 |
 Young women and men were increasingly free to pick or reject a spouse
with little parental interference. At the same time that courtship
grew freer, however, marriage became an increasingly difficult transition
point, particularly for women, and more and more women elected not
to marry at all.
In seventeenth and early eighteenth century New England, courtship was not simply a personal, private matter. The law gave parents "the care and power...for the disposing of their Children in Marriage" and it was expected that they would take an active role overseeing their child's choice of a spouse. A father in Puritan New England had a legal right to determine which men would be allowed to court his daughters and a legal responsibility to give or withhold his consent from a child's marriage. A young man who courted a woman without her father's permission might be sued for inveigling the woman's affections. Parental involvement in
courtship was expected because marriage was not merely an emotional
relationship between individuals but also a property arrangement
among families. A young man was expected to bring land or some other
form of property to a marriage while a young woman was expected
to bring a dowry worth about half as much.
In
most cases, Puritan parents played little role in the actual selection
of a spouse (although Judge Sewall did initiate the courtship between
his son Joseph and a neighbor named Elizabeth Walley). Instead,
they tended to influence the timing of marriage. Since Puritan children
were expected to bring property to marriage, and Puritans fathers
were permitted wide discretion in when they distributed property
to their children, many sons and daughters remained economically
dependent for years, delaying marriages until a relatively late
age. Credits: |
