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A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony

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A Little Commonwealth starts with a brief history of the Plymouth Colony, beginning in England through to its end in 1691. The author begins by discussing the physical setting in which the colonists lived. He continues with the structure of the household and follows with a look at development of people during this period, from birth to old age. He finishes with the thought that perhaps the colonial family of Plymouth colony is not so different than our own. As the book opens we learn that the Plymouth colonists were from a Puritan community that had left England because of persecution and resettled in Holland. However, after about ten years they decided to move again, this time to the New World. It took a lot of negotiations and work, but they finally struck a deal with Thomas Weston for transportation aboard the Mayflower to form a new colony. The new colonists arrived shortly before Christmas and found life extremely difficult. By spring nearly half of the c! olonists were dead. It was at this time that they were befriended by Indians, who advised them on the ways of the land. During all of this they were setting up their government, which consisted of freemen, a General Court, and a governor. The church was active at this time also, hiring ministers, conducting services and punishing its wayward members. There was also trouble with the Indians, until they were defeated during King Phillip's War. Then there were the sweeping reforms by the British Crown, ending with the annexation of the Plymouth colony by Massachusetts. In short, colonial life was anything but easy. The colonists lived in simple homes, typically one room, with a large fireplace, perhaps a loft for sleeping and a lean too at the rear of the house for storage. The houses were made of oak timbers that were covered with planks and a thatch roof. There were homes that were larger, but these belonged to the wealthier members of the colony. The furnishings were as s! imple as the home. There were a few cooking utensils, a tab! le for eating and a bed for sleeping. There were also large chests for storing linens, clothing and the like, which also served as tables or seats if the need arose. As their life was simple, so was their clothing. They used wool, linen and leather for their clothes, and like homes, clothes were an indication of social standing in the community. Household members included a husband, wife, children and sometimes a servant. Each had not only personal but shared responsibilities to the household. As the author continues, he tells us that households may have had up to nine children but typically there were only three to five in the house at a time. This is due to the spacing of the births, where an older child may be getting married and leaving the home while another is breast-feeding. The husband and wife were expected to live together, maintain a peaceful relationship and not engage in adultery. The author tells us that children were expected to "honor thy father and m! other" and that upon attainment of the age of sixteen were subject to laws which enforced this principle. Parents for their part were responsible for raising their children in a Christian manner, providing for their basic needs, such as clothing, food, shelter and education, and for teaching them a lawful trade. And sometimes the children were sent to live with another family as a servant, to learn a trade or get an education. We also learn that as children grew and left home, the circle of kin grew ever larger as some sons left the colony for the open lands of the frontiers. The author next addresses the life cycle in the colony, from precarious birth, through the idyllic first year and into the psychological molding of the child by the parents, between the ages of two and six. At the age of six or seven the child began to be treated as a little adult. They were dressed like their parents and the boys began to work with the fathers and the girls with the mothers, le! arning about life and households. As the children progresse! d into adolescence they began the process of courtship, leading to marriage and the starting of their own families. As the children left the home the parents continued to work, for they had little idea of retirement and in later life perhaps the husband went into politics and if he was elected to an office, he would most likely finish out his life in public service. The author concludes with the observation that perhaps family life in the Plymouth colony is not so different from ours today, an adult couple with children, making up the core of the family. Yet the author points out some startling differences. Colonial families were self-sufficient and acted as the school for the children, both educational and vocational. There was the obligation of family worship and there were times when the home was a "house of correction", having idle or criminal persons sentenced to them as servants. John Demos closes by telling us that the story of the family forms a part of! our history, the story of traditions, values and institutions brought by these first settlers to a new land.

In this compact book, John Demos paints a superb and informative picture of everyday life in early colonial Massachusetts. I'm delighted to see that a new edition has been issued.

Demos shatters many of our impressions of 17th-century Puritans - for example, the impression that Puritans were sexually repressed. More interesting, though, is Demos's compelling demonstration of just how difficult life was for early Plymouth colonists. An example: privacy within the home, of the sort that we today take for granted, was not enjoyed by Plymouth's settlers. (The reason for this fact is that the houses of the settlers were quite small, their families quite large, and most of each person's life was spent very close to his or her home.) Also, by today's standards, childbirth was incredibly dangerous: it killed one in five women. Infant mortality high, too, at about one in ten. And the wide choice of occupations that we moderns enjoy was unavailable to the Plymouth's settlers.

