Examining the Puritan Heritage

...be they adults or children, were frequently sentenced to live for a given number of years Single men, too, were forced to stay with a family when it was felt that their libido might endanger the community For m the 17th century, the home was the sole custodian of human sexuality—and sex inevitably meant babies A society that did not have the resources to mamtain schools, hospitals, orphanages, and other such modern services could certainly not afford to bear the burden of supporting an unwanted, dependent child until it reached the age of economic productivity Finally, the Plymouth family was an integral part of an alliance with church and state that was designed to teach and enforce a well-defined set of values While the church required heads of households to catechize their children on pain of excommunication, the law msuied that a child heeded his father's injunctions by making willful disobedience a capital crime In our day, of course, morals are not nearly so well defined or universally accepted Exposed to many different values at an early age, a child has a ready arsenal with which to challenge the standards of his parents, who cannot call for church or state intervention to insure obedience And because the hard economic necessity that formerly required the coordination of a unified family command has vanished, the authority of the father is no longer so solid in affluent America What then of the 20th-century family7 If Puritan values of godliness and order have been replaced by those of freedom and selt-reah-zation, and the family has given over many of its functions and prerogatives, it is obviously not Dr Spock's fault entirely Still as Demos points out, the home has a definite role to play in modern society It can at least provide the human warmth and personal touch that even the most advanced of our institutions seem unable to offer...

...Examining the Puritan Heritage A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony By John Demos Oxford University Press 201 pp $6 75 Reviewed by Jerald A. Combs Department of History, San Francisco State College Nowadays, even the mstitution of the family has become a political issue The Women's Liberation Front labels it an agent of tyranny and repression, while critics of Dr Spock claim that permissiveness m the modern home has brought chaos to society Breakmg through the current rhetoric and mythology, John Demos' A Little Commonwealth examines the status of the family in the Amencan past—m the Pilgrim colony of Plymouth, to be exact—and the comparison with our times is indeed startling and informative In the first place, the composition of the 17th-century New England household was apparently not very different from ours As Demos shows, the picture of the extended family—with grandparents, uncles, cousms, parents, and children all living out therr brief spans under one roof—is mistaken Parents and children almost always dwelled apart from in-laws and relatives, except perhaps for an aged grandparent Nor was old age uncommon If a man reached 21, he might live to 70, a woman to 63 (The difference between the average life expectancies of men and women, of course, reflects the hazards of havmg children, m 17th-century Plymouth, 20 per cent of the women perished as a direct result of childbirth ) But if the make-up of the early New England home was not unlike that of contemporary America, there the similarity pretty much ends Among other things, every member of the 17th-century family served an important economic function Even a small child, once he reached the age of seven, was thought of as a little adult, and was expected to relax, work and dress like one Each offspring was a financial asset, which may explain why couples often had eight or nine Today, a child is more of a liability, requiring support and training until much older In fact, the whole concept of adolescence—the thoroughly dependent teen-ager—seems to be confined largely to the modern era In the Plymouth community generally, the family had responsibilities that in the 20th century have been relegated to government Education, for example, was a domestic charge, and the head of the household was required by law to teach his children to read If he himself was illiterate, he sent them to live with another family The father also trained one or more of his sons to follow in his footsteps as a farmer, blacksmith or whatever, a child who was to learn another trade was apprenticed to a journeyman for a period of years and lived in his master's home during the learning period Even the schools which were then beginning to appear were frequently boarding establishments operating in loco paientis A number of New England households, moreover, were correctional institutions, where miscreants...