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Article: Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society.
- Article from:
- Journal of Social History
- Article date:
- March 22, 1997
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1997 Journal of Social History. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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At first glance, the argument of Mary Beth Norton's Founding Mothers & Fathers seems plausible, and appears to be a nice hook on which to hang a great deal of material about gender and power in seventeenth-century America. In her view, early New England was characterized by a "Filmerian" world view usually associated with Sir Robert Filmer, the great English theorist of paternal and above all of monarchical power. To Norton, Filmer's close analogies between paternal power in the family and monarchical power in the state implied, for complex reasons, that women who had some form of familial power, such as mothers, widows, and women of high social status, also in some limited ...