Author Description

Americans have an unusually strong family ideology. We believe that morally self-sufficient nuclear households must serve as the foundation of a republican society. In this history, Barry Levy traces this contemporary view of family life all the way back to the Quakers. Levy argues that the Quakers brought a new vision of family and social life to America--one that contrasted sharply with the harsh, formal world of the Puritans in New England. The Quaker emphasis was on affection, friendship and hospitality. They stressed the importance of women in the home, and of self-disciplined, non-coercive childrearing. This book explains how and why the Quakers had such a profound cultural impact (and why more so in Pennsylvania and America than in England); and what the Quakers' experience with their own family system can tell us about American family ideology. Who were the Northwest British Quakers and why did their family system so impress English, French, and New England reformers--Voltaire, Crèvecouer, Brissot, Emerson, George Bancroft, Lydia Maria Child, and Lousia May Alcott, to name just a few? To answer this question, Levy tells the story of a large group of Quaker farmers from their development of a new family and communal life in England in the 1650s to their emigration and experience in Pennsylvania between 1681 and 1790. The book is thus simultaneously a trans-Atlantic community study of the migration and transplantation of ordinary British peoples in the tradition of Sumner Chilton Powell's Puritan Village; the story of the formation and development of a major Anglo-American faith; and an exploration of the origins of American family ideology. --From publisher's description.