Mother–Son Relationships

Mother–Son Relations and Colonial Patriarchy

In the premodern, patriarchal society of colonial America, social order was believed to require both respect for rank and hierarchy and deferential obedience to male domestic, religious, and political authority. Fathers acted as heads of households, and because they were viewed as more rational and more effective disciplinarians, they were considered to be better suited than mothers to raise and educate children. Mothers were to bear, nurse, and care for infants, but were considered too affectionate and lenient to ensure their children's obedience and morality, and therefore ill-suited to raising sons for participation in a stratified and deferential society.

The Nineteenth Century: Mother–Son Relationships Idealized

Beginning in the Revolutionary period, American attitudes regarding mother–son relationships became more favorable, and the responsibility for child rearing increasingly shifted from fathers to mothers. After about the mid–eighteenth century, the advent of republican political theory emphasizing the voluntary bonds between citizens and government generated new theories about child rearing that stressed affection and voluntary obedience over stern discipline. The result was a concept of “republican motherhood,” which deemed mothers ideally suited to preparing their sons for citizenship. Because mothers could foster virtue, honesty, and love of liberty in their sons, mother–son relationships became understood as fundamental to the health and stability of the new nation.

Additionally, the impact of Romanticism on American culture in the early to mid-nineteenth century reinforced the emphasis on sentimental affection and nurture over harsh discipline in child rearing. Meanwhile, new gender constructs accompanying the growth of commercial capitalism, which defined men as work-oriented, amoral breadwinners and women as naturally pious, moral, and nurturing, led Americans to view mothers as better suited than fathers to mold the character of their sons. Changing economic patterns, in which economic production and male work increasingly moved outside of the home, meant that mothers were increasingly responsible for day-to-day child care and domestic governance. Beginning around 1830, an explosion of advice literature suggested that mothers would foster in sons the morality, self-restraint, sobriety, and honesty considered essential to well-rounded manhood, successful breadwinning, and the proper functioning of the nation's developing market economy.

At the same time, boys developed an independent culture away from the domestic sphere that encouraged the development of strength, speed, adventure, and courage. This culture assumed that boys required not only the self-restraint and moral virtue taught by mothers at home, but also the individualism, ambition, aggressiveness, and competition they would need as adults participating in the public sphere of their fathers. The idealization of mother–son relations thus coexisted with a continuing mistrust of excessively close mother–son bonding.

The “cult of domesticity” that enshrined the nobility and virtue of white mothers did not extend to slave women. [Page 320]However, the end of U.S. participation in the international slave trade in 1807 transformed slavery into a system that relied on procreation for its expansion. Although slave families varied in structure, women played a significant role in rearing their sons and earning their love and respect. But several factors disrupted the mother–son tie among slaves, including the forced labor of slave women (and the resulting frequency of slave boys raised collectively); the removal of boys from maternal nurture to a labor regimen at puberty; and the frequent breakup of slave families through sale and “abroad” marriages between men and women living on separate plantations. Still, women were typically more involved in child rearing than were slave men, a circumstance that defined boys' childhoods and often influenced the limited fathering role they would play in their own families.

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