Americans are inundated with warnings about the decline of American family values--we read books and articles about it, watch television journalists investigate it, discuss it at work and dinner parties. We've even invented a language to discuss it--deadbeat dad, latchkey kid, welfare moms, blended families, divorce culture. I'm nonplussed by all this because as a family historian,
I realize that all the debates over family values are, to varying degrees, predicated on misperceptions, even distortions, of the American past.
Most of the discussions about family values seem to center on how, since the late 1960s, Americans have dropped the ball, somehow failed where prior generations have succeeded. We're always harkening back to some vague, undefined halcyon days when families were always stable, always all the same; when couples stayed married, parents doted on children, and children respected and obeyed parents; when extended family members interceded at just the right moments (and never more) and everyone was happy and well-adjusted and loved.
We are not the first generation of Americans to convince ourselves that our families are in a state decline and disarray. In the early eighteenth century the Puritan minister Cotton Mather complained that
"tho' the first English planters of this country had usually a government and a discipline in their families that had a sufficient severity in it, . . . the relaxation of it is now such that it seems wholly laid aside, and a foolish indulgence to children is become an epidemical miscarriage of the country, and likely to be attended with many evil consequences". In 1851 Horace Bushnell longed for a return to the family that lived and loved "all together . . . young and old, male and female, from the boy who rode the plough-horse to the grandmother knitting under her spectacles." In the early twentieth century,
Teddy Roosevelt warned of an impending white race suicide and blamed it on "men [who] cease to be willing and able to work hard, and . . . women [who] cease to breed freely." In the twenties experts were convinced that the
automobile was destroying American morality since it was little more than "a house of prostitution on wheels." And in the 1940s Americans were sure that
"The old time prostitute in a house or formal prostitute on the street is sinking to second place. The new type is the young girl in her late teens and early twenties, the young woman in every field of life who is determined to have one fling or better."1
You see, Americans have always seemed to believe that their families were decaying, that the moral center had withered away, and that the current generation was working fast and furious to propel the next generation toward heartache and failure. But if so many generations of Americans were convinced they lived in an era of familial and moral decay, what then about the "good old days"? When people talk about going back to a more stable, successful time in family history, what exactly do they mean?
Surely they don't mean the colonial era. In Puritan New England fully a third of women went to the alter pregnant. Puritans believed that children were born evil, that they had to be compelled, often by force, to obey parental and societal rules. They ascribed to a child-rearing philosophy called "will-breaking". Physical violence toward children was not just acceptable. It was essential to combat their sinfulness and willfulness. Families were headed by strong patriarchs who ran the family like "little commonwealths," controlling every aspect of the lives of family members.
The colonial South hardly seems more inviting. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as many marriages were destroyed by death as by divorce today. High death rates meant that most marriages lasted less than twelve years, and at least 50% of children under age thirteen lost one parent. The death rates dramatically expanded the meaning of family. People welcomed into their families half-siblings, step-brothers and sisters, orphaned cousins, and a host of kin. Most whites married for wealth and status. As one South Carolina man explained "I am sure I want someone to look after my house and Negroes as well as any man. [Also] I have allied myself with a numerous and wealthy family--which enlarges my interest more ways than one." Southerners willingly admitted that in marriage, they "plumed themselves on rank and fortune."2
Throughout the colonies there was no public education, children were apprenticed and indentured and enslaved. Women faced a lifetime of dangerous, sometime deadly child-bearing.
Even free white women could not own property, enter into any legal transaction, and were considered permanent minors, the property of their fathers and then their husbands. Women were not allowed to speak before men in church or criticize men publicly--those who did risked their reputations and even their lives. Apprenticed white women had even less voice. Their indentures forbade marriage and bearing children--an out-of-wedlock pregnancy extended their period of bondage and could be criminally prosecuted. Most African women and men were enslaved, sometimes forcibly bred, and had their children seized and sold away. All of this took place after a concerted effort of slave catchers and traders to separate families and communities during the middle passage in order to avoid rebellions. Who would want to return to this?
Source
Do you ride? How are you doing? By the way those rolly eye's weren't directed at you. :wink:
You don't see that as much now, because it's politically incorrect. If you'll notice, Hollywood has even gotten the male actors to stand closer together, like the women do with each other, when they talk to each other. In their scripts, they even have them talking in a slightly more feminine manner.