Toward Republican Families

The controversy over women’s political rights mirrored a debate over authority within the household. British and American husbands had long claimed patriarchal power and legal control of the family’s property. However, as John Adams lamented in 1776, the republican principle of equality had “spread where it was not intended,” encouraging his wife and other women to demand legal and financial rights. Patriot author and historian Mercy Otis Warren argued that patriarchy was not a “natural” rule but a social contrivance and could be justified only “for the sake of order in families.”

To see a longer excerpt of the Mercy Otis Warren document, along with other primary sources from this period, see Sources for America’s History.

Republican Marriages Economic and cultural changes also eroded customary paternal authority. In colonial America, most property-owning parents had arranged their children’s marriages. They looked for a morally upright son- or daughter-in-law with financial resources; physical attraction and emotional compatibility between the young people were secondary considerations. As landholdings shrank in long-settled communities, many yeomen fathers has less control over their children’s marriages because they had fewer resources to give them.

Increasingly, young men and women chose their own partners, influenced by a new cultural attitude: sentimentalism. Sentimentalism originated in Europe as part of the Romantic movement and, after 1800, spread quickly through all classes of American society. Rejecting the Enlightenment’s emphasis on rational thought, sentimentalism celebrated the importance of “feeling” — a physical, sensuous appreciation of God, nature, and fellow humans. This new emphasis on deeply felt emotions pervaded literary works, popular theatrical melodramas, and the passionate rhetoric of revivalist preachers.

As the passions of the heart overwhelmed the logic of the mind, magazines praised companionate marriages: marriages “contracted from motives of affection, rather than of interest.” Many young people looked for a relationship based on intimacy and a spouse who was, as Eliza Southgate of Maine put it, “calculated to promote my happiness.” As young people “fell in love” and married, many fathers changed from authoritarian patriarchs to watchful paternalists. To guard against free-spending sons-in-law, wealthy fathers often placed their daughters’ inheritance in a legal trust. One Virginia planter told his lawyer “to see the property settlement properly drawn before the marriage, for I by no means consent that Polly shall be left to the Vicissitudes of Life.”

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The Wedding, 1805
Bride and groom stare intently into each other’s eyes as they exchange vows, suggesting that their union was a love match, not an arranged marriage based on economic calculation. The plain costumes of the guests and the sparse furnishings of the room suggest that the unknown artist may have provided us with a picture of a rural Quaker wedding. The Granger Collection, NYC.

As voluntary contracts between individuals, love marriages conformed more closely to republican principles than did arranged matches. In theory, such marriages would be companionate, giving wives and husbands “true equality,” as one Boston man suggested. In practice, husbands dominated most marriages, because male authority was deeply ingrained in cultural mores and because American common law gave husbands control of the family’s property. Moreover, the new love-based marriage system discouraged parents from protecting young wives, and governments refused to prevent domestic tyranny. The marriage contract “is so much more important in its consequences to females than to males,” a young man at the Litchfield Law School in Connecticut astutely observed in 1820, for “they subject themselves to his authority. He is their all — their only relative — their only hope” (American Voices).

Young adults who chose partners unwisely were severely disappointed when their spouses failed as providers or faithful companions. Before 1800, unhappy wives and husbands could do little; officials granted divorces infrequently and then only in cases of neglect, abandonment, or adultery — serious offenses against the moral order of society. After 1800, most divorce petitions cited emotional issues. One woman complained that her husband had “ceased to cherish her,” while a man grieved that his wife had “almost broke his heart.” Responding to changing cultural values, several states expanded the legal grounds for divorce to include drunkenness and personal cruelty.

Republican Motherhood Traditionally, most American women had spent their active adult years working as farmwives and bearing and nurturing children. However, after 1800, the birthrate in the northern states dropped significantly. In the farming village of Sturbridge in central Massachusetts, women now bore an average of six children; their grandmothers had usually given birth to eight or nine. In the growing seaport cities, native-born white women now bore an average of only four children.

The United States was among the first nations to experience this sharp decline in the birthrate — what historians call the demographic transition. There were several causes. Beginning in the 1790s, thousands of young men migrated to the trans-Appalachian west, which increased the number of never-married women in the East and delayed marriage for many more. Women who married in their late twenties had fewer children. In addition, white urban middle-class couples deliberately limited the size of their families. Fathers wanted to leave children an adequate inheritance, while mothers, influenced by new ideas of individualism and self-achievement, refused to spend their entire adulthood rearing children. After having four or five children, these couples used birth control or abstained from sexual intercourse.

Even as women bore fewer children, they accepted greater responsibility for the welfare of the family. In his Thoughts on Female Education (1787), Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush argued that young women should ensure their husbands’ “perseverance in the paths of rectitude” and called for loyal “republican mothers” who would instruct “their sons in the principles of liberty and government.”

To see a longer excerpt of Thoughts on Female Education, along with other primary sources from this period, see Sources for America’s History.

Christian ministers readily embraced this idea of republican motherhood. “Preserving virtue and instructing the young are not the fancied, but the real ‘Rights of Women,’” the Reverend Thomas Bernard told the Female Charitable Society of Salem, Massachusetts. He urged his audience to dismiss public roles for women, such as voting or serving on juries, that English feminist Mary Wollstonecraft had advocated in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Instead, women should care for their children, a responsibility that gave them “an extensive power over the fortunes of man in every generation.”

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