This book is well-researched and well-written. To read it is to learn more about life in early colonial North America. But reading it also provides important perspective for evaluating the immense material prosperity that the institutions bequeathed to us by these settlers - most importantly, private property - have made possible. We today are indeed fortunate.

I first read this book while in graduate school during the late 1970s, and I am glad it has been reissued in this new edition. John Demos was one of a group of "new social historians" in the latter 1960s that made colonial New England his domain and reinterpreted what we know about the Puritans "from the bottom up." Including Kenneth A. Lockridge ("A New England Town," 1970), Philip J. Greven ("Four Generations," 1970), and a few others, these historians employed the analysis of legal documents, especially wills and probate records, to uncover the past of the more "ordinary" New Englanders. Concentrating on small units in their study--Demos on Plymouth, Lockridge on Dedham, and Greven on Andover--they also employed, for the first time, material culture analysis of buildings, the accoutrements of everyday life, and findings from historical archeology and anthropology to understand better the nature of colonial New England.

Previously, historians had relied heavily upon letters, diaries, sermons, autobiographies, and other writings to construct their portrait of the Puritans of the seventeenth century. Almost by definition, this documentary record skewed the account toward telling the story of New England's social and political elites. The use of these new materials transformed our understanding of this time and place in American history. It may be hard to appreciate how exciting this approach to American history seemed at the time. These historians, using both the tools of social science and measured statistical analysis, rescued from obscurity the everyday lives of the rank and file who settled New England. William Bradford, Cotton Mather, John Winthrop, and other elites remained significant, but the story was now so much broader and interesting. It was such a breath of fresh air! Many of us in graduate school at the time embraced their lead and sought to apply at least some of their methodologies to our own work.

"A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony" is one of the best of these "new social histories." John Demos unearthed, in some cases literally through archaeological excavations, the style of life present at Plymouth Plantation. In the process he transformed our understanding of these religious separatists. He makes some startling revelations, destroying many old myths about marriage, family, and lifestyle. The basic organizing unit, according to Demos, was the nuclear family. He inferred this from probate records, but he also noted that the small size of the houses forced the exclusion of extended families under one roof. He was criticized for this conclusion, but subsequent research seems to support much of what he wrote. He also found that children married later than had been previously believed, between 23 and 28 years, starting their lives apart from their parents after greater maturity. He also found that the typical family numbered between seven and ten children, had an infant mortality rate of one in ten, that twenty percent of women died in childbirth, and that a man aged 21 could expect to live until 69.2 years but a woman at age 21 had a life expectancy of only 62.2 years.

By far the most path-breaking part of "A Little Commonwealth" deals with Puritan childrearing and the formation of the child's character. During the first year, Demos argues, a baby would receive much nurturing and support. Tranquility was the objective. In the second year, the child was weaned, usually had to deal with a younger sibling, and most interesting underwent an effort to break the spirit and bend it to the will the parents. Taking place in a crowded house, this experience was traumatic to say the least, and Demos asserts that it led to a set of psychological issues that revolved not so much around sex as a "tight cluster of anxieties about aggression" (pp. 134-37). Demos makes the case that fear of aggression, conflict, and loss are the dominant themes of Puritan life in the seventeenth century. At the same time, the Puritan family could be warm and supportive, and joy and fun was also part and parcel of their existence.

Equally important, Demos helps overturn the longstanding stereotype of Puritans. H. L. Mencken once said that the definition of Puritanism was "The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." Demos pretty much destroys this idea in "A Little Commonwealth" as well. They liked to dress colorfully, have parties, dance, sing, and drink. Despite their traumatic upbringings, he thinks they were not so nearly repressed as previously believed.

This is a very important benchmark in the history of early America and still deserving of serious consideration 35 years after its first publication.

Mr. Demos certainly did a tremendous amount of research in preparing this work, as his information is plentiful, organized, and lends support to his theories.

However, one should be warned that the writing style is quite dry, his refences to numbers and factoids are unending, and the entertainment quotient of the book is near zero. As a reference volume, there are plenty of interesting tables and charts to glean. As a flowing, historical piece that tells a story which brings the Old Colony's residents to life, it is lacking.

