Born Southern: Childbirth, Motherhood, and Social Networks in the Old South

5. Fatherhood and the Southern Patriarchy

113 chapter five c Fatherhood and the Southern Patriarchy cd When Caroline North Pettigrew of North Carolina gave birth to her second child in 1855, many in her extended family expressed disappointment that the baby was a girl. Her husband’s brother, Johnston Pettigrew, summed up these sentiments when he wrote that he could not “refrain from regretting” the infant’s sex since boys were “the thing for the world.”1 The ideals of patriarchy, male dominance , and paternal authority formed an important backdrop for southern society, and birth both shaped and was shaped by this social organization . As the words of Johnston Pettigrew suggest, gender preferences were expressed in reaction to an infant’s arrival—women may have been the focus of the maternal ideal but, in the view of many southerners, they fulfilled that ideal by producing male citizens. Equally important, the southern social system relied on a racial hierarchy that sought to give white men a position of ultimate authority. White southerners expressed these racial beliefs in metaphors about blood, suggesting that social as well as physical traits were passed on through birth. But birth did not just reflect social boundaries; it also shaped the identity of individual men by making them fathers. For white men this role became a basis for their power, while for black men fatherhood often demonstrated their ultimate powerlessness. Not merely a tale of women ’s experiences, birth in southern society established the authority and social position of men, shaping the way each person understood his or her place within the family and within the household to which that family belonged. Ultimately, maintaining control of these structures formed 114 born southern the foundation for a white man’s claims to patriarchal and political authority in the antebellum South. In societies in which the inheritance of property and of surnames pass through the male line, families generally invest the birth of a male heir with great importance. Sons represent a continuity of the family and, therefore, presumed security for parents in their old age. In many societies the birth of a male child evokes celebrations, while female children receive no such welcome.2 The antebellum South followed many of the tenets of such a traditional patriarchal society, based around agriculture and land ownership. Southerners valued male heirs who could maintain property holdings both through legal inheritance and labor. Even poor whites viewed the potential labor of sons as a means to better their circumstances ; the labor of daughters, while often fully utilized, could be lost through marriage. Further, women working in the fields marked the lower social status of poor white farmers, so this tended to be ignored in public discussions, particularly by the elites who hoped to gain the political support of the yeomen class.3 Sons, in contrast, were openly acknowledged as assets to the family. Carey Pettigrew may have meant to be humorous when she wrote to her husband of their son as their “heir apparent,” yet these sentiments fit well with elite southerners’ concerns about inheritance and their related preference for male children.4 For white southerners in the antebellum period, gender was not merely an incident of identity, but identity itself, determining intellect, emotions, and one’s place within society. A preference for male infants existed to some extent throughout antebellum America, motivated by both a belief in male superiority and inheritance concerns. James Smith of Philadelphia, for example, wrote his friend Levi Lewis the morning after his wife gave birth: “This morning at quarter of 5 my wife presented me with a what—a-a-a-little baby—one of the human species and unquestionably and unexpectedly a girl—No boy this time and I feel confoundedly disposed to let baby making alias boy making alone for the future—I succeed only in girl making[.]”5 Sex preference was clearly not limited to the Deep South. Yet certain elements of southern society—the agricultural economy, the celebration of masterhood , and a system of honor that associated virility with the production of male heirs—made the desire for male offspring resonate in this region. Fatherhood and the Southern Patriarchy 115 The shaping of this sex preference began with expressions of the ideal future progeny. Married under a year, Elizabeth Perry’s husband promised her in 1838 that “when you present me with a little son, I will make you a present of a handsome...