PART 17
EARLY AMERICA
***, MARRIAGE, CHILDREN, GAYS, LESBIANS, BOYS AS GIRLS, ABORTION,
BREECHING, FAMILY AND OTHER MYTHS
Privacy and Autonomy in Traditional American Families
Family "autonomy" was not a value either for traditional Native American
societies or for the European settlers who confronted them, although the
limits on family privacy came from different sources in each case.
Europeans were disappointed to find that Native American families had no
private right to sell the land they lived on or worked and astonished to
discover that "every man, woman, or child in Indian communities is allowed
to enter any one's lodge, and even that of the chief of the nation, and
eat
when they are hungry." Despite this lack of privacy in property rights,
public authority was far from absolute in Native American groups, since
leaders had no way of coercing followers: Colonists remarked
contemptuously
that "the power of their chiefs is an empty sound." European explorers
also
were scandalized to find that Indian women had "the command of their own
Bodies and may dispose of their Persons as they think fit; they being at
liberty to do what they please."10
Colonial Americans held almost antithetical notions of where private
rights
began and public authority ended. They gave political leaders the power of
life and death over each subject and put women's bodies under the control
of fathers or husbands, but they respected the property rights of private
landowners and defended them against trespass by the lower cl*****.
Nevertheless, colonial views on privacy and family autonomy were far
removed from the notion that "a man's home is his castle." In the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, city officials, social superiors,
and
prying neighbors regularly entered homes and told people whom to associate
with, what to wear, and what to teach their children; families who did not
comply were punished or forcibly separated.
Slave families, of course, had no rights at all; slaves were a "species of
property" Indentured servants and paupers also were denied parental rights
and family autonomy. Since child custody was considered a male property
right and children a form of chattel, women and men without property
lacked
a legal basis for asserting parental rights. Yet even propertied families
were subject to extensive regulation. The Puritans, for example, gave
masters of apprentices equal responsibilities and rights with parents in
educating and disciplining the young. They also appointed special
officials
to oversee both parties. In 1745, the Massachusetts Assembly ordered that
any child older than six who did not know the alphabet was to be removed
to
another family." 11
Church courts, civic leaders, and neighbors enforced a legislatively
sanctioned household order that took precedence over the autonomy of any
particular family. Authorities might intervene if they found the household
head too severe or not strict enough. In Virginia, for example, both a
master and his servant were ordered dunked in the local pond, she for
being
insubordinate and he for failing to restrain her. Conversely, the
magistrates of Es*** County fined one man forty ****llings when neighbors
re****ted that he had referred to his wife as his servant, despite the fact
that she denied any dissatisfaction with his treatment. In each of these
cases, no one in the family requested aid; the intervention was initiated
by outside forces.12
During the Revolutionary era as well, Americans expected to be scrutinized
and called to account by neighbors, church authorities, and local
officials. Historian Nancy Cott's study of divorce records reveals that in
the late eighteenth century, people nonchalantly entered what modern
Americans would consider the most intimate, secluded arenas of their
neighbors' lives.
In 1773, for example, Mary Angel and Abigail Galloway testified in an
adultery case that they had caught sight through an open window of a man
they knew "in the Act of Copulation" with a woman not his wife. By their
own re****t, they matter-of-factly walked into the house "and after
observing them some time...asked him if he was not Ashamed to act so when
he had a Wife at home." When John Backus and Chloe Gleason sneaked away
from their companions one evening in 1784 and were subsequently caught in
bed together, the company told them to "get up or be puled [sic] out of
bed." The pair obediently got dressed, and John "agreed to treat said
Company for his misconduct." The reach of neighbors, church courts, and
local authorities into what was only later to be defined as "private life"
continued into the first decades of the nineteenth century." 13
During the Jacksonian period, white families gained considerable freedom
from this kind of outside interference, but legal and economic trends
ushered in a whole new set of processes for defining and controlling
family
life. What has changed since the early nineteenth century is not the
extent
of public regulation of family life but the formality of that regulation.
10. George Catlin, Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs and
Conditions
of the North American Indians, vol. 1 (New York: Dover, 1973), p. 122;
James Adair, The History of the American Indians (New York: Johnson
Reprint
Cor****ation, 1925), p. 428; Baron LaHontan, New Voyages to North America,
vol. 2, ed. Reuben Thwaites (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1966), p.
463.
11. Leslie Howard Owens, This Species of Property: Slave Life and Culture
in the Old South (New York: Oxford, 1976); Edmund Morgan, The Puritan
Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England
(New York: Harper & Row, 1966), pp. 78, 88, 100, 142, 148; Eli Zaretsky,
"The Place of the Family in the Origins of the Welfare State," in
Rethinking the Family: Some Feminist Questions, ed. Barrie Thorne with
Marilyn Yalom (White Plains, N.Y.: Longman, 1982), p. 197; John Demos, A
Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York: Oxford,
1970), p. 183.
12. Morgan, The Puritan Family, p. 45; Julia Cherry Spruill, Women's Life
and Work in the Southern Colonies (New York: Norton, 1972); Rhys Isaac,
The
Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1982).
13. Nancy Cott, "Eighteenth-Century Family and Social Life Revealed in
Massachusetts Divorce Records," in A Heritage of Her Own, ed. Nancy Cott
and Elizabeth Pleck (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), p. 110; Mary Ryan,
Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York,
1790-1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 24-43.
SOURCE: The Writer's Guide, Everyday Life in Colonial America From 1607 -
1783. Dale Taylor. Weiter's Digest Books (1997) pp 125-127
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You are invited to check out the following:
The Rise of the Theocratic States of America
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/theocracy.htm
American Theocrats - Past and Present
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/theocrats.htm
The Constitutional Principle: Separation of Church and State
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/index.html
[and to join the discussion group for the above site and/or Separation of
Church and State in general, listed below]
HRSepCnS · Hampton Roads [Virginia] SepChurch&State
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HRSepCnS/
[Its not just Hampton Roads folks who are members, there are members from
all over the US and a couple from overseas as well]
***************************************************************
.. . . You can't understand a phrase such as "Congress shall make no law
respecting an establishment of religion" by syllogistic reasoning. Words
take their meaning from social as well as textual contexts, which is why
"a
page of history is worth a volume of logic." New York Trust Co. v.
Eisner,
256 U.S. 345, 349, 41 S.Ct. 506, 507, 65 L.Ed. 963 (1921) (Holmes, J.).
Sherman v. Community Consol. Dist. 21, 980 F.2d 437, 445 (7th Cir. 1992)
.. . .
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USAF LT. COL (Ret) Buffman (Glen P. Goffin) wrote
"You pilot always into an unknown future;
facts are your only clue. Get the facts!"
That philosophy 'snipit' helped to get me, and my crew, through a good
many combat missions and far too many scary, inflight, emergencies.
It has also played a significant role in helping me to expose the
plethora of radical Christian propaganda and lies that we find at
almost every media turn.
*****************************************************************
THE CONSTITUTIONAL PRINCIPLE:
SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/index.html
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