New England’s puritans were set apart from other English settlers by how much—and how long—they lived out of their baggage. The supplies the first arrivals brought with them eased their adjustment, as did the wherewithal of later, equally heavily laden arrivals. The puritans’ baggage, however, included, besides pots and pans, and saws and shovels, a plan for the proper ordering of society.
At the center of the plan was a covenant, or an agreement, to ensure the upright behavior of all who took up residence. They sought to provide what John Winthrop described to the passengers on the Arbella as the imperative of human existence: “that every man might have need of other, and from hence they might be all knitt more nearly together in the Bond of brotherly affection.”
The first and most important covenant governing puritan behavior was that of binding family members. The family’s authority was backed by the Fifth Commandment: “Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the land.” In a properly ordered puritan family, as elsewhere in the colonies, authority flowed downward. Sociologists describe such a family as nuclear and patriarchal; each household contained one family, and in it, the father was
New England children like David, Joanna, and Abigail Mason (painted by an unknown artist around 1670) were expected to emulate adults in their chores and their appearance. Nevertheless, diaries and letters indicate that children were cherished by their parents in a way closer to modern family love than what their European contemporaries experienced.
Boss. His principal responsibilities consisted of providing for the physical welfare of the household, including any servants, and making sure they behaved properly. All economic dealings between the family and other parties were also transacted by him, even when the property involved had been owned by his wife prior to their marriage.
The Reverend John Cotton’s outline of a woman’s responsibilities clearly establishes her subordinate position: She should keep house, educate the children, and improve “what is got by the industry of the man.” The poet Anne Bradstreet reduced the functions of a puritan woman to two: “loving Mother and obedient Wife.” Colonial New England, and the southern colonies as well, did have their female blacksmiths, silversmiths, shipwrights, gunsmiths, and butchers as well as shopkeepers and teachers. But usually such women were widows and the wives of incapacitated husbands. Even so, most widows, especially young ones, quickly remarried.
Dealings with neighbors and relatives and involvement in church activities marked the outer limits of the social range of most puritan women. Care of the children was a full-time occupation when broods of twelve or fourteen were more common than those of one or two. Fewer children died in New England than in the Chesapeake colonies or in Europe, though few families escaped a miscarriage or a child’s death along the way. Childbearing and
Motherhood, therefore, commonly extended over three decades of a woman’s life. Meanwhile, she also functioned as the chief operating officer of the household. Cooking, baking, sewing, and supervising servants, as well as mastering such arcane knowledge as the chemistry needed to make cheese from milk, bacon from pork, bread from grain, and beer from malt, all fell to her.
As puritan social standards required husbands to rule over wives, so parents ruled over children. The virtue most insistently impressed on New England children was obedience; refusal to submit to parental direction was disturbing in itself and for what it implied about the child’s eternal condition. Cotton Mather’s advice, “better whipt, than damned,” graced many a New England rod taken up by a parent in anger, from there to be rapidly transferred to the bottoms of misbehaving offspring. But household chores kept children out of mischief. By age six or seven girls did sewing and helped with housework and boys were put to work outdoors. Older children might be sent to live with another family to work as servants or apprentices.
Such practices, particularly when set beside portraits of early New England families that depict toddlers as somber-faced miniature adults wearing clothes indistinguishable from those of their parents, may convey the impression that puritans hustled their young through childhood with as little love as possible. New Englanders harbored no illusions. “Innocent vipers” is how one minister described children, having fourteen of his own to submit as evidence. Anne Bradstreet, mother of eight, characterized one as harboring “a perverse will, a love of what’s forbid / a serpent’s sting in pleasing face lay hid.” Yet for all their acceptance of the doctrine of infant damnation, puritan parents were not indifferent to the fate of their children. “I do hope,” Cotton Mather confessed at the burial of one of the eight children he lost before the age of two, “that when my children are gone they are not lost; but carried unto the Heavenly Feast with Abraham.” Another minister assigned children who died in infancy “the easiest room in hell.”
Population growth reinforced puritan ideas about the family. When the outbreak of the English Civil War put an end to the Great Migration in the early 1640s, immigration declined sharply. Thereafter growth was chiefly due to the region’s extraordinarily high birthrate (fifty births for every one thousand population, which is more than three times the rate today) and strikingly low mortality rate (about twenty per one thousand). This resulted in a population much more evenly distributed by age and sex than that in the South. Demographic realities joined with Puritan expectations to create a society of nuclear families distinct to the region.
World History
