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>> 1 1 In the Shadow of Patriarchal Authority This book tells the story of how American leaders were able to conserve, legitimize, and perpetuate patriarchal authority over the sex lives of the first few generations of Americans to reside in a newly emergent liberal society. America’s early elites rejected the rule of English kings and transformed the nation into a liberal society of rights-bearing citizens who consented to limited, lawful government.1 An important litmus test of elites’ patriarchal authority and police power was their ability to regulate the most intimate aspects of citizens’ private lives, including their sexual language, behavior, and partners, without provoking widespread citizen anger, protest, or rebellion . The new nation’s political father figures retained virtually uncontested legitimacy and power to regulate the terms of citizens’ marital relations as well as their nonmarital sexual experiments, regardless of the widespread rhetoric of liberty and the robust growth of individualism. In the process, they succeeded in reconciling core aspects of traditional patriarchal authority and the new liberalism. Patriarchy meant the government of fathers. In ancient Greece and Rome, the patriarch, or male head of household, was believed to have the “natural” authority to make all final family decisions. Families included a number of dependents: wives, children, relatives, servants, and slaves. Although philosophers and politicians debated the limited or unlimited nature of the family patriarch’s authority, they agreed that he was the one who set the rules for family life, enforced them, and disciplined and punished family members for infractions. To assert patriarchal authority was to control and police family members. However, the family patriarch did not govern arbitrarily. His main obligation was to foster the welfare of the family, to protect it from internal strife, and to fend off external threats to it by any means necessary. He had extensive discretion. The main restraint on his governing powers was the 2 > 3 the intellectual foundation for an emerging liberalism that emphasized individual rights, private property, a free-market economy, limited constitutional government, and the rule of law. Liberalism discredited Filmer’s ideas, rapidly gained ground at the expense of moral patriarchalism, and dealt a severe blow to people’s acceptance of patriarchal values, reasoning, and institutions. Nevertheless, important aspects of ideological patriarchalism persisted even where liberalism thrived. For example, the liberal idea that all men were political equals was counterweighed by the patriarchal belief that particularly “masculine” men had a natural ability, if not a natural authority, to govern other men and all women. R. W. Connell suggests that modern male hierarchies developed with three main elements: “hegemonic masculinity, conservative masculinities (complicit in the collective project but not its shock troops), and subordinated masculinities.”4 Even where hereditary kings were replaced by elected parliaments or congresses, at least a few powerful men (natural aristocrats?) continued informally to proclaim their dominion and succeeded in getting other men to recognize, respect, and obey it. Liberal equality did not replace, neutralize, or eliminate patriarchal pecking orders. Second, the liberal social contract left intact the domination of men over women. Carole Pateman argues that an implicit “sexual contract” preceded the social contract.5 The sexual contract was an informal agreement among men to maintain male authority over all women. Male thinkers were convinced that women were deficient in the qualities necessary for granting consent and exercising independent citizenship. Only after women were sequestered and subordinated in patriarchal households did male theorists make their case for a social contract that contested the patriarchal authority of kings and sought to replace it with a fraternal society—a liberal male society in which equal rights and limited government constituted the bases for citizen interactions. Additionally, Anglo-American jurisprudence contained common-law guarantees for husbands’ authority over their family members and, equally significant, for governments’ patriarchal authority to intervene in society to ensure “the due regulation and domestic order of the kingdom.” English legal scholar Sir William Blackstone explained that “the individuals of the state, like members of a well-governed family, are bound to conform their general behavior to the rules of propriety, good neighborhood, and good manners; and to be decent, industrious, and inoffensive in their respective stations.”6 When citizens failed to conform to the norms of good behavior, political officials had a patriarchal duty to use their discretion to police citizens and to intervene in their lives in the cause of restoring good 4 > 5 Thaddeus Russell argues that the resiliency of patriarchal authority is evident in the behavior...

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