Patriarchy and Partus Sequitir Ventrem 9.19.23

• HIS 379 The Family in America

Patriarchy and Partus Sequitir Ventrem: 

Forming Families in a New World

 

The History of Family in America (HIST 379)

Dr. Caitlin Wiesner
Main Hall Room 213
September 19, 2023

Simon van de Passe

Engraving of Pocahontas Portrait (1616)

John Gadsby Chapman

"The Baptism of Pocahontas" (1840)

Oil on canvas

Source:

John Lawson, "Carolina Women Observed" (1708)

 

According to Lawson’s travelogue, what differences are there between how the English form their families and how Native Americans do so?

What can this tell us about the place of the “family” in the settler colonial mission?

Algonquin woman and child

Drawing by John White (c. 1585)

Courtesy of British Museum

Marriage and Family in Indigenous Cultures

• Marriage practices in some indigenous societies granted women considerable control in choosing their partners.
• In others, marriages were arranged by elders (often women) as a means of building economic alliances through kinship.
  
• Divorce was common and easy to accomplish.
  
• Although male-dominated groups prized female chastity, most Indian groups encouraged sexual expressiveness and did not enforce strict monogamy.
  
• Women’s political power was rooted in kinship relations (nurturers of small children) and economics (food gatherers and processors).
  
• Religious cosmology conceived of the Earth as a fertile mother and life-giver, in contrast to the creator “Heavenly Father” of Christian theology.
  
• Iroquois women worked in cooperatively and controlled the distribution of all food whether procured by men or women. This gave them essential control over the economic organization of their tribe, as they could withhold food at any point.
  

Metissage in New France

“It is not that the wives have become Frenchified, if one may use that term, but it is because those who have married them have themselves become almost Indians, residing among them and living in their manner, so that these Indian women have changed nothing or at least very little in their manner of living”- Pierre d’Iberville, (1705)

“...experience shows every day that the children that come from such marriages are of an extremely dark complexion . . . adulterating the whiteness and purity of the blood in the children. . . [Louisiana] will become a colony of halfbreeds who are naturally idlers, libertines, and even more rascals as those of Peru, Mexico and the other Spanish colonies give evidence.”-Jean-Baptiste du Bois Duclos (1715)

What was the sex ratio for the English Chesapeake Colonies (Virginia and Maryland)?

1. 1 Englishmen to 2 Englishwomen
2. 4 Englishmen to 1 Englishwoman
3. 3 Englishmen to 1 Englishwomen
4. 5 Englishman to 1 Englishwoman

Africans in America

1619: a Dutch slave ship called White Lion arrived in the Jamestown colony of Virginia with 20 enslaved Africans on board.

1650: Less than 300 Africans live in Virginia colony

1655: Elizabeth Keye petitioned the Virginia General Assembly for her freedom, claiming that as the illegitimate daughter of a free English father and enslaved African mother she was only indentured (not enslaved) and she had been held long past her contracted term of service (9 years)

1680: 4,000 enslaved Africans lived in Virginia colony
1700: 2/3rds of residents of the Lower Colonies (Virginia, Carolinas, Georgia) lived in some form of bondage (500,000 enslaved Africans and 160,000  European indentured servants)

1662 Law: Partus Sequitir Ventrem

“According to the condition of the mother…”

• Children born to enslaved African women are automatically the property of their mother’s masters

• Fine doubled for interracial fornication (sex outside of marriage)

1691 Law:  “For the prevention of that abominable mixture” 

• Interracial marriage between whites and Africans or Indians is banned, punishable by banishment from the colony.
  
• Clergy who perform interracial marriages to be heavily fined.
  
• Mixed-race children born to white mothers were indentured until age 30 (as opposed to all other illegitimate children who were indentured until age 24).
• White mothers who give birth to mixed-race children will be fined 15 pounds sterling.

Patriarchs and Good Wives in Puritan New England

“When we undertake to be obedient to him, [we do so] on behalfe of every soule that belongs to us . . . Our wives, and children, and servants and kindred”

-John Cotton (1641)

Good Wives’ “revered subjection” for their husbands.

• Respectful obedience.
• “He for God only, she for God in him”
• “Be helpful in the propagating of mankind.”
  

“You have stept out of your place. You have rather been a Husband than a Wife and a Preacher than a Hearer, and a Magistrate than a subject.”

- Trial and Excommunication of Anne Hutchinson (1638)

A fact is an objective and incontrovertible piece of information.
Evidence is the application of one or more facts to support an argument.
An argument is a subjective claim made to expand an area of knowledge.

We will begin discussion of readings each class with an FAQ (Fact, Argument, Question) Exercise. All students will free write the following:

     A fact that stood out to you in the reading (please include page number)
    An explanation of how that fact works as evidence for the historian’s argument
    A question that the reading raised for you

A fact is an objective and incontrovertible piece of information.
Evidence is the application of one or more facts to support an argument.
An argument is a subjective claim made to expand an area of knowledge.

FAQ (Fact, Argument, Question) Exercise

All students will free write the following:

1.  A fact that stood out to you in the reading (please include page number)
2. An explanation of how that fact works as evidence for the historian’s argument
3. A question that the reading raised for you

Nancy Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation , Introduction- Chapter 3

1) Cott asserts that “most people view it as a matter of private decision-making and domestic arrangements. The monumental public character of marriage is generally its least noticed aspect.” (1). What are some of the ways that American marriage is embedded in the public?

2) How can we define the model of marriage prescribed by the American state since the nation’s founding? What influences can we detect in this model?

3) What did Revolutionary-era Americans mean when they spoke of marriage as a contract? How did coverture fit with this idea of a marriage contract?

4) What role did the concept of marriage play in the formation of the Early Republic?

5) What was the relationship between state legislatures/judges and local communities in recognizing and regulating marriage in the Early Republic? How did this relationship change over time?

6) How did abolitionists, pro-slavery Southerners, women’s rights activists, and utopian “free love” advocates invoke the concept of marriage in their respective movements? 

7) Why did the federal government respond vigorously to the Mormon plural marriage (polygamy) practice, when it allowed other critiques of marriage to remain with the states?