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
[W]hat is it that lightens labour, what is it that makes a man act a manly part under his own roof tree, what is it that makes the Father of a Family surrounded by his filial flock teach them good examples and moral precepts, what but the certainty of a better world beyond this vain chimera, yes, Walter, God is the end of everything.1
There is, in some households, no family government, no order, no subordination.2
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Notes
Rev. John Angel Jones, quoted in Rev. John Lanceley, The Domestic Sanctuary or the Importance of Family Religion (Hamilton, 1878).
See, for example, Toby Ditz, ‘The new men’s history and the peculiar absence of gendered power: some remedies from early-American gender history’, Gender and History 16 (2004), 1–35; Thomas A. Foster, Sex and the Eighteenth-Century Man: Massachusetts and the History of Sexuality in America (Boston, 2006).
John Tosh, ‘Masculinities in an industrializing society: Britain, 1800–1914’, Journal of British Studies 44 (2005), 332, 335. On the dominance of moral motherhood in the cmnineteenth-century transatlantic world, see John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven, 1999), pp. 90–1; Mary Ryan, The Empire of Mother: American Writing about Domesticity, 1830–60 (New York, 1982); Mary Ryan, The Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (Cambridge, 1981); Barbara Epstein, The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelicalism and Temperance in Nineteenth-Century America (Middletown, CT, 1981); William Westfall, Two Worlds: The Protestant Culture of Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Montreal and Kingston, 1989); Marguerite Van Die, ‘Revisiting “separate spheres”: women, religion and the family in mid-Victorian Brantford, Ontario’, in Nancy Christie (ed.), Households of Faith: Religion, Family and Community in Canada, 1760–1969 (Montreal and Kingston, 2002), pp. 234–63; Cecilia Morgan, Public Men and Virtuous Women: The Gendered Languages of Religion and Politics in Upper Canada, 1791–1850 (Toronto, 1996).
For this interpretation, see John Tosh, A Man’s Place. For a more recent reassertion of this argument, see Trev Lynn Broughton and Helen Rogers, ‘Introduction’, in Trev Lynn Broughton and Helen Rogers (eds), Gender and Fatherhood in the Nineteenth Century (London, 2007), p. 1.
For this line of argument, see J. Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750–1800 (Cambridge, 1983); Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (Harmondsworth, 1979); Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley, 2003); Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, 1988). For an important critique of this chronology which argued for the rehabilitation of patriarchy under Napoleon, see Suzanne Desan, The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France (Berkeley, 2004).
On this theme, see Marguerite Van Die, Religion, Family and Community in Victorian Canada: The Colbys of Carrollcroft (Montreal and Kingston, 2005), pp. 5, 54, 108. For other interpretations which emphasise the prominent role of fathers in the religious socialisation of children, see Ollivier Hubert, ‘Ritual performance and Parish sociability: French-Canadian families at mass from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries’, in Christie (ed.), Households of Faith, pp. 37–76; J.I. Little, ‘The fireside kingdom: a mid-nineteenth-century Anglican perspective on marriage and parenthood’, in Christie (ed.), Households of Faith, pp. 77–102.
See Nancy Christie, ‘Introduction: theorizing a colonial past’, in Nancy Christie (ed.), Transatlantic Subjects: Ideas, Institutions and Social Experience in Post-Revolutionary British North America (Montreal and Kingston, 2008), pp. 3–44.
For a more extensive discussion of this transition, see Nancy Christie, Engendering the State: Family, Work and Welfare in Canada (Toronto, 2000).
Thomas Adsett to Rev. Robert Ridsdale, 21 December 1832, quoted in Wendy Camerson, Sheila Haines and Mary McDougall Maude (eds), English Immigrant Voices: Labourers’ Letters from Upper Canada in the 1830s (Montreal and Kingston, 2000), p. 87.
Michael Gauvreau, ‘The dividends of empire: church establishments and contested british identities in the Canadas and the maritimes, 1780–1850’, in Nancy Christie (ed.), Transatlantic Subjects, pp. 199–250.
See Nancy Christie, ‘“A painful dependence”: female begging letters and the familial economy of obligation’, in Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau (eds), Mapping the Margins: The Family and Social Discipline in Canada, 1700–1975 (Montreal and Kingston, 2004), pp. 69–102; Nancy Christie, ‘Strangers in the family: work, gender, and the origins of old age homes’, Journal of Family History 32 (2007), 371–91. On the expansion of patriarchal rule in colonial America, see Carole Shammas, A History of Household Government in America (Charlottesville, 2002); Mary Beth Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society (New York, 1988).
John R. Gillis, A World of Their Own Making: Myth, Ritual and the Quest for Family Values (New Haven, 1997), pp. 187–88; Robert Griswold, Fatherhood in America: A History (New York, 1993).
