A History of Household Government in America.

A History of Household Government in America. By Carole Shammas (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002, xiii plus 232 pp. $55.00).

In recent years, several studies examining the ways in which marriage has not only been a civil institution and legal arrangement historically, but also a foundation of civic life with important connections to the state, have expanded our understanding of American marriages and family relationships. Carole Shammas' A History of Household Government in America is a welcome addition to this literature; however, she shifts the focus to the household, defined not as "those persons related to one another by genes or marriage but ... a broader group held together today by coresidency and earlier by dependents' relationship with the head." (1) The phrase "household government" in the title hints at key features in Shammas' analysis--governing within the household, usually embodied by the male head, and external economic, legal, and social conditions that affect, and even assume, that governance.

In this brief volume, Shammas covers a lot of ground, beginning with historical sociological theories of the household. She then traces the origins of colonial households, comprised of a household head, usually the husband and father, and dependents ranging from his wife and children to extended kin and bound laborers. Shammas argues that during the colonial period through the Early Republic household heads' authority declined for several reasons. In the seventeenth century, local governments could intervene if households did not meet community standards regarding orderly behavior by dependents. Well into the colonial period local governments had the authority to act if heads of household failed to meet the economic needs of their dependents. As these public interventions eroded household heads' authority, the American Revolution brought additional decline through what Shammas calls weak support for household heads to control the "exit" of dependents from the household, evidenced by low numbers of marriage contracts and lax methods of religious and state enforcement if fathers tried to intervene in their children's choice of marriage partners. In addition, male household heads tended to keep property in their own hands rather than disburse it to dependents in their lifetime; the tradeoff for retaining property, however, was the decline of household heads' authority in dependents' life choices.

Shammas' chapter on the "household civil war" of 1840-1880 suggests an intriguing way of thinking about familial changes, through an examination of experiments in different living arrangements and the rise of social welfare institutions in this tumultuous period. She notes, "the whole idea was not to preserve families, but to preserve orderly family government, which often meant encouraging small, weak households to disband and join up with larger, stronger ones," such as orphanages and similar institutions. (2) However, by the turn of the twentieth century social welfare experts re-evaluated these approaches and pushed for a return to private households even if it meant supplementing its income with public funds; Shammas labels this an "institutional U-turn."

One of the strengths of Shammas' work is her analysis of the relationship between households and cultural assumptions related to race. For the colonial period, this allows Shammas to consider not only the distinctions between different European nations' influence on their respective colonial household legal systems, but also shifts slightly how we think about European critiques of Indian household organization, especially related to matrilneality. She also turns her attention to how the institution of slavery and indentured labor affected white households and authority, as well as how freedom significantly increased the number of households after the Civil War and created new forms of state intervention into household authority. Her attention to Indian boarding schools offers as a useful contrast to changes in institutions; her analysis of the religious and civic conflict that was part of race and religious-based institutionalism is suggestive.

Shammas also offers a provocative discussion of global household changes as a point of comparison with current American household organization. She makes clear that the discomfort with male headed households being displaced by female headed households is a constant through America's past and continues into the twenty-first century. The figures she supplies show the marked move toward these female centered households in the post World War II years and the rise in single parent households more generally. Does this replicate, to some degree, the model of one head of household with dependents of early America or does it mean we have swung to the opposite end of the continuum of household organization?

Shammas' book is a synthesis, primarily, in that it relies heavily on secondary literature of the past thirty years as evidence. This does not reduce the quality of her analysis of household government, however. Shammas' scholarly work comes from a quantitative history background with an emphasis in legal and census records. She uses this method and the sources on which it is based with skill and ease. Tables throughout and extensive data in Appendices might intimidate those who shy away from statistical analysis; however, Shammas' discussion in the text clearly explains the data and aids the reader in decoding the statistics. She makes a conscious effort to include qualitative sources like portraiture, photography, and women's fiction through the 1880s, which provides a different window to look at household change, yet it feels like the two approaches are not integrated; rather, they coexist within chapters. That said, it would have been nice to have additional sources for the U-turn period. She emphasizes Indian boarding schools as a counter to the trend to return to households--photographs of boarding school students abound, with far fewer family photographs of Indian families, whereas Jacob Riis turned his lens to urban immigrant families. Where would his pictures fit within her argument about the Protestant progressive urge to weaken parochial institutions in favor of using "orphan trains" to provide a family experience--that in some ways resembled bound labor and apprenticeships of the colonial period? On the whole, however, these suggestions about additional qualitative material would not change but rather add to Shammas' already convincing analysis of household government in America's past.

Andrea R. Foroughi

Union College

ENDNOTES

1. Carole Shammas, A History of Household Government in America (Charlottesville, VA, 2002), xiii.

2. Ibid., 111.