Americas dominant ideal of manhood was the traditional patriarch who devoted himself to governing his family and serving his community. E. Anthony Rotundo describes the traditional patriarch as “a towering figure... the family’s unquestioned ruler.” He exhibited exemplary self-control and little visible emotion. He might express “approval or disapproval in place of affection or anger” and govern family dependents through “persuasion and sympathy,” but he also could issue edicts and enforce his will with coercive power and corporal punishment. The traditional patriarch governed his “little commonwealth” by supervising his wife’s piety and productivity, and by managing his sons’ education and children’s marriages to perpetuate his family line. Though his authority was nearly absolute, a family father was accountable to church officials and civic leaders, who sought to ensure the “good order in the home” they thought essential to social harmony and the public good.2
American culture encouraged young males to discipline desire, marry early, sire legitimate offspring, and mature into traditional patriarchs. Protestant clergy counseled youth on marital duty as an alternative to sexual promiscuity or priestly chastity. During the Great Awakening, Susan Juster reports, Congregational ministers worried that New Light spiritual individualism, disregard for authority, and emotionalism fostered “a kind of sexual anarchy,” “a potential for sexual libertinism,” and “a sexualized climate” subversive of family stability and public order. The proper way to transform male lust into virtue was to channel it into monogamous marriage and sublimate it into family responsibility. Secular wisdom also urged young men into marriage. A Virginian communicated common sense on the subject in 1779 by stating, “No man who has health, youth, and vigor on his side can when arrived to the age of manhood do without a woman.” In turn, marriage focused male passion on family duty. Nancy Cott observes, “Marriage was seen as a relationship in which the husband agreed to provide food, clothing, and shelter for his wife, and she agreed to return frugal management, and obedient service.” Fundamentally, “to ‘act like a man’ meant to support one’s wife.”3
Not all young males could act like a man. Mary Noyes Silliman counseled her sons to “lay a foundation in subsistence” before contemplating marriage. That was especially difficult when fathers withheld the land and patrimony that sons needed to support a family, or when fathers had little or no realty to transmit to their sons. Still, few writers saw economic want as prohibitive. Benjamin Franklin argued that any poor, hardworking young man could acquire enough land to start a family. George Washington applauded the opening of the Ohio Valley as an opportunity for “the poor, the needy, and the oppressed” to own land and start families. Thomas Jefferson justified the Louisiana Purchase, in part, as enabling “everyone who will labor to marry young and to raise a family of any size.” The choice of marriage was a different matter for servants, apprentices, and slaves, who needed their masters’ permission to marry; but masters such as Thomas Jefferson approved of dependent marriages as a means to tame male passions and make male slaves more obedient and reliable.4
The reputed “taming effect” of marriage threatened to subject young men to the manipulative powers of potentially domineering women. John Gregory’s popular advice book A Father’s Legacy to His Daughter admonished against women’s tendency to abuse their power “over the hearts of men,” and Pennsylvania Magazine sounded an alert against “bad wives [who] flatter and tyrannize over men of sense.” Alas, marriage exposed men to female tyranny. One counterresponse was to define manhood as tyranny over women. American fiction embodied figures such as Hannah Webster Foster’s Peter Sanford, a coxcomb who saw overcoming obstacles to the sexual conquest of an innocent girl as “the glory of a rake,” and Judith Sargent Murray’s Sinisterus Courtland, a rogue who squandered his patrimony, fell into debt, and tried “to extricate himself by . . . deluding some woman whose expectations were tolerable into an affair of the heart.”5 A fictive war of the sexes was waged by seductive coquettes and deceitful libertines.
Mainstream culture condemned both the coquette and the libertine but condoned the notion that men needed to restrain disorderly women. The preferred means of restraint were parental education and marital supervision. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich writes that colonial parents sought to instill in their daughters virtues such as “prayerfulness, industry, charity, [and] modesty.” At an appropriate age, young women were to marry and submit to their husbands’ authority. A well-bred wife did not tyrannize over her husband; nor did a manly husband fear “bondage” from his wife. Benjamin Franklin asserted that “every man that really is a man” would be “master of his own family.” If he married a “difficult girl,” he still was expected to “subdue even the most restless spirits” and transform an unruly spouse into a virtuous “helpmeet” who practiced piety, gave birth, nursed infants, educated children, cooked, healed, manufactured, managed servants, grew food, tended livestock, traded in the marketplace, worked in the family shop, took in boarders, or engaged in paid employment. The precise nature and degree of a husband’s authority varied by religion, race, ethnicity, class, and region, but the legitimacy of his family sovereignty was everywhere secured by law and custom.6
A major motive for young men to marry was to procreate legitimate sons. John Demos explains that the traditional patriarch sired, raised, and educated sons to continue his “accomplishments, indeed his very character, into the future.” The Reverend John Robinson noted that grandfathers often were “more affectionate towards their children’s children than to their immediates as seeing themselves further propagated in them, and by their means proceeding to a further degree of eternity, which all desire naturally, if not in themselves, yet in their posterity.” A concerned father made sacrifices to provision and protect sons and, in turn, expected to achieve a sense of immortality through his children. Contemporary testamentary practices indicated that northern men tried to extend family dynasties for one generation and southern men hoped to perpetuate them even longer. The conviction that fathers were deeply devoted to their posterity suggested that they had an enduring stake in the community that justified citizenship. Accordingly, New York artisans proposed in the 1760s that “every man who honestly supports a family by useful employment” should have the right to vote and hold office.7
The traditional patriarch’s performance as husband and father was his main contribution to the community. Men with marital responsibilities disciplined their passions; husbands who were masters of a household restrained women’s disorderly conduct; and responsible fathers produced sons likely to mature into trustworthy citizens. Also, the traditional patriarch represented his household in the various hierarchies that ordered the larger society. This meant, among other things, that he recognized, respected, and deferred to his superiors—the “fathers” and “tender parents” of his communal family.8
Destabilizing Traditional Patriarchy
The ideal of the traditional patriarch was destabilized between 1750 and 1800 when, Jay Fliegelman suggests, Americans began to surrender “an older patriarchal family authority” in favor of “more affectionate and equalitarian” family relationships.9 English Whig ideology and disputed gender relations, a gap between American patriarchal ideals and actual gender relations, and dynamic economic change contributed to a weakening of the traditional patriarch as the dominant ideal of manhood. The result was not the elimination of the old ideal but the emergence of several alternative ideals.
England transmitted to America a mixed image of manhood. On the one hand, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Englishmen legitimized the traditional patriarch and authorized him to rule family dependents with almost “absolute authority.” He managed a wife whose lot was “perpetual pregnancy” to multiply her husband’s person “by propagation.” He supervised his sons’ upbringing to ensure they would mature into responsible stewards of the family dynasty. The exemplary patriarch spoke