Title: Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of an American Society
Author: Mary Beth Norton
Year of Publication: 1996
Thesis:
Private sphere develops in Virginia and Maryland (Chespeake) from a secular Lockean framework (also demographics play a role, where fewer immmigrants are there), where in New England the Puritan-based framework incorporates the family and the distinction between public and private prove less clear. Both systems are patriarchal, but the more secular form leads to less interference by the state into family life. Filmerian models appear to offer women a slightly more powerful role (see: Hutchinson as one example). Therefore, "New England and the Chesapeake developed diverse modes of political and judicial behavior as a result of the demographic and religious differences between those two initial sites of English settlement." (12) By the 19th century, lines between public and private are much more clear as the Lockean system dominates.
Time: 1620-1670
Geography: New England, Virginia, Maryland
Organization:
Acknowledgments
Introduction
- Mayflower Compact vs. Constitution (serving as analogy to the central argument)
- Communal labor in Plymouth was a thing, until it wasn't (abandoned after 3 years) (7)
- Why? Working for others with no pay, flat distribution of goods not based on labor effort, older men not happy to be treated the same as younger, and something something "slavery" if wives worked to support men who weren't their husbands. (7)
- Makes the point that these are all gendered reasons (7)
- Older men achieve rank through their toil/relations - want younger men to have to go through a similar gauntlet (7)
- For women - motivation comes from laboring to benefit one's family above all, especially coinciding with economic shifts (ex: more amenable to working in fields when it brought gains) (8)
- Rank baked into Puritan philosophy (see: Bradford & especially Winthrop's "A Modell of Christian Charity")
- Class/gender divisions (via Bradford):
-> Men: Bachelors / husbands in prime / older men
-> Women: Women (wife or daughter)
- Roman system: family/state totally separate
- Filmerian: "rank depended on a combination of age, gender, and status," with high-status women sometimes having power outside the home. (11)
- Still some obvious issues with the Filmerian model (high-status women having power over low-status men, for example) (10)
- Africans/African Americans known to be enslaved household labor, but go almost totally unmentioned in the court docs (16)
- Eye on differences between & within (16)
- Maryland politically contentious w/Catholics & Protestants, so NE can be similar to VA in some cases. (16)
SECTION 1: GENDERED POWER IN THE FAMILY
PROLOGUE: The Government of Familyes
Chapter 1: The First Society
Chapter 2: A Little Monarchy
Chapter 3: Free in Liberty
- Women able to function somewhat in the male gender as they carried out responsibilities of managing the household; they lacked the franchise, though.
SECTION II: GENDERED POWER IN THE COMMUNITY
PROLOGUE: Searchers Againe Assembled
Chapter 4: Communities of Men, Communities of Women
- Men's rhetorical concerns around abstract notions of justice & women's around reproduction. (204)
- Implies that women are able to harness their authority as women in the courtroom around reproduction & don't always lose.
Chapter 5: Amongst the Neighbors
- Neighborhood politics influence larger colonial politics (243)
- Gossip gendered where men had their reputations in public (political/etc.) life questioned, where women, majority not owning property, leveled attacks based on sexual character. (277)
SECTION III: GENDERED POWER IN THE STATE
PROLOGUE: His Lordship's Attorney
Chapter 6: Fathers and Magistrates, Authority and Consent
Chapter 7: Marvelous Wickedness
Chapter 8: Husband, Preacher, Magistrate
CONCLUSION
Author's Note
Appendix: Data and Methodology
Abbreviations used in the notes
Notes
Index
Type:
Intellectual
Political
Social
But definitely legal
Methods:
Gendered analysis
Thematic
Sources:
- legal cases/court records
- Argues it would be "inappropriate" to include Native Americans (outside of British framework) and African Americans (barred from testimony) (14)
Family - subordinate to same (male) head & living together but NOT necessarily related (so an enslaved person could be considered "family" then? - also allows for some other interesting combinations outside of the "nuclear" family (17)
Public - 1. visible, 2. "of or pertaining to the people as a whole." This is a gendered concept, as women are largely left out of the public eye; however, they do carry influence in the private realm (20-21)
Private - Generally taken to mean "not public;" however, it could also pertain to affairs of folks or that their actions didn't pertain to public office. Especially interesting in the case of Anne Hutchinson b/c of the conversations around her teachings. Were these private affairs? Norton points out how determining what was public was fairly easy, but what was private or should have been considered private was not always as simple. Gendered component comes up w/women - should they be examined/cross-examined in public or privately? (21-22)
Also important that in 18th century, private-female/private-family not obvious links, even though both public/formal public were considered male (23) All this to argue that within NE there is no public/private in the 18th cent. (24)
- Men with official positions are an exception - their affairs within the household are considered private (24) <-- So men get to have what we would call a private life. Women's lives have no distinction between private and public?
Rank/Status - differentiated from the later idea of class (18)
Community/Informal public - "the social collectivity within which individuals and families lived their daily existence, and which affected nearly every aspect of their lives. These were people who, as David Sabean has stressed, shared arguments as well as values." In sum, a "neighborhood" without a rigid requirement for proximity. (19)
Formal public - Contains formal discipline (19)
Historiography:
Keywords:
Filmerian (family w/patriarch @ the head - mini version of wider political realm - evident in NE culture)
Lockean (social contract - more apparent in VA & Maryland)
Gender: "describes the cultural construction of sex; that is, the definition of masculinity and femininity." (5) Also affects work & social roles and relations of power (5-6)
- Turns out Plymouth folks had a communal economy (that they appear to have quickly abandoned (7)
Covenant - "an agreement through which men (and in some churches, women as well) voluntarily submitted to the governance of others." (13)
Themes:
Filmerian (unified) vs. Lockean (dichotomous)
Criminality
Common vs. Theocratic law
Consent (by the governed) (see p.12)
Critiques:
Issues w/Filmerian and Lockean ideas being read back.
Questions:
Quotes:
"The words Master or Mister and Mistress have often confused editors and scholars, but it is important that they be understood ina. seventeenth-century context. Abbreviated in the court records as "Mr." and "Mrs.," they have been misread as the simple, uninflected designators famliar to twentieth-century readers. The confusion has been particularly notable in the case of "Mrs.," which historians have tended to interpret as an indicator of marital rather than social status. Yet in early modern Anglo-America, "Mrs." exclusively designated a high-status woman, regardless of whether she was single, widowed, or married. In fact, the term's role as a sign of rank was so important that where the word mistress might commonly have been employed in a somewhat different context--a servant's referring to his "master an dmistress"--it was often replaced by another term, dame, when the woman in question was of ordinary rather than high rank. (18-19)
"Yet the seventeenth-century insistence that proper authority in the long run rests not on the consent of the people but rather on a grant of power from a symbolic father, coupled with beliefs that state and family were analogous and that society was appropriately organized in a rigidly hierarchical fashion, points up the conceptual gulf that separates the world of the first English settlers in Norht America from our own." (401)
Notes:
- Raises interesting question about the parallel unfreedoms that result from applying work from Enlightenment thinkers.
- Student of Bernard Bailyn