Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society

by Mary Beth Norton

Overview

Much like A Midwife's Tale and The Unredeemed Captive, this novel is about power relationships in early American society, religion, and politics--with insights into the initial development and operation of government, the maintenance of social order, and the experiences of individual men and women.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307760760
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/03/2011
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	512
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Mary Beth Norton is Mary Donlon Alger, a professor of American history at Cornell University. She is the author of The British-Americans: The Loyalist Exiles in England, 1774–1789 (1972); Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (1980); Founding Mothers & Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society (1996), which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist; and (with five others) A People and a Nation (6th ed., 2001). She has also edited several works on women’s history and served as the general editor of The AHA Guide to Historical Literature (3rd ed., 1995).

Editorial Reviews

Norton documents the relationship between gender and power in early colonial America, basing her study on the period from 1620 to 1670. The dominant worldview of family and state during the period was patriarchal, and its leading proponent was one Sir Robert Filmer. The head of a family held power parallel to that held by the head of state, serving as justice of the peace, arbiter of order, payer of fines, and poster of bonds for all dependents, including servants. Most families were governed by men, but widows, wives of high-ranking men, and midwives, who knew the family sins and secrets, could assume leadership roles. The reader is shown how women such as Anne Hutchinson assumed religious power through the Filmerian principle that all authority flowed from the symbolic parent, father or mother--a belief soon overthrown by the encroaching Enlightenment's Lockean worldview, which initiated the confinement of women's authority to the home. A scholarly, provocative read.

Patricia Hassler

A lucid and enlightening explication of the relationship between gender and power in early colonial America.

Taking the period between 1620 and 1670 as the basis for this study, Norton (American History/Cornell; Liberty's Daughters, 1980, etc.) sets out to prove that the political and social worldview of early Americans underwent a drastic change from the founding of the first colonies to the framing of the Constitution 150 years later. The philosophy dominant in the 17th century, which Norton terms "Filmerian" after its primary theorist, Sir Robert Filmer, was a patriarchal view of both family and state, in which the hierarchical systems of power were derived from God and nature. Opposed to this was the later "Lockean" worldview (named after John Locke), which severed the connection between family and state, holding that public power was derived from a contractual agreement between consenting adults. Here Norton focuses on the Filmerian view, using court cases from the 17th century to show how women and men were treated under the law, how sexual offenses were punished, and what attributes were valued under this system. She also comes to the somewhat ironic conclusion that the Filmerian patriarchal worldview allowed more room for women to wield public power than did the Lockean: Although women were ordinarily subordinate to men in family situations, occasionally a woman could become the head or acting head of the family—if her husband were away, for example, or deceased. In the Filmerian system, these women were given a say in public affairs, whereas Lockean political philosophy would categorically deny women any access to political power by virtue of their sex alone.

Something of a work-in-progress (Norton's next book will address the question of how the Lockean view became dominant), this is a promising beginning to what may prove to be a definitive work on the subject of gendered politics in America.

Kirkus Reviews