Reviews of Books

The colonial lowcountry was hardly an auspicious place for family life. Disease ruptured marriages, orphaned children, and undermined patriarchal ideals; affluent settlers struggled to establish stable families, much less lineages. How did men and women forge dynasties in such unprepossessing conditions? Lorri Glover began her research into early South Carolina merchant and planter families with that question. But her direction changed, as she discovered a wealth of material on relationships between siblings, cousins, and other nonlineal kin--the "hidden family" (p. xii) only dimly visible in conventional narratives. Patriarchy, she came to realize, was counterbalanced by the "ability of siblings and other intragenerational kin to step into the breach" (p. 42) left by the deaths of parents and spouses. In her accessible and absorbing study All Our Relations, Glover offers a compelling new model of planter family life, suggesting that "the key to understanding elite culture in South Carolina [lies] not in 'vertical' family dynasties, but rather in the 'horizontal' ties between siblings and kin" (p. ix).	1
Glover's attention to sibling relationships (and occasionally other horizontal kin relationships, such as cousinhood) subtly reshapes our image of the eighteenth-century American family. While American colonists recognized reciprocal obligations between husbands and wives and between parents and children, they understood both marriage and parenthood to be profoundly hierarchical. Glover argues, however, that adult siblings' relations with one another were usually much less hierarchical than marital relationships. Women from planter and merchant families cooperated extensively with brothers and other male kin in family and business affairs, forming relationships based on equity and reciprocity rather than deference. This rough egalitarianism among siblings modified the patriarchal character of nuclear family life. Extended family members' involvement in child-rearing limited parents' authority, while cousin and sibling-exchange marriages introduced the values of mutuality and cooperation into marital and affinal relationships. Ties between siblings and other nonlineal kin also formed the basis for the South Carolina gentry's gargantuan economic and political networks; the Bond sisters of Hobcaw Point, who "unified and virtually monopolized the Carolina ship-building industry" (p. 98) through a series of strategic marriages, vividly exemplify this phenomenon. In some cases, the extended family provided shelter and support for unhappy wives and children.	2
Glover's study of the economic and emotional dynamics of kinship raises several intriguing questions about marriage and gender mores in the early South. As she acknowledges, the presence of two contrasting family value systems, patriarchy and mutuality, sometimes led to confusion and conflict. Many women deferred to husbands in financial matters even as they cooperated with brothers in other business ventures. In the long run, Glover argues, mutuality became the dominant value in the planter class: "Ultimately, lowcountry elites used one set of values (patriarchy and deference) to ensure their dominance over poor whites, Indians, and slaves, while embracing another (cooperation and equity) within their own kin universe and class" (p. xi). Yet patriarchal attitudes continued to shape the most intimate family relations, those of parents and children and, particularly, husbands and wives. Glover deftly describes the complex countercurrents of gentry culture, but it is unclear precisely how the values of patriarchy and reciprocity interacted to shape everyday life in the numerous planter and mercantile households in which women acted as economic agents not just for brothers but also for husbands and fathers.	. . .