. Because home and work were not separated for most colonial families, fathers and mothers were often present in children’s day-to-day life. In families that could either afford servants or own slaves, these nonfamily members also shared in child care. These servants or enslaved persons, therefore, had limited opportunities to spend time with their own children. Children were kept busy in all cultures, from fieldwork to tending to babies. Children often spent much of their childhood in apprenticeships, farm labor, or household service. Thus, many people beyond parents participated in socializing children.

To the extent that women had a special role in rearing the next generation, they were to bear children and help them survive their early years in the harsh disease climate of colonial North America. Women’s fertility was essential to community survival. Ministers told women that pregnancy was the first privilege of the Sex. Colonial headstones emphasized not women’s social or religious influence on children, but the fact that they were, as Judith Coffin’s stone read in 1704, Brave, sober, faithful, and fruitfull of vine. Coffin’s progeny at the time of her death numbered 177 children and grandchildren combined. Her fecundity was typical of New England white women, who spent on average twenty to twenty-five years pregnant or nursing babies.⁸

Premodern cultures conceived of fertility broadly, from pregnancy through the end of the nursing period. The birthing process was an especially dangerous ordeal. Bradstreet, for example, emphasized her role in her children’s survival at least as much as in their socialization. In one poem, she asked her children to remember that

You had a Dam that lov’d you well,

That did what could be done for young,

And nurst you up till you were strong,

And ’fore she once would let you fly,

She shew’d you joy and misery;

Taught what was good and what was ill,

What would save life, and what would kill.

In another poem, Bradstreet suggested that the travail of birthing a child was a sacrifice for which children owed a mother special gratitude and respect. In Bradstreet’s day, New England women bore an average of seven to nine children and stood a one in eight chance of dying in childbirth. Bradstreet also wrote of the physical burden and special sacrifice of nursing children in another poem, written from her imagined perspective of a child:

With tears into the world I did arrive,

My mother still did waste as I did thrive,

Who yet with love and all alacrity,

Spending, was willing to be spent for me.

With wayward cryes I did disturb her rest,

Who sought to appease me with her breast:

With weary arms she danc’d and By By sung

When wretched I ingrate had done the wrong.⁹

For colonial women breastfeeding was not only a physical sacrifice but also a spiritual gift. Providing the only sustenance that allowed infants to live, women who nursed their children sustained life in ways that sometimes inspired religious metaphors among the Puritan clergy. Grace goes directly to Christ, as a childe new borne goes to the mothers breast, and never leaves crying till it be laid there. Ministers referred to themselves as breasts of God and invited good Christians to church services to suck the breast while it is open. Breast milk could be also found in medicinal recipes, and many a sick adult was said to have been cured by sucking a Woman’s Breast, as a publication for midwives reported in 1660. It was used in salves and employed to treat eye problems, earaches, and any number of other ailments, as well as in childbirth. Many believed that drinking another mother’s milk might speed up a woman’s labor or relieve her pain. Women’s fertility, including their fertile, breastfeeding function, was highly valued by premodern cultures throughout the world. For example, in the West African societies from which enslaved women were forcibly removed, the announcement of an upcoming marriage prompted the friends of the bride-to-be to ritually prepare her for pregnancy.¹⁰

In practice, colonial women were also valued for their contributions to the material survival of their families. Throughout most of human history, the vast majority of women have had to combine productive labor, the work of producing goods and services that provided food, shelter, and other material goods, with reproductive labor, the labor of bearing and rearing children, caring for the sick, and generally maintaining family life. Colonial women in all the major cultural groups of North America were no exception. Indeed, both kinds of labor were so extensive that colonial mothers had little time to focus on tending to each individual child’s spiritual and emotional development. New England housewives worked from dawn to dusk: they planted and maintained kitchen gardens, spent hours each day building and tending to fires to heat homes and cook, baked bread and other foods, made cider and beer, traded and bartered for sugar, wine, spices, and other goods produced beyond the farm, spun and carded wool, and sewed and ironed clothing. Women’s work was seasonal, from processing milk and making butter in the spring to butchering livestock and preserving meat and vegetables in the fall. In Native agricultural tribes, women were the farmers, who also provided most of the subsistence necessary for family and community survival: they baked bread; gathered wild plants for food, medicine, and dyes; harvested, processed, stored, and prepared other foods; ground grain for bread; cured meat; made utensils and clothing; and wove mats and carpets.¹¹

