Patriarchy

Patriarchy in Early America

European colonists brought to America social systems in which the male-headed household was the fundamental unit, male household heads represented their families politically, and men exercised power over their families (especially their sons) through the promise of the inheritance of land and other real estate. Colonists also adhered to the belief that these patriarchal social and political patterns were divinely instituted and necessary for a well-ordered society. These assumptions informed such early visions of American society as the Mayflower Compact (1620) and Massachusetts governor John Winthrop's Model of Christian Charity (1630)—both of which were, effectively, contracts among men about social order and the purpose of their colonial undertaking.

Colonial societies in New England, the Chesapeake Bay region, and elsewhere sought to maintain a strict patriarchal order. The Puritan leadership of the Massachusetts Bay colony perceived the gathering of both male and female religious dissenters at the house of Anne Hutchinson as a threat to their patriarchal power, and they expelled her and a group of her followers in 1638. Scholars have argued that the witchcraft accusations in Salem in 1692 (with a large majority of the accused being women) suggests an attempt to counteract challenges to pervasive patriarchal power. Seventeenth-century Chesapeake laws about the status of black servants grounded slavery in a legally constructed system of race-based patriarchy. Colonists in both regions defined Native American societies as uncivilized because their gender relations did not conform to European patriarchal patterns.

The era of the American Revolution witnessed both an ideological challenge to patriarchy and its affirmation in the drafting of the Constitution. Boycotts of English goods drew women into political activism and encouraged such women as Abigail Adams and Judith Sargent Murray—supported by such male patriot leaders as Thomas Paine and Benjamin Rush—to seek political equality with men in the emerging republic. Furthermore, the republican ideology that justified resistance to England's King George III also called for a softening of patriarchal governance in families and households. Despite these challenges to patriarchal leadership, citizenship and political power in the new nation were confined to white male property owners, and national identity formed around a notion of white male patriarchy embodied in the figure of wartime leader George Washington.

Patriarchy in the New Nation

During the first six decades of the nineteenth century, economic developments such as the market revolution and industrialization tended to undermine earlier forms of patriarchy and forced its regrounding, particularly in the northern states. The market and industrial revolutions forced a reconfiguration of male patriarchy by causing a decline in the significance of land ownership as a foundation of male economic and political power. Instead, male power became increasingly grounded in the forces of market exchange and men's ability to respond to them, and a new rationale for middle-class male authority promoted free competition, acquisitive individualism, and the pursuit of economic self-interest. A concomitant ideology of “separate spheres” defined men as alone suited to administer and participate in public political and economic life. Patriarchal power—at least for the middle class—depended increasingly on fathers' abilities as breadwinners and their capacity to provide education and guidance, especially to their sons. Linking manhood to income-generating activities gave men a greater share of economic power than they had held in the traditional patriarchal household.

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