A History of Household Government in America.

A History of Household Government in America. By Carole Shammas. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2002. Pp. xviii, 232. Paper, $19.50, ISBN 0-8139-2126-0; cloth, $55.00, ISBN 0-81392125-2.)

In this ambitious and wide-ranging book, Carole Shammas presents a commendably inclusive historical synthesis. Between 1840 and 1880, she contends, the authority of household heads--typically, propertied white men--disintegrated throughout the United States. Shammas believes that this change, which affected virtually all Americans, was "Much more central to the definition of a modern United States ... than industrialization or urbanization" (p. xiii).

Shammas argues that heads of households had more power in colonial America than in Europe, a situation that the Revolution scarcely altered. Early Americans were more likely than their English counterparts to be dependents within a household because of the pervasiveness of slavery and servitude and the lack of governmental and ecclesiastical checks on patriarchal power. The revolutionary era brought some modest reforms, though Shammas suggests that these changes either had minimal impact or occurred for reasons other than political ideology. Revolutionary leaders, who often lived off their wives' property and profited by the slave system, "did not pretend to mess with what were understood to be natural forms of subordination" (p. 79).

Nevertheless, domestic patriarchy was vulnerable and became increasingly more so in the nineteenth century. American fathers, who, unlike their English counterparts, conveyed property to their heirs by will rather than in marriage settlements, were less and less able to influence their children's marriage choices and subsequent formation of new households. Nor was there an established church to step in when domestic patriarchs failed to enforce morality or provide poor relief or other social services to an increasingly complex society. By the 1840s, domestic patriarchy was under attack in the northern states. The erosion of slavery and servitude, married women's property laws, changes in divorce laws and child custody arrangements to favor women, and the creation of institutions ranging from public schools to orphanages to insane asylums all sought to improve society in part by lessening the authority of household heads.

Shammas recasts nineteenth-century social activists as "political reformers of household government" whose impact was insignificant in the South before Reconstruction (p. 143). She sees the Civil War as the violent analogue of legislative and judicial battles northerners waged over slavery, marriage, and household government generally. Shammas overstates the case for regional distinctiveness; white servitude also declined in the Old South, and antebellum southerners founded orphanages and asylums--institutions they must have reconciled with their region's patriarchal social values.

Still, southern historians should prefer Shammas's interpretive framework to those that relegate white southerners and African Americans to the margins of a generally progressive national narrative. Her final chapters, which take her analysis through the twentieth century, imply similarities between white southerners and conservative northerners who, for different reasons, mounted a backlash against antipatriarchalism in the postbellum decades.

University of North Carolina at Charlotte

CYNTHIA A. KIERNER