Most of the labor of enslaved women belonged to their masters. Most enslaved African women in the southern English seaboard colonies worked in the fields. By working very long hours from approximately age ten to age fifty, these women produced wealth for the English planters of rice, tobacco, and indigo. Some also worked more intimately for Europeans in domestic service. Charles Pinckney and Thomas Jefferson received a great deal of their physical nurture as children from enslaved women. Pinckney said that he had gained strength at the breasts of domestic slaves. When possible, African women and men tried to provide extra sustenance for their own children through planting small garden plots, hunting, and fishing.¹²

But the English had long placed less cultural value on women’s contributions to the material well-being of families than did Native or African societies. Indeed, English women were considered simply the helpmeets of their husbands. In 1704 Judith Coffin’s husband’s headstone emphasized not his ability to produce children, but his economic role: On earth he purchased a good degree, read the first line. In both the Old World and the New World, European women were denied access to apprenticeships to become skilled tradespersons, and once the Industrial Revolution created more wage-earners, women’s economic second-class citizenship would be everywhere apparent in their measly wages, when compared to men. For example, women’s wages averaged less than half those of men between 1800 and 1850.¹³

The English view of women’s labor would prevail and be elevated by the good fortune of New Englanders. The Puritans liked to think of themselves as enjoying God’s favor as they gradually gained control of the northeastern seaboard. In reality, historical accident was a critical factor: the British crown protected the settlers, while Old World diseases killed enormous swathes of the Native population. New World diseases also wiped out scores of Europeans farther south, which meant that family formation for the first century of colonization in the southern colonies was extremely difficult. The traditions of Africans, American Indians, and many other cultural groups continued in spite of many obstacles. But ultimately it was the good fortune of the English to be the lawmakers of what became the United States; British laws and cultural values would have a lasting and disproportionate impact on the family lives of all Americans.¹⁴

The English came from an Old World society that valued private property. Marriage determined how property would be passed from generation to generation, and marriage laws reinforced social inequality. In English law and custom, marriage was the only legitimate avenue to social acceptance for mothers and children. Bastard children lacked the legal right to support from their fathers, and woe to the woman who conceived out of wedlock and could not convince the baby’s father to marry her. Indentured servants who became pregnant out of wedlock could face fines, whippings, and extra years of service for lost labor. Courts could also take children away from these mothers and indenture the child as a servant to another family. A free woman who became pregnant out of wedlock might receive help from her family in persuading the future father to marry her. She was far more likely to succeed if the father-to-be was from an established family of means, but, if this effort failed, she might be publicly tried for fornication and face poverty and social ostracism. Even economically privileged married women’s place as mothers was shaped by their legal and economic dependence on men. Long after mothers gained a special status as children’s moral guides, they continued to be shackled by the coverture laws that kept them without a legal identity outside the context of marriage.¹⁵

Prohibitions on interracial marriage and the placement of an economic value on African women’s reproductive capacities were also important legacies of colonial America. In 1644 and 1662, respectively, Marylanders and Virginians legislated legitimate families and furthered the system of race-based chattel slavery. Maryland outlawed interracial unions between freeborne Englishwomen forgetful of their free Condition who to the disgrace of our Nation doe intermarry with Negro slaves. This first anti-miscegenation law—a law to prohibit interracial sex or marriage—was followed by many more state laws. Not until 1967 did the U.S. Supreme Court strike down these state laws, which also had an impact on American Indians and Asian Americans. In Virginia, English colonists defied the mother country’s legal tradition of offspring receiving their social status from their fathers. Enslaved women who became pregnant—no matter who made them pregnant—instead passed their enslaved conditions onto their children.¹⁶ In this way, the child of an enslaved woman was automatically defined as a slave for life; therefore, the rape of enslaved women by white men, endemic to the system of slavery, often resulted in economic gain in the form of interracial children defined as slaves.

