Founding Mothers and Fathers:
Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society
By Mary Beth Norton
Knopf, 496 pages, $35
When most of us think about Colonial America, it is in the simple, harmless images that linger from grammar school. Pilgrims alight gratefully on Plymouth Rock. More Pilgrims eat turkey and succotash with Pocahontas, and a little later Puritans, clad in gloomy black, forbid dancing and card games in favor of interminable sermons. In contrast to this impossibly bland view, Mary Beth Norton gives us a vision of Colonial New England and the Chesapeake Bay area that is vivid, startling and yet overwhelmingly convincing. Her version of life in the Colonies, based on court documents dating from 1620 to 1670, reveals a different band of settlers from those depicted in our grade-school textbooks.
The domestic problems of 3 1/2 centuries ago prove starkly similar to our own. A midwife testifies that a child is born dead and horribly bruised as a result of the mother’s having been beaten by her husband. The husband, unrepentant, claims his wife, in advanced pregnancy, “fell out of a peach tree.” In Maryland, a court inquiry into the death of one “Antonio” unwittingly conveys the evidence of what to modern eyes is a slave’s heroic resistance. The victim, newly arrived from Africa, although beaten, threatened with stabbing and tied to a ladder, “layd himself downe and would not stirre,” preferring death to unjust servitude.
There were further instances of authority reviled, as well as pleasures embraced. Apprentices charged with disobedience made countercharges that their master scarcely fed them, courting couples were lashed for public displays of affection, and defiant citizens whipped for calling the Maryland government “a Company of pittiful Rogues and puppys.”
Many cases arose from quarrels between neighbors. A certain Joan Nevill, provoked by insults, tried to burn down Mary Roe’s log house. Roe retaliated, knocking Nevill down with a stick. During a subsequent encounter, Roe struck Nevill in the face. Nevill correspondingly “strooke her (enemy) a good blow in the Chops” and cried, “bauld Eagell get thee home.” All of which demonstrates that the colonists, or at least the ones who turned up in court, were not only free-spirited spellers and gifted at invective but a surprisingly contentious bunch. It becomes evident from Norton’s book that the reason the Puritans issued so many edicts about swearing, drinking, whoring and “ryotting” was not simply because they were prudish, but because those founders, from whom the haughtiest Anglo-Saxon Americans today trace their lineage, were astonishingly disorderly.
But Norton wishes to demonstrate more than our forebears’ virtuoso range of misbehaviors. By analyzing contemporary treatises on government, and the kinds of transgressions brought before the courts, their rate of incidence and the evidence that was presented, she deduces the values of the age and patterns of thought then used as a justification for civil authority. Norton’s focus is on the relation of gender to the exercise of power. She is alert not simply to the relative positions of, and opportunities for, men and women, but to the ambiguities within the system she examines.
The powerlessness of women seems at first nearly absolute. Wives are “femmes covert”–“covered” so completely by their husbands that they have no separate legal existence. This had its obvious drawbacks but sometimes shielded them from the law’s full force. If a woman’s husband committed a crime in which she participated, she could hardly be found to be his accomplice, since her ordained obedience to her husband made the responsibility all his. If a woman were found guilty of a crime punishable by a fine, it was her husband who was required to pay it, adding insult to injury if the crime was adultery.
The women with the greatest freedom were those who enjoyed high status and absence of male constraint. Well-born women, by remaining unmarried or through widowhood, became heads of a household and were able to make a free disposition of their own property. The most remarkable was Margaret Brent, an aristocratic friend of the Calvert family, the founders of Maryland. In her early 40s, Brent embarked on what Norton calls “a long chain of court appearances that eventually made her the most litigious woman in the province.” Norton adds, “Many of the suits, which she almost invariably won, sought repayment for debts owed to herself or her siblings.”
It was unprecedented for a woman to fill a role so public. That she did is testimony to her high position and formidable abilities. In 1647, Brent was named executor of the estate of the colony’s governor, Leonard Calvert. This was a private and public job, which required her to administer his personal funds and government income such as customs revenues. Brent exercised power vigorously, averting a potential rebellion, for example, by providing back pay owed to unruly soldiers. At a time when power adhered more to the individual than to laws, and the powerful made their own rules, Brent also prosecuted miscreants and voted in the assembly.
As Norton says, “At no other time in the history of colonial Anglo-America did anything comparable occur.” That only one instance did occur, she argues, was because of underlying concepts of the relation of gender to power. In general, ideas of government were modeled on the household. Just as the father of the family ruled his children and servants, so did the king rule his subjects. But the 17th Century political theorist Robert Filmer also admitted the possibility of politically powerful women, writing, “There is no vertue in men so different which weomen may not in some sort hope to attaine, for even sayling and warre and government of kingdomes have been often times well handled by weomen.” He based this doctrine on the 5th Commandment, “Honor thy father and mother,” which to him implied, in Norton’s words, “that all authority flowed from the power of symbolic parents (including mothers).”
Thus, Norton argues, John Locke’s later argument that governments are formed with the consent of the governed–supposedly an advance toward enlightenment and democracy–actually represented a decrease in the possibility of power for women because Locke’s view of the governed included only male heads of household. It was not until generations later that Locke’s notions of government were broadened to include others.
But no other woman in the Colonies shared in the exercise of authority as Margaret Brent did. In the thinking of the time, wives, children, servants and slaves were alike dependents. A male who fulfilled his proper role ensured that the behavior of such dependents was virtuous, seemly and resolutely private.
This was deemed to ensure not only domestic tranquility but a sound social order. For as Norton says, defiance within the family had broad implications challenging the whole notion of authority. In the words of the time, an unruly child or disobedient servant was an “emblem of confusion.” This explains why Puritans in New England applied the harsh correctives of the judicial system to unfilial children, such as a daughter who swore at her mother and cried, “A pox of the devil! What ayles this mad woman?”
Because law derived from religious beliefs, and there was no area of one’s life to which religion did not apply, the line between public and private was erased. All of which makes this lucid, persuasive and entertaining book particularly relevant–even cautionary–today, when there is a determined movement to assert that religious doctrine should shape laws and public life.
