Early America, Sex, Marriage, family #18


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Date: 01 Oct 2006 09:43:34 AM
Object: Early America, Sex, Marriage, family #18
PART 18
EARLY AMERICA
SEX, MARRIAGE, CHILDREN, GAYS, LESBIANS, BOYS AS GIRLS, ABORTION,
BREECHING, FAMILY AND OTHER MYTHS
THE PILGRIM PATRIARCHS
The Puritan view of the family was remarkably well suited to founding a new
society under adverse conditions. The Jamestown
settlers had gone down before the assault of carelessness and contrariness,
but the efficient, humorless, cantankerous Puritans of New England prided
themselves on their foresight and were prepared to go to extreme lengths to
impose the discipline they knew the circumstances demanded. Inevitably,
they overdid it.
Their views were to a large extent partly conditioned by the certainty that
all God's creatures, even the Chosen, were born to an inheritance of sin.
They were as full of it "as a toad is of poison. Thy heart," said the
Reverend Thomas Shepard, preaching at Cambridge, Massachusetts, "is a foul
sink of all atheism, sodomy, blasphemy, murder, whoredom, adultery,
witchcraft, buggery [unaccountably, he left out cannibalism and incest]; so
that if thou hast any good thing in thee, it is but as a drop of rose water
in a bowl of poison." 8 It was a heavy burden, and one that could not, for
Protestants, be shrugged off in the confessional. Thus it was the duty of
the strong-in-faith to help their weaker brethren—whether they liked it or
not—to fight temptation.
The fight began within the ruthlessly disciplined family, presided over by
a father whose role was stand-in for Jehovah. Obedience, solidarity, and
fruitfulness had all been enjoined on the children of Israel, and these
were the rocks on which Puritan families—and America itself—were built.
Right from the start, of course, there were problems. Although the Fathers
who sailed on the Mayflower had providently taken their wives and children
with them, 13 of the 18 wives died during the first winter, and for several
decades afterward men seriously outnumbered women.
Where men were deprived of women, and where many women were suspect, sexual
sin was rife, and the Puritan assessment of human weakness seemed to be
justified. In the tradition of the time, punishment was harsh. Fornicators
were flogged, and then had to make public confession in church; adulterers
were similarly treated, and sometimes branded as well; the pillory or the
stocks were the penalty for parents whose first child was born too soon
after the wedding day; an infant born on a Sunday was often refused baptism
because it was believed that it must have been conceived on a Sunday. The
weak-minded might be burned as witches, or hanged—like the teenage servant,
Thomas Granger of Duxbury—for having carnally abused a mare, a cow, two
goats, five sheep, two calves, and a turkey. And a petty criminal, innocent
for once but harried beyond the bounds of reason, might be put to death
because one piglet in a sow's litter had a human look about it, as well as
"one eye blemished just like [his] ... which occasioning him to be
suspected, he confessed." 9
In a society where the word of the elders was law—and law in a way it had
never been in Catholic Europe, where Church and state had never, quite,
been one—sensible women stayed out of sight. But too many changes had taken
place since the days of the first patriarchs for them to accept the role of
cipher. Puritan morality had three direct effects on the American future.
It produced a mental state of Victorianism fifty years before Victoria
herself mounted the throne on the other side of the Atlantic. It taught
American women how to control their menfolk by sickly-sweet virtue and
purity that sometimes reached caricature proportions, while yet appearing
to submit to them like good Old Testament wives. And it gave extraordinary
importance to the concept of "the family."
The Puritans' fight to maintain their own dour moral standards was bound to
be a losing one. But they were the firstcomers in effective, if not in
factual terms, and they were forceful enough and bigoted enough, and
possessed of a sense of self-preservation powerful enough to enable them to
impose their ways on several generations of later colonists, even those of
milder faith. For a long time they were assisted by the fact that new
immigrants were predominantly Protestant. A traveler in 1700, making his
way from Boston to the Carolinas, would have encountered assorted
Congregationalists and Baptists, Presbyterians, Quakers, a variety of
Puritan radicals, Dutch, German and French reformed church followers,
Swedish, Finnish, and German Lutherans, Mennonites and radical pietists,
Anglicans, a few Rosicrucians—and some Roman Catholics and a handful of
Jews.10 Because of this, the Puritan ethic had a disproportionate influence
on the whole future of the United States. Senators and Congressmen today,
struggling (whatever the state of their faith and/or marital relationships)
to project an image of dedicated family men, at work, at rest, at church,
at play, owe this particular electoral hazard to the early New England
settlers who wove the public demonstration of family solidarity into the
American ethos. In no other country in the world is a politician expected
to drag his wife and children onto the public podium with him.
SOURCE: Sex in History Reay Tannahill A Scarborough Book , Stein and Day
Publishers , NY (1980, 1982) pp. 328-330
Refer back to previous installments in this series to note that New England
had a good deal of evidence of premarital sex as well.
***************************************************************
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