Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth

¶ … Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony

Cultures evolve over time in response to changes in environment and social conditions. This fact is brought home in a Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony, where John Demos ostensibly sets out to reconstruct the typical life of an average Pilgrim household in the seventeenth century. However, since Demos uses a social history rather than a narrative framework, he succeeds in effectively establishing the manner in which the Pilgrim families adapted to their new environment. Demos achieves this through a process of analysis and interpretation of everyday life, using method and theory from the social sciences. This approach allows Demos to infer that the opportunities for geographical and social mobility offered by the new environment led to changes in the family system and ideals that the Pilgrims brought with them from the Old World.

Demos uses three types of source material to bring together a vivid portrayal of family life in Plymouth colony - physical artifacts, documents such as wills and inventories, and the official records of individual towns and the Colony. In addition, Demos also draws upon secondary research in the form of literary materials published during the period. Using these source materials, Demos analyzes the everyday life of a Plymouth household using a combination of quantitative data, an impressionistic and topical approach and theoretical models borrowed from the behavioral sciences. Indeed, it is the unorthodoxy of Demos's method that allows him to draw inferences and develop the hypothesis that, contrary to popular legend, family life in Plymouth Colony was not at all unique, and that it marks the beginning of the history of American family life.

Demos's systematic and scientific approach to his subject lends a great deal of credibility to the supports and inferences he uses to support his major theme. For instance, he points out that scholars have traditionally focused on the authoritative control exercised by the various institutional systems of Plymouth Colony on virtually all aspects of life, including family. Whereas, a careful examination of individual lives reveals a kind of fluidity that is commonly associated with a much later period in American national history. As a prime example, he cites the simple factor of geographical mobility, brought about by the temptation of empty land and a desire for wealth: "New towns arose in the wilderness and were chartered, albeit reluctantly, by the General Court." In effect, Demos debunks the myth that the Pilgrims were people who believed in austerity and a Godly life. In fact, as additional support, Demos analyzes artifacts, wills, and inventories to establish a trend of steadily growing diversity in housing, furnishing, and the possession of other material objects.

Demos also analyzes the cultural effect of Pilgrim families eagerly responding to the "land of opportunity." For instance, he points out that the gradual increase in the average size of houses foreshadows major realignments in a whole network of human relationships, namely, the modern day concept of privacy within families. Another inference Demos draws is that the distribution of land by newer townships to almost anyone who proposed to move in, as against the earlier plan to restrict land grants only to upright, religious-minded settlers, laid the foundation for cultural evolution through social mobility. In a similar vein, the prospect of new land served to disperse families with the younger generation either rejecting their modest inheritance to seek their fortunes elsewhere or being given land in a new township or frontier area. From these and other facts, Demos makes it evident that the Pilgrim families were keen to distinguish themselves along the lines of wealth and status, thereby laying the foundation for America to develop along the lines of heterogeneous immigrant groups, enterprise and individualism.