‘Proper Government and Discipline’: Family Religion and Masculine Authority in Nineteenth-Century Canada

Abstract

The above quotation from John Grubb, a yeoman farmer in Upper Canada (Ontario), to his brother in Scotland underscores the extent to which he believed spiritual growth was best nourished within the family. More importantly, he stressed the degree to which manliness, meaning masculine authority, was affirmed first and foremost within the home and that the central pillar of that authority was constituted by the cultural power of religion. While historians have now begun to focus upon the degree to which masculinity was constructed within the household, thus drawing historiographical attention to the importance of fatherhood in the nineteenth century, the power which men wielded over their familial dependents — including their wives, children and servants — has often been considered in terms of their mastery over the labour and sexuality of those subordinate to them in the home.3 While historians have accentuated the importance of the conjugal unit and marital status to men’s sense of identity and power in the nineteenth century, they have for the most part seen the moral authority of men within the family as merely episodic and occluded by what has been interpreted as the dominant discourse relating to moral motherhood. Thus, whilst men may have had a large presence within the family, historians have continued to see the moral sphere of the family and the building of character as a predominantly female preserve. John Tosh was one of the first historians to identify the cultural dominance of ‘domesticated manhood’ in Victorian England; nevertheless, he has also concluded that in industrialising Britain the concept of manliness was by and large a secular one, for, as he observed, ‘manliness had much more to do with one’s own standing in the sight of men than with one’s standing with the Almighty.’4