Puritan Family Life: The Diary of Samuel Sewall (review)

In The Puritan Family (1944), Edmund S. Morgan argued that Puritan parents loved their children to a fault, falling into tribalism that undid the Puritan "experiment" in New England (104). Despite Morgan's account, popular perceptions of stern and unloving Puritan parents have persisted. In her study of Puritan family life, Judith S. Graham challenges these perceptions, using the family life of Samuel Sewall to demonstrate that Puritan families were warmer, gentler, and more loving than is widely believed.

Graham's book shares methodological ground with studies such as Alan Macfarlane's The Family Life of Ralph Josselin, A Seventeenth Century Clergyman (1970) and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812 (1990), which focus on diarists whose attention to lives intersecting their own offers insight into the societies they inhabited. Drawing on Samuel Sewall's diary, Graham takes on earlier studies of the Puritan family, particularly scholarship influenced by historians of the European family whom she finds insufficiently attentive to the warmth of New England Puritans' familial relationships. In contrast, she finds that "[t]he record of the Sewall family suggests that the parent-child relationship in early New England was marked by warmth, sympathy, and love; that the special nature of childhood was a concept that parents understood very well; and that when children spent time in other households, it was for an entirely practical, clear purpose" (4). Graham does not claim that Sewall was "a representative father"; rather, she finds in him "an exceptional one," whose social contacts and "judicial, political, business, and religious responsibilities" exposed him to "every stratum of Puritan society," giving him"the opportunity to observe life inside a broad range of Puritan households" (14).

Using the observations recorded in Sewall's diary, Graham traces family life from marriage through childbirth, education, and eventually the next generation's courtships and marriages. Throughout, she emphasizes the warmth of the Puritan family, and challenges both common scholarly views and popular stereotypes. For example, she considers the practice of sending children to live elsewhere, which has been explained in terms of various theories of psycho sexual development. Examining instances of children sent out from and taken into the Sewall household, Graham suggests that some theories (especially fear of spoiling children and attempts to mitigate intergenerational conflict) seem applicable to certain cases, but that on the whole, no single explanation suffices. Rather, she asserts, "There was no mystery to explain. Sewall sent his children out as the need arose for education, apprenticeship, healing, and social experience" (166).

Graham also disputes charges that children were treated as "miniature adults" (78ff.). She draws some evidence for this from Sewall's descriptions of injuries sustained by children at play, but here as elsewhere extends her study beyond Sewall's diary itself. Addressing previous research on "the material artifacts of childhood," especially Karin Calvert's Children in the House (1992), Graham draws on reference works on American furniture, collections of antique furniture, and interviews with "distinguished antique dealers who specialize in New England furniture" to dispute Calvert's claims that children's furniture was designed to force children into upright positions (83–84). Instead, Graham asserts, her sources testify to the ample supply of children's chairs and high chairs, and the relative rarity of standing stools, revealing "that mothers and fathers in New England, far from seeking to hasten their offspring through their earliest stages of development and to suppress their babyish characteristics, rather went to the expense and trouble of providing their very young children with the wholly unnecessary luxury of specially made little chairs" (87).

Graham's emphasis on warm familial relationships extends even to families in crisis. Graham presents an illuminating account of the marriage of Sam and Rebeckah Sewall, whose troubles included a period of separation and Rebeckah's delivery of a child by an adulterous relationship. Graham uses the case to demonstrate the benevolent involvement of parents in their adult...