Domestic duty: The family life of Samuel Sewall, 1675-1729
Abstract
Much of the historical literature casts parent-child relations in the New England Puritan family in grim terms, stressing the late discovery of childhood, parental indifference toward children, the callous attitude toward the death of children, brutal punishment of children, the consignment of children to the condition of miniature adulthood, and the sending out of children to strangers or kin. These judgments are based on questionable evidence, much of which has been drawn from the historiography of the European childhood. My purpose in this dissertation has been to reexamine this harsh assessment of the Puritan family by studying the diary, letters, and family papers of Samuel Sewall (1652-1730), the Boston judge, Councilor, and merchant. Sewall's account of the birth of his children, their baptism and naming, nursing and weaning, illness and death, shows these to have been intensely spiritual events, ones in which Sewall was deeply engaged as a husband and father. In child-rearing practice, Sewall was a moderate, intent on bending, but not breaking, the child's will. Sewall closely oversaw his children's religious training, proceeding with a Puritan zeal tempered by kindness and reassurance. Sewall also painstakingly oversaw the children's secular education and preparation for a calling. He guided their courtships and marriages, and maintained a close relationship with his adult children. The notion that colonial parents could not conceive of their children as children, but only as "miniature adults," is very persistent. But the Sewall family record challenges the evidence marshaled to support this idea, particularly the claims that parents rushed their children to assume the demeanor and the full religious responsibilities of adulthood, and that children had little opportunity to play. Nor does the record sustain the equally persistent notion that an opaque Puritan child-rearing practice caused parents to routinely send their children out of the family home to be raised by others. The Sewall children left home for entirely practical, fully understandable purposes: education, apprenticeship, healing, socialization. The Sewall family's experience compels us to make a far more positive assessment of the Puritan family than has generally been presented in the literature.
Recommended Citation
Judith S Graham,
"Domestic duty: The family life of Samuel Sewall, 1675-1729"
(January 1, 1997).
Boston College Dissertations and Theses.
Paper AAI9735280.
http://escholarship.bc.edu/dissertations/AAI9735280
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