Early America, Sex, Marriage, family #9


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Date: 24 Sep 2006 05:44:21 AM
Object: Early America, Sex, Marriage, family #9
PART 9
EARLY AMERICA
SEX, MARRIAGE, CHILDREN, GAYS, LESBIANS, BOYS AS GIRLS, ABORTION,
BREECHING, FAMILY AND OTHER MYTHS
The Elusive Traditional Family
Whenever people propose that we go back to the traditional family, I always
suggest that they pick a ballpark date for the family they have in mind.
Once pinned down, they are invariably unwilling to accept the package deal
that comes with their chosen model. Some people, for example, admire the
discipline of colonial families, which were certainly not much troubled by
divorce or fragmenting individualism. But colonial families were hardly
stable: High mortality rates meant that the average length of marriage was
less than a dozen years. One-third to one-half of all children lost at
least one parent before the age of twenty-one; in the South, more than half
of all children aged thirteen or under had lost at least one parent.'
While there are a few modern Americans who would like to return to the
strict patriarchal authority of colonial days, in which disobedience by
women and children was considered a small form of treason, these
individuals would doubtless be horrified by other aspects of colonial
families, such as their failure to protect children from knowledge of
sexuality. Eighteenth-century spelling and grammar books routinely used
fornication as an example of a four-syllable word, and preachers detailed
sexual offenses in astonishingly explicit terms. Sexual conversations
between men and women, even in front of children, were remarkably frank. It
is worth contrasting this colonial candor to the climate in 1991, when the
Department of Health and Human Services was forced to cancel a proposed
survey of teenagers' sexual practices after some groups charged that such
knowledge might "inadvertently" encourage more sex.2
NOTES
1. Philip Greven, Four Generations: Population, Land, and Family in
Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
1970); Vivian Fox and Martin Quit, Loving, Parenting, and Dying: The Family
Cycle in England and America, Past and Present (New York: Psychohistory
Press, 1980), p. 401.
2. John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 108; Mary Ryan, Cradle of the
Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 33, 38-39; Carroll Smith-Rosenberg,
Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 24.
SOURCE: The Way We Never Were American Families and the Nostalgia Trap
Stephanie Coontz Basic Books, A Division of HarperCollins Publishers (1992)
p 10
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Miscellaneous Matters
Throughout the colonies, the bed and bedstead were the most expensive
possessions, so many homes did not have them. Children were often present
in bed with a copulating couple, or all were present in a common room on
mattresses on the floor. Later, with the advent of modern ideals of
privacy, this would change.
SOURCE: The Writer's Guide, Everyday Life in Colonial America From 1607 -
1783. Dale Taylor. Weiter's Digest Books (1997) p. 125
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The language of sex has not changed much. The biggest change is that words
now considered obscene were in common use early and only gradually passed
into the obscene. "Hump," "roger" and "*****," especially the latter, were
commonly found in early court records as slang terms for the sex act and
had no negative connotations until sometime during the later periods. The
penis was referred to by slang terms such as "rod" and "yard" (as in
yardarm).
SOURCE: The Writer's Guide, Everyday Life in Colonial America From 1607 -
1783. Dale Taylor. Weiter's Digest Books (1997) p. 125
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Privacy and Autonomy in Traditional American Families
Family "autonomy" was not a value either for traditional Native American
societies or for the European settlers who confronted them, although the
limits on family privacy came from different sources in each case.
Europeans were disappointed to find that Native American families had no
private right to sell the land they lived on or worked and astonished to
discover that "every man, woman, or child in Indian communities is allowed
to enter any one's lodge, and even that of the chief of the nation, and eat
when they are hungry." Despite this lack of privacy in property rights,
public authority was far from absolute in Native American groups, since
leaders had no way of coercing followers: Colonists remarked contemptuously
that "the power of their chiefs is an empty sound." European explorers also
were scandalized to find that Indian women had "the command of their own
Bodies and may dispose of their Persons as they think fit; they being at
liberty to do what they please." 10
Colonial Americans held almost antithetical notions of where private rights
began and public authority ended. They gave political leaders the power of
life and death over each subject and put women's bodies under the control
of fathers or husbands, but they respected the property rights of private
landowners and defended them against trespass by the lower classes.
Nevertheless, colonial views on privacy and family autonomy were far
removed from the notion that "a man's home is his castle." In the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, city officials, social superiors, and
prying neighbors regularly entered homes and told people whom to associate
with, what to wear, and what to teach their children; families who did not
comply were punished or forcibly separated.
10. George Catlin, Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs and Conditions
of the North American Indians, vol. 1 (New York: Dover, 1973), p. 122;
James Adair, The History of the American Indians (New York: Johnson Reprint
Corporation, 1925), p. 428; Baron LaHontan, New Voyages to North America,
vol. 2, ed. Reuben Thwaites (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1966), p.
463.
SOURCE: The Way We Never Were American Families and the Nostalgia Trap
Stephanie Coontz Basic Books, A Division of HarperCollins Publishers (1992)
p 125
***************************************************************
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