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11 Q To understand the historical significance of modern motherhood, it helps to take a brief look backward to the essentially premodern world of mothers in the English colonies. Ideas about mothers as unique moral guardians only emerged at the time of the American Revolution. Before that, the nation’s Puritan ancestors, who left us the most voluminous records about seventeenth- and early eighteenthcentury family life, held starkly different views. For them, mothers had no special place in the moral and spiritual education of their children. Fathers were considered the morally stronger of the two parents. According to one Puritan minister,“Persons are often more apt to despise a Mother, (the weaker vessel, and frequently, most indulgent).” Because a mother was sometimes “overmoved by her tender & motherly affections,” to quote another colonial commentator, she was not as capable as a father of exercising the stern authority Puritan children were thought to require.1 A Look Backward: Colonial Mothers under English Patriarchy “There is in all children . . . a stubbornness and stoutness of mind, arising from natural pride, which must in the first place be broken and beaten down,”noted one Puritan minister. The stated goal of “breaking the child’s will” appears in a great deal of colonial sources about family life. For example, Susanna Wesley, an English woman, wrote to her grown son on the eve of his departure to Georgia in 1732, insisting that “in order to form the minds of children, the first thing to be done is to conquer their will and bring them to an obedient temper.”Such conquest was, in her view,“the only strong and rational foundation of a religious education without which both precept and example will be ineffectual.” Parents, especially fathers, commonly used whipping or caning as the physical discipline necessary to prepare a child for subservience within a patriarchal social order. Children were considered c h a p t e r 1 Inventing a New Role for Mothers 12 Roots of Modern Motherhood miniature adults, as is evident from seventeenth-century paintings that depict an adult face—and head/body proportion—on young children. Even babies were set forth on the path to early self-control: Puritans swaddled their babies with wooden rods and encouraged walking at an early age.2 Colonial parents loved and treasured their children, as is amply evidenced. One of the very few women writers of the period, Anne Bradstreet, frequently makes that point in her poetry. For example, she lamented the limits on a mother’s power to keep her beloved children safe from harm: Great was my pain when I you bred, Great was my care, when I you fed, Long did I keep you soft and warm, And with my wings kept off all harm, My cares are more, and fears than ever, My throbs such now, as ’fore were never: Alas my birds, you wisdom want, Of perils you are ignorant. Puritan minister Cotton Mather, who saw eight of his fifteen children die before reaching adulthood, poignantly acknowledged parents’ pain in losing children at a time of very high infant and child mortality. “We have our children taken from us . . . the Desire of our Eyes taken away with a stroke.”3 Still, there is no denying that children were considered economic assets in the colonial world.In the English colonies this was most obviously true for enslaved African children, most of whom began field labor around age ten.4 It was also true for the thousands of poor English children shipped overseas to work in the cash-crop colonies of Maryland, Virginia, and points farther south. Even in the Northeast, where more children lived in intact families and family labor prevailed, children’s labor was sorely needed. Because of this economic reality, people did not talk about innocent children, but rather about children whose wills needed to be broken. At the same time, Puritan religious thought found even babies tainted with original sin. For all these reasons, socializing children into a religious worldview and teaching them to work for the family were tasks assigned to the father, at least in theory. By English and colonial law, fathers ruled their families, including their wives, their children, and their servants. The English common-law tradition of coverture meant that married women were legally “covered” by their husbands. Without legal identity of their own, wives were simultaneously defined as economically dependent. Married women had no rights to either the property they brought into the marriage or...

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