J.C.D. Clark, English Society, 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice During the Ancien Regime (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 197–216. Where Clark stressed social continuity, Boyd Hilton has recently argued that patriarchalism was refurbished, although he concurs with Clark’s periodisation. See Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People?: England 1783–1846 (Oxford, 2006).
Rachel Weil, Political Passions: Gender, the Family and Political Argument in England, 1680–1714 (Manchester, 1999), pp. 7, 72–3. She states that Whigs believed not simply in a symbolic analogy between kings and fathers, but in a literal elision between these roles.
Rev. John Strachan, A Discourse on the Character of King George the Third, Addressed to the Inhabitants of British America (Montreal, 1810), 13, 22. On the link between religious masculinity and public virtue in the eighteenth century, see Jeremy Gregory, ‘Homo religiosus: masculinity and religion in the long eighteenth century’, in Tim Hitchcock and Michele Cohen (eds), English Masculinities, 1660–1800 (London, 1999), pp. 85–110.
See Todd Webb, ‘How the Canadian methodists became British: unity, schism, and transatlantic identity, 1827–54’, in Nancy Christie (ed.), Transatlantic Subjects, pp. 159–98.
See Christie, ‘Strangers in the family: work, gender, and the origins of old age homes’, Nancy Christie, ‘“The plague of servants”: female household labor and the making of classes in upper Canada’, in Christie (ed.), Transatlantic Subjects, pp. 83–132. For the moral economy of service, see Tim Meldrum, Domestic Service and Gender, 1660–1750: Life and Work in the London Household (London, 2000). For the importance of domestic service as a benchmark of patriarchalism, see Clark, English Society, pp. 85–6.
AO, Anna Ardagh Diary, passim. For a more complete discussion of Anna Ardagh and the place of ‘private’ religion as a space for female resistance to patriarchal authority, see Nancy Christie, ‘Time, space, modernity and the transatlantic family’, in Brigitte Caulier and Yvan Rousseau (dirs), Temps, espaces, modernité: Mélanges offerts à Serge Courville et Normand Séguin (Ste-Foy, 2009), pp. 69–82. On religion as contested terrain in Victorian marriages, see Tosh, A Man’s Place, pp. 69–73, 96. On different views of marriage as a variable of class, see Desan, The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France, p. 89. For an interpretation that sees gender as the key to varying views of marriage, see A.J. Hammerton, Cruelty and Companionship: Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Married Life (London, 1995).
For a larger discussion of Brigden’s life, see Nancy Christie, ‘“On the threshold of manhood”: Working-Class Religion and Domesticity in Victorian Britain and Canada’, Histoire Sociale/Social History, 36:71 (2003), 145–74.
On the theology of the atonement, see Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1785–1865 (Oxford, 1988). Buchanan does not entirely fit Hilton’s paradigm, as Hilton is most interested in the link between evangelicalism and free trade theories of political economy, and Buchanan emphatically rejected free trade.
On the new fatherhood which stressed playing with one’s children, see Stephen M. Frank, Life with Father: Parenthood and Masculinity in the Nineteenth-Century American North (Baltimore, 1998).
Donald C. Hossack, The Gospel of the Home (Toronto, 1903), p. 25. Interestingly, the preface written by Rev. Nathanael Burwash, Chancellor of Victoria University, the leading Methodist College, stressed the importance of mothers in sustaining a family’s religious lineage, even though this was not the principal goal of Hossack’s tract.
Rev. John Lanceley, The Domestic Sanctuary or the Importance of Family Religion (Hamilton, 1878), p. vi.
Ibid., pp. 10, 13.
Ibid., p. 39.
Hossack, The Gospel of the Home, pp. 5, 29; Lanceley, The Domestic Sanctuary, pp. 12, 50. For the continued association between family and the state and society with the emergence of liberalism, see Jennifer Huer, The Family and the Nation: Gender and Citizenship in Revolutionary France, 1789–1830 (Ithaca, 2005); Judith Surkis, Sexing the Citizen: Morality and Masculinity in France, 1870–1920 (Ithaca, 2006).
On this theme, see Nancy Christie, ‘Young men and the creation of civic christianity in urban methodist churches, 1880–1914’, Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, new series, 17 (2006), 79–105; Patricia Dirks, ‘Reinventing christian masculinity and fatherhood: the Canadian protestant experience, 1900–1920’, in Christie (ed.), Households of Faith, pp. 290–316.
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Christie, N. (2011). ‘Proper Government and Discipline’: Family Religion and Masculine Authority in Nineteenth-Century Canada. In: Arnold, J.H., Brady, S. (eds) What is Masculinity?. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230307254_19
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