Ye Heart of a Man: The Domestic Life of Men in Colonial New England (review)

Lisa Wilson’s work offers a unified point of view on masculinity, gender and family in the northern colonies. It shows as well a unified sensibility, one perhaps closest to Edmund S. Morgan’s as seen in his two books on family life in the colonies. Her new book represents a swing of the scholarly pendulum back toward common sense.

Gender historians, myself among them, have emphasized the dysfunctions of the heavily gendered world of the “patriarchal” family in America in the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Drawing heavily upon Puritan sensitivities to gender (Carol Karlsen) and on angry, would-be, self-constructing Southern gentlemen (myself, Kathleen Brown), these scholars have seen relations between women and men and to some degree family relations as a battleground of stereotypes and authority, an area sometimes as violent as desolate. As one recent reviewer has said of us, in effect, “Why do they select such extreme cases. Why are they so angry?” Gerda Lerner could explain why, but the reader has a certain point. ¹

What is nice about Lisa Wilson’s work is that she fully accepts the validity of this preceding layer of research on the abuses entailed in patriarchy while bringing the larger picture back toward wholeness. Her work on widows, and now this lovely essay on masculinity and the life course, acknowledge the tensions inherent in a culture with gendered expectations. Yet she sees also, and this is her great contribution, the deep senses in which most men, women, couples, and families negotiated these shoals with compassion, and lived their lives successfully. She provides evidence that perspective and adaptability enabled most families—and most men—to overcome the crises of the life course in a culture which constantly threatened to turn these into tragedies. One example lies in her evidence that, in New England at least, most proud young men overcame their fear of being “bagged,” or publicly rejected by an eligible young lady, and many managed to swallow their humiliation when “bagged” and go on to other courtships. After spending too much or perhaps too little time with Robert Bolling, a Virginian who went into misogynistic rages when “bagged,” I was relieved to see courtship in Lisa Wilson’s wider perspective. What had made me angry was having to deal with a grotesque like Robert Bolling. Grotesques are revealing but in the end suffocating.

The danger Ms. Wilson faces is that her work will be regarded as a narrowly conceived Panglossianism. The debate over her earlier work, in the 1987 William and Mary Quarterly, expresses the dimensions of this challenge, ² one she needs to keep constantly in mind. But in fact hers is part of a larger body of work, not all of it by any means Panglossian, which is freeing us from the assumption that gender was always a destructive straightjacket and is enabling us to put into perspective, for men and women both, the occasions on which it was. Much of this new literature on masculinity in early America is not yet published. It ranges from Allegra Hogan’s current work on a farmer’s emotional landscape through Anne Lombard’s forthcoming manuscript on masculinity and father-son relationships in rural New England, to Alaric Miller’s reassessment of the Smith-Adams courtship. ³ It could as well include a manuscript I just encountered in the Randolph papers at the University of Virginia, a man’s journal, circa 1850–65, of his courtship and his love for his wife, whose hand he had won by taking up lawyering at great cost to his personal sense of ethics. When her life ended, his journal ended. Properly executed, this literature fulfills our highest task as historians; it gives us a sense of the wholeness of human life in the past yet does so in full sight of current ideologies. Personally I find Lisa Wilson’s new book delightful...