Reviews of Books

Reviewed by Kirsten Sword, Georgetown University

In this compact volume, Carole Shammas further develops provocative arguments about the changing and distinctive nature of household government in America that she first published in this journal.1 She aims to "jump the conceptual groove" (p. 178) that has defined American family history and separated it from "the general political history of the nation," reminding us that from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries household government "was the government" (pp. xiii, 2) for most Americans. She argues that "the disintegration of the authority of the household head" over his dependents—wife, children, servants, slaves, or wards—was "much more central to the definition of a modern United States in the middle of the nineteenth century than industrialization or urbanization" (p. xiii). In nineteenth-century struggles to reallocate the authority and responsibilities once based in the household, moreover, Shammas sees the roots of the twentieth-century welfare state and of ongoing debates about the status of children—"the household's last legal dependent" (p. 179).	1
Shammas begins with a discussion of late nineteenth-century debates about the history of the family. She uses these controversies both as evidence of the mid-nineteenth-century "tumult around household relations" (p. 20) that is central to her own narrative and as an explanation for why this disruption in household organization has not been properly understood. Emerging interest in the variety of human kinship arrangements and disputes over whether patriarchy or matriarchy was the original human condition gave birth to modern social science theory. By the early twentieth century, questions about the household's past had been displaced by an ahistorical consensus about the importance of the nuclear family and by amnesia regarding the functions of the household as a governmental body. Interest in family history reemerged in the 1960s, but Shammas notes that "the habit of considering family structure only as the result and not the cause of political and economic events and the relegation of it to a private, nongovernmental realm" (ibid.) persisted. The study of power relations between household members fragmented into separate historiographies on women, on slavery and servitude, and—to a much lesser extent—on childhood. Shammas aims to synthesize this disparate work, tying it together in an extended meditation on the relationship between our understanding of the household and "how we think about what the government does and does not do" (ibid.).	2
The next four chapters of the book flesh out the argumentative skeleton developed in her earlier article. From the colonial period through the early republic, American household government was marked by an almost continual expansion of the legal powers of household heads. However, the increased authority of individual household heads came at the expense of controls over inheritance, amplifying the effects of the "weak lineage system" that set early modern England apart from its European counterparts. Over the long term, this system helped undermine household heads' ability to regulate their children's marriages. More than land availability, revolutionary political ideology, or other "overgeneralized mega-explanations" (p. 177), the loss of control over "the household-formation impulses of the younger generation" left the American patriarch "primed for an early fall" (p. 83). The inability of household heads to regulate the mobility of their own children raised questions about their authority to "control the children of others," widening "the gulf between servants and free labor" and making "slavery more anomalous" (p. 106). The householder's authority was the central and shared preoccupation of mid-nineteenth-century social reformers, however varied their solutions to that problem. "Advocates of the asylum, abolition, women's rights, and the common school" as well as "slavery apologists, sectarian prophets, and communitarians," Shammas contends, can all be "thought of as political reformers of household government" (p. 143). Struggles begun in the household spread to the courts, the political arena, and eventually to the Civil War battlefield.	. . .