Under Household Government: Sex and Family in Puritan New England. By M. Michelle Jarrett Morris. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013. xiv + 326 pp. $49.95 cloth.

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Under Household Government: Sex and Family in Puritan New England . By M. Michelle Jarrett Morris . Cambridge : Harvard University Press , 2013. xiv + 326 pp. $49.95 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesWhen Edmund S. Morgan published The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England in 1944, he probably did not realize what he was starting. By the 1980s, scholars in fields as diverse as historical demography, African-American history, and women's history had joined colonialists in establishing early American family history as a burgeoning area of study. M. Michelle Jarrett Morris's Under Household Government: Sex and Family in Puritan Massachusetts is simply the most recent of numerous interpretations. It also ranks among the liveliest and most persuasive.If Morris focuses more than Morgan on sex and sexual sins, she is quick to acknowledge that her conclusions echo his in several respects. She too finds that the still-lingering popular view of the Puritans as killjoys, ever vigilant to ensure that no one partakes of earthly pleasures, hardly fits the picture that emerged from her research. She agrees as well that Puritan households were profoundly hierarchical but that familial relationships were characterized more by affection and concern than stern discipline. Most notably, like Morgan, she argues that her subjects were an intensely 'tribal' lot (3), fiercely loyal to their families, sometimes to the detriment of their communal mission.Under Household Government comes fully into its own as Morris tells the stories of those residents of Middlesex and Suffolk counties who came before the courts between 1660 and 1700 on charges of sexual misbehavior, rape, or infanticide--or as witnesses for or against the accused. Strikingly, she discovers that rather than prying neighbors, most court witnesses were friends and kin who could be counted on to close ranks in the face of perceived threats to a family's reputation or economic well-being. What is more, at least some of these families went beyond loyalty and protection to influence the courts unduly by means of perjury, slander, false alibis, and jury tampering. Visualizing these cases, as well as divorce petitions, as windows into the everyday dynamics of household and community life, Morris adds considerable complexity to our picture of Puritan morality and family values.Although the metaphor of the family as a little commonwealth has been analyzed before, Under Household Government speaks vividly to the relationship between the authority of fathers and masters and governmental authority. The former, Morris demonstrates, sometimes undermined the latter. In their determination to protect their own families' reputations and estates, some fathers and masters in Massachusetts failed as household heads to live up to their obligations to church and state, in particular the reform of young sinners and the stability of households. Clashes are apparent in cases where fathers (with the support of kin) subverted the truth in defending offspring charged with fornication or rape. …