Lisa Wilson – författare

This fascinating book is the first to investigate the everyday lives of men in prerevolutionary America. It looks at men and women in colonial Massachusetts and Connecticut, comparing their experiences in order to understand the domestic environment in which they spent most of their time. Lisa Wilson tells wonderful stories of colonial New England men, addressing the challenges of youth, the responsibilities of adulthood, and the trials of aging. She finds that ideas about patriarchy or nineteenth-century notions of separate spheres for men and women fail to explain the world that these early New England men describe. Patriarchal power, although certainly real enough, was tempered by notions of obligation, duty, and affection. These men created their identities in a multigendered, domestic world. A man was defined by his usefulness in this domestic context; as part of an interdependent family, his goal was service to family and community, not the self-reliant independence of the next century’s “self-made” man.

Stepfamilies are not a modern phenomenon, but despite this reality, the history of stepfamilies in America has yet to be fully explored. In the first book-length work on the topic, Lisa Wilson examines the stereotypes and actualities of colonial stepfamilies and reveals them to be important factors in early United States domestic history. Remarriage was a necessity in this era, when war and disease took a heavy toll all too often led to domestic stress, and cultural views of stepfamilies during this time placed great strain on stepmothers and stepfathers. Both were seen as either unfit substitutes or as potentially unstable influences, and nowhere were these concerns stronger than in white middle-class families, for whom stepparents presented a paradox.Wilson shares the stories of real stepfamilies in early New England, investigating the relationship between prejudice and lived experience, and, in the end, offers a new way of looking at family units throughout history and the cultural stereotypes that still affect stepfamilies today.