When the historian Edmund Morgan wrote "The Puritan Family" in 1966, he used as his primary sources the sermons and essays of important clergymen to tell the story of the early American social and political elites. John Demos seeks to complement as well as go beyond Morgan's efforts with "A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in the Plymouth Colony." By examining new sources and employing new methodologies, the author fashions a picture of the Puritan family that embraces a wider cross section of the colony's social classes. His sources-including wills, court records, and physical artifacts such as furniture and architecture-reveal a fuller understanding of America's earliest settler families.

The book explodes myth after myth about the Puritans, arguing that the common conception of dour, maniacally religious zealots dedicated to burning witches and ferreting out religious heresies is at best a fabulous oversimplification and at worst outright incorrect. Demos examines the physical setting of the Plymouth colony, particularly the size of the houses, implements of daily living, and clothing. He looks at the structure of the household, and how the various family members interacted with each other and with the larger community. The book goes further by studying how individual settlers developed psychologically from early childhood to old age. In the Plymouth colony, the family functioned as a school, a business, a church, a vocational training ground for community members, and a welfare institution. The author contrasts the American family of three centuries ago with the institution today, claiming that Plymouth families fused every aspect of life into an inseparable whole rooted in the home. The modern family tends to separate life into public and private spheres, and turns over many of the above functions to outside entities.

"A Little Commonwealth" has several strengths as a work of history. The book stands as a prime example of the shift in the discipline occurring in the 1960s and 1970s. Previous historians relied extensively-and almost exclusively-on written sources. As every historian knows, the individuals who could read and write in the past were often the elites of society. Hence, literary sources emphasized privileged modes of living while ignoring the activities of the majority of humanity. Demos's book attempts to dig down into the lower classes by expanding the base of available source material. The author forms hypotheses based on this evidence that could never have been extracted from essays, speeches, or literary works. Moreover, his methodological approaches open up new vistas in studying the past. Trends in anthropology, psychology, sociology, and archeology all serve his study with varying degrees of success as he pieces together family life in the Plymouth colony.

Unfortunately, borrowing theories from other branches of the social sciences also opens up a Pandora's box of problems for the historian, problems unlikely to ever find satisfactory resolution. For instance, the use of psychohistorical analysis in studying the past is fraught with peril. A historian simply does not possess the necessary training to put the past into a proper psychological framework. Demos's declaration that he took an intensive one-year series of courses in a graduate psychology department does not necessarily translate into success when constructing profiles of long dead subjects. Psychology requires live subjects, hundreds of hours of carefully structured interviews, and rigorous testing before formulating a hypothesis or proving a theory can take place. Historians do not have the metaphorical couch on which they can place their subjects to do such an analysis. Arguably the section that most suffers from Demos's reliance on psychohistory is his examination of the infancy and early childhood of Plymouth settlers. The sources concerning children are scarce at best, often tangential, and rarely provide the type of evidence a psychologist would need to formulate a concrete theory.

The problem of pyschohistorical methodology aside, a rather glaring omission in "A Little Commonwealth" revolves around the relationship of the settlers to their new surroundings. While the author underscores the importance of New England's geographical and meteorological influences on the recently arrived Europeans, chiefly the lure of vacant lands eventually leading to an outflow of settlers to virgin territories, he fails to provide any detailed information about the relationship between the Puritans and the indigenous populations. References to Indians in the book are vague and sporadic, relegated to a passing mention in the chapter on servants and a short history of King Philip's War. This conflict, according to the introductory background chapter, devastated the Plymouth colony. Would this war not then have had an effect on the family structure? In a broader sense, what was the effect of the native population on the settlers' families over the course of the colony's history? Subsequent research on indigenous populations since the release of Demos's book covers the topic in some depth. Perhaps blaming the author for ignoring the Indians is an anachronistic criticism, as the movements to secure Indian rights that eventually led to a reappraisal of their role in American history did not start in earnest until the early 1970s.

