Boyhood

The Colonial Period

Native American boys lived in culturally diverse tribes, but their lives invariably involved preparation for manhood in societies whose reality was defined by cosmos, landscape, economy, and culture. Through ritual, oral stories, shaming, and the example of older men, they learned to hunt large game (a male task in most hunting tribes) and seek the required relationship with animal spirits. Typically, boyhood culminated in the vision quest, in which the boy separated from the group and sought contact with the animal spirits that would guide him through manhood. The use of ridicule and shaming to correct unsanctioned behavior remains central to the raising of boys in Native American cultures.

Euro-Americans, meanwhile, considered social stability to be dependent on social hierarchy and deferential respect for authority. They therefore believed boyhood should be devoted to learning proper obedience. Likewise, they believed that boyhood was to be spent acquiring the skills one would need to assume the responsibilities of manhood—defined as becoming established in a trade and achieving status as a head of household. Thus, boys typically worked from their early youth in their parents' household, contributing to their fathers' artisanal labor or doing agricultural work on the family farm—or else as servants or apprentices in other people's households.

Boyhood experience varied by region. For New England Puritans, it was shaped by the doctrine of infant depravity. Because Puritans considered boys naturally prone to sin, they severely punished rebelliousness so that boys might avoid damnation. They encouraged young males to seek the conversion and salvation they deemed necessary to full spiritual manhood. Most boys in the colonial and antebellum South, meanwhile, were raised in preparation for a manhood grounded in agrarianism and racial hierarchy. On plantations, white boyhood involved learning about honor, paternalistic care for slaves, plantation business, and such gentlemanly leisure activities as hunting and horse racing. For slaves, boyhood served as an introduction to the problematic nature of masculine identity as a slave: performing difficult and involuntary agricultural labor, living under the domination of whites, learning lessons in survival, and facing the possibility of separation from one's family.

Americans' understandings of child rearing—and thus of boyhood—began to change in the eighteenth century. With the growing influence of Enlightenment ideas and republican political philosophy, commentators on child rearing increasingly regarded boyhood as a stage of life in which the growing man developed the faculties of reason and judgment, as well as an understanding of the responsibilities of political citizenship, which was considered fundamental to manhood. Later, in the early nineteenth century, Romantic ideas of natural childhood purity and a growing challenge to the Calvinist doctrine [Page 66]of human depravity reinforced this more positive view of boyhood and encouraged the indulgence of natural boyhood playfulness as important to healthy manhood.

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