Early America, Sex, Marriage, family #3


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Date: 23 Sep 2006 05:00:16 AM
Object: Early America, Sex, Marriage, family #3
PART 3
EARLY AMERICA
SEX, MARRIAGE, CHILDREN, GAYS, LESBIANS, BOYS AS GIRLS, ABORTION,
BREECHING, FAMILY AND OTHER MYTHS
Some general information on marriage
Marriage was still largely a business arrangement; love was considered
unimportant until after life expectancies and overall wealth rose. With the
shorter life expectancies of the early years, children in the
seventeenth-century Chesapeake were often unrelated to the adults raising
them by the time they were teenagers. First one natural parent would die
and the survivor would remarry, then the survivor would die and the
stepparent would remarry. What is interesting is that such children were
raised for the corporate good, even when there was no genetic investment.
The best place to begin to understand the differences between then and now
is marriage. Marriage had always served one of three purposes: to produce
legitimate heirs, to obtain money or property, or to obtain title. As such
marriage was a business contract having nothing to do with love. That was
what affairs were for. Marriages for love, or with love an important
factor, were just becoming common during the early period, and then only
for the middle classes. Sanctified marriage, as distinct from a contract,
had been established for only about 150 years. The newer Protestants
adopted a view of sanctified marriage in which procreation and the allegory
of marital love could justify sex within the religious framework, whereas
sex outside of marriage was considered immoral and criminal.
Marriage customs varied with religions and regions, but a few things
pertained to all. Because of the high cost of clothing, wedding attire was
not special, except at the very highest court levels. Instead, the
celebrants wore the finest clothes they already owned. White was not an
obligatory color. Most such customs come from after the period, although in
the very late period customs gradually shifted toward the more modern ones.
Even here it is wise to be cautious. White was then becoming a common color
for dresses, so when one hears about a white dress for the bride, it may
not imply a special bridal dress symbolic of virginal purity. It is better
to see the marriage ceremony merely as a symbolic rite of passage into a
period of acknowledged sexual activity, with a few religious overtones.
In the Anglican church, marriage required the POSTING or PUBLICATION OF THE
BANNS a fortnight before the wedding, so that any person with reason to
object to the marriage had opportunity to do so. The ceremony was to be
performed by a minister within a church, before noon, and only during
certain seasons of the year. On the South's plantations this broke down and
most services were held in the bride's home, with noon the nominal assembly
time, but actually starting about two o'clock to allow travel time. Twelfth
Night (January 6) was a favorite date for weddings.
In lower-class Virginia, the party assembled at the groom's house, then
passed to the bride's house in a riotous footrace, with the winner getting
a bottle of liquor. Next came a heavy wedding breakfast with beef, venison,
chicken, pork and possibly bear, during which the bridesmaids protected the
bride's slipper. If a male guest stole it, the bride was forced to redeem
it with another bottle of liquor before the ceremony. A minister said a
short service, little more than an exchange of "will you take's" and a
blessing. The festivities then began with a dinner, followed by drinking
and dancing until about sunrise. Before midnight the bride and bridesmaids
stole off to her room, shortly followed by the groom and groomsmen. There,
with the couple in bed, a variant on our modern garter and bouquet rituals
was performed. Taking turns, the bridesmaids stood at the foot of the bed
with their back to the couple and threw a rolled-up stocking at the bride.
The groomsmen then repeated the performance, aiming for the groom's head.
The first to connect were the next to be married, not necessarily to each
other. In the morning the couple was disturbed again and toasted by the
party.
SOURCE: The Writer's Guide, Everyday Life in Colonial America From 1607 -
1783. Dale Taylor. Weiter's Digest Books (1997) pp 120-122
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
America's Founding Fathers were not always married: In Concord,
Massachusetts, a bastion of Puritan tradition, one-third of all children
born during the twenty years prior to the American Revolution were
conceived out of wedlock; during the 1780s and 1790s, one-third of the
brides in rural New England were pregnant at marriage. A study of
illegitimacy in North Carolina found that out-of-wedlock birth rates for
white women were approximately the same in 1850 as in 1970, though the
pattern was more indicative of class exploitation than it is today: The
fathers tended to be well-off heads of intact families, while the mothers
lived in poor, female-headed households.10
10. Sar Levitan, What's Happening to the American Family? (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1981), p. 66; Jack Larkin, The Reshaping of
Everyday Life, 1790-1840 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988); Susan Newcomer,
"Out of Wedlock Childbearing in an Ante-Bellum Southern County," Journal of
Family History 15 (1990).
SOURCE: The Way We Never Were American Families and the Nostalgia Trap
Stephanie Coontz Basic Books, A Division of HarperCollins Publishers (1992)
p 184
***************************************************************
You are invited to check out the following:
The Rise of the Theocratic States of America
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/theocracy.htm
American Theocrats - Past and Present
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/theocrats.htm
The Constitutional Principle: Separation of Church and State
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/index.html
[and to join the discussion group for the above site and/or Separation of
Church and State in general, listed below]
HRSepCnS · Hampton Roads [Virginia] SepChurch&State
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HRSepCnS/
[Its not just Hampton Roads folks who are members, there are members from
all over the US and a couple from overseas as well]
***************************************************************
.. . . You can't understand a phrase such as "Congress shall make no law
respecting an establishment of religion" by syllogistic reasoning. Words
take their meaning from social as well as textual contexts, which is why "a
page of history is worth a volume of logic." New York Trust Co. v. Eisner,
256 U.S. 345, 349, 41 S.Ct. 506, 507, 65 L.Ed. 963 (1921) (Holmes, J.).
Sherman v. Community Consol. Dist. 21, 980 F.2d 437, 445 (7th Cir. 1992)
.. . .
****************************************************************
USAF LT. COL (Ret) Buffman (Glen P. Goffin) wrote
"You pilot always into an unknown future;
facts are your only clue. Get the facts!"
That philosophy 'snipit' helped to get me, and my crew, through a good
many combat missions and far too many scary, inflight, emergencies.
It has also played a significant role in helping me to expose the
plethora of radical Christian propaganda and lies that we find at
almost every media turn.
*****************************************************************
THE CONSTITUTIONAL PRINCIPLE:
SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE

http://members.tripod.com/~candst/index.html
****************************************************************
.

 

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OLDER