A reprint of "A Little Commonwealth" comes as no surprise considering its importance to the present state of historical study. The book served as a bridge between two schools of inquiry: the old one emphasized a study of the past that relied heavily on sources written by educated social, political, religious, and economic elites. The new history, which we see everywhere today, strives to uncover the currents swirling beneath the privileged classes. Too, Demos brought into his field a multitude of methodologies from other branches of the social sciences, methods still employed, although with greater caution, by researchers today. If the results of psychohistory and quantitative analysis have since proved problematic, the initial promise this book offered to the discipline led to a major reassessment of the profession and an enlargement of what constituted viable fields of historical research.

In this study Demos examines family life as it was for the Pilgrims who came over on the Mayflower, before they joined with the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The book is in three main sections: the physical setting (housing, furnishings, and clothing); the structure of the household (family connections, including servants); and individual development (childhood, coming of age, and old age). The most striking thing is how all aspects of communal life were controlled by the Court: although laws were not draconian, they spelled out how one was to conduct his or her life pretty thoroughly. Mess up and you would be punished. But it's also true that people were not that different back then, either: parents still cared for their children and worried about their futures by making provisions for them; families were at the core of society's welfare; even women were given rights denied them in the mother country. It's interesting that even these first settlers saw the American continent as a vast area just waiting to be colonized, and one of the biggest problems facing the authorities was how to keep settlers from wanting to spread out too far from Plymouth itself, thus weakening communal ties. A highly recommended book.

The transit of the group now known as the Pilgrims from the Netherlands to the New World is now, as much the fodder for legend as it is historical fact. In this book, Demos examines the daily life of the first two generations of the people who came over on the Mayflower. Since they were very busy in their struggle to exist, they had very little time for writing down their experiences. Therefore, there is a near total absence of historical data such as personal diaries or books. However, that does not mean there is an absence of information. Demos examines records such as wills, court records and the inventories of estates to determine what their life was like.
Quite naturally, what emerges is a portrait of a community with common beliefs that is struggling to succeed. It is clear from his research that the Puritan lifestyle was not as sexually repressive as it is usually portrayed. There are records of sexual activity, but nothing that would indicate that they were all that uptight about it. Most of the records indicate that hostile and aggressive impulses directed into the colony were strongly suppressed. They also indicate that there were fairly rigid social requirements that people take care of each other. Family was important, and many of the wills stipulate who is to care for those left behind. This is hardly surprising, as these people were attempting to carve a community in what was at best neutral territory.
If you are interested in what the life of the Mayflower Pilgrims was really like, then this is a book you should read. While most of it is nowhere near the stuff of legend, it is an accurate rendition of what their life and society was like.

I got my item a day EARLIER than expected. It was nice to see it my doorstep so soon. Very reliable and the item was in great condition, so thank you very much!

Although written in 1970 it provides an interesting look at every aspect of colonial life in New England. I highly recomend it for everyone interested in this period of history. Academic but not boring.

I found the book to be informative, but not particularly revealing. After reading such books as OLD JULES, by Mari Sandoz (his daughter), and A BEAUTIFUL CRUEL COUNTRY, by Eva Antonia Wilbur-Cruz, as well as comparing my life's experiences with those of the Colony (not to mention my own Ms. entitled IT IS EASIER TO FORGIVE THAN TO FORGET, about mother's childhod, her marriage, and the raising of four boys alone during the Great Depression) what impresses me most is the continuity of life styles from one generation to another subject, of course, to the influences of the community in which lives are lived.
I have a degree in History from SFSU that I attended in the 70s, and I agree with what appear to be conclusions of Academics on the subject of mingling disciplines. I believe that the truth of history is best described when there is such a comingling. I came to the conclusion that Historical Continuity is more a matter of emotion than of logic (that cannot be ignored), and that if we can relate emotionally to the vital situation of those about whom we read, we will become better informed. There is little value in repeating what the author reports except as it differs from the values and norms of our own lives. Then, faced with consequential differences, we must adjust our minds to pass judgment based on reality laced with understanding. In the end, we may well discover that given the same circumstances our lives would differ less from those of the past than we think. There are some who proclaim that life is a gift, but I would argue, as might the residents of THE LITTLE COMMONWEALTH, that it is more a duty to perform. How well one performs that duty depends upon our duality; our individuality versus the demands of the community into which we just happened to have been born. I found myself relating my own life experiences, to those of the members of the COMMONWEALTH, and except for the religious severity of the witchhunt imported from Europe, found that I had little difficulty appreciating their situation.