Another important legacy of the premodern world was what historians Margaret Marsh and Wanda Ronner have called the motherhood mandate, the idea that all women must be mothers. If colonial Americans did not uphold a special cultural role for mothers beyond children’s infancy, they nevertheless placed very little value on women’s gifts to society other than maternity. Colonial women who were unable to biologically conceive children could function as mothers to the children of others, and couples could adopt children informally and with relative ease. The bodies of women who did not produce children, however, were suspect; in the Puritan view they were marked with the Lord’s disfavor. As Marsh explains, Men were never considered to be incapable of procreation unless they were impotent; only women could be ‘barren.’ Far beyond the colonial era, arguably even up to the present, cultural ideas about womanliness would remain strongly linked to the social compulsion and what has been thought to be the innate desire of women to bear children. The booming industry in infertility treatments today speaks to the powerful continuation of the idea that motherhood is women’s biological, as well as social, destiny.¹⁷

Women’s Revolutionary Prize: Mothers instead of Citizens

In the latter half of the eighteenth century, across the Atlantic world, Enlightenment ideas of human progress and perfectibility encouraged youthful rebellion and the casting off of old ideas of hierarchy, both familial and political. The best examples of these enlightened ideas are, of course, well known: the political revolutions of the English colonies inspired creation of the United States; in France, the old nobility was dethroned, even beheaded, and replaced by popular sovreignty; and in Haiti, enslaved people took over the island and created their own government. Self-government was the right of rebellious sons, it seemed.

But some believed that rebellion against arbitrary authority was a broader human right for all people. The possibilities briefly seized upon by women, enslaved persons, and youth were downright dangerous to the patriarchal rule of white, propertied men for several decades of the late eighteenth century. Abigail Adams famously questioned her husband John on the matter of the new nation’s complicity in keeping women under the rule of their husbands. Remember the Ladies, she admonished, And be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. And she was not alone. Writing under a pseudonym, one woman publicly called on members of her sex to consider yourselves as intitled to a Suffrage, and possessed of Influence, in the Administration of the great Family of the Publick.¹⁸ But such anti-patriarchal questioning of authority, with all its familial metaphors, only went so far. The founding fathers had a more private patriarchal family in mind, and their legislative acts sought to ensure women’s continual confinement in what would come to be envisioned as a separate sphere of family privacy.

By the end of the American Revolution, the new nation offered women something other than citizenship, something historian Linda Kerber aptly termed republican motherhood, a kind of compromised maternal citizenship. Mothers, through their virtue, would sustain the nascent republic, but not as voters or office holders; instead, they would raise virtuous sons who could continue to handle effectively the experiment of youthful self-government that was the new nation’s light to shine in the world. Abigail Adams expressed this notion well in her stern advice to her grown son: Justice, humanity, and benevolence are the duties you owe to society in general. To your country the same duties are incumbent upon you, with the additional obligation of sacrificing ease, pleasure, wealth, and life itself for its defence and security. . . . To become what you ought to be, and what a fond mother wishes to see you, attend to some precepts and instructions from the pen of one, who can have no motive but your welfare and happiness.¹⁹ Adams kept her place in this writing, confining herself to selfless maternal advice, while simultaneously expressing her own patriotism.

And yet the American Revolution dovetailed with social, demographic, and religious changes that were beginning to erode the rule of the father in families. Propertied men were having greater difficulty controlling their progeny. As the northern land base shrank, fathers’ authority weakened. Without land to inherit, young people left home as teens and young adults, seeking new positions outside agriculture in the growing towns and cities that were the product of the trans-Atlantic trade networks. Young people married earlier, not always with parental permission. Rates of early marriage and premarital pregnancy rose over the course of the eighteenth century.²⁰

Meanwhile, women were finding new voices and cultural influence within Protestant religions. Even as early as the 1690s, church membership was 70 percent female, and historians have argued that a feminization of New England religion was beginning. Theologically, eighteenth-century Americans began emphasizing a humble, sacrificing, and more feminine-seeming Christ. These changes corresponded with greater religious activism on the part of what was called the gentler sex. By the early decades of the new nation, American women were beginning to create voluntary associations within their churches, and they were vocal and influential participants in the evangelical fervor that swept the Northeast.²¹

The evangelical movements of the early nineteenth century also contributed to the revaluing of motherhood. In the Second Great Awakening of Protestant revivalism, especially prominent in New York, three of every five new converts were female. Women converts contributed to an important change in religious ideology and cultural ideals. To put it bluntly, the weaker vessel of colonial times now became the morally superior sex. Morally speaking, it was men who needed a feminine influence, not the other way around. By the 1830s,