Susan E. Klepp - Revolutionary Conceptions: Women, Fertility, and Family Limitation in America, 1760-1820

A nineteenth-century historian entertained his readers with a comic interlude. His tale of bygone days told of the reunion of Old Lydick, a humble Pennsylvania German veteran of the Revolutionary War, with George Washington, who had once honoured [Lydick] with his favour. After mutual pleasantries, Lydick supposedly told the newly elected first president of the United States:

It has been my happiness, once again, to meet and pay my duty to your Excellency. I have but one regret. You are childless! You leave your country no representative of your virtues! But you are not as old as Abraham [George Washington was in fact fifty-seven]; and she (gently touching the shoulder of Mrs. Washington) as old as Sarah [Martha Dandridge Custis Washington was fifty-eight]; and through the favour of the Almighty, I hope that a son may still be born to bless us.

Washington thanked him, and Lydick left, praying, that fruitfulness might crown the last years of their existence with perfect felicity. It was not enough for Washington to be the figurative father of his country. According to this elderly baker and farmer, the president also needed to prove his virility by siring male offspring. Procreation towered above all other achievements.

This story is undoubtedly fictitious, with its stock comic character of the simple, honest, but rustic and faintly ludicrous Pennsylvania Dutchman. Yet Lydicks character was meant to recall the old days, when fruitfulness was a civic virtue, not laughably uncouth, and when a mans standing as husband and father was measured by the number and rank of his sons as well as by the deference of his subordinates. It was a time, too, when a womans first task in marriage was to follow biblical commandments to increase and multiply (as well as to be silent). By 1822, when this tale was published, Lydicks fecund and patriarchal sentiments, once so potent, were designed to evoke a wistful smile or hearty chuckle at old days, old ways. What had changed?

In the actual, not fictive, late 1780s, Susanna Hopkins Mason took pen in hand to describe a very different ideal through the lens of her life on a Pennsylvania farm:

Masons doggerel verse described a new mental and material world: a reasonably efficient and inviting domestic space, with books and with, no doubt, the teacups, teapots, teaspoons, sugar tongs, and tea tables that invited socializing with friends. The intellectual diversions of reading and sociability offered enticing options and shifted womens concerns, if not always their waking hours, from the daily drudgery of housework. Egalitarian ideals infused relationships: a loving husband and responsive father shared the joys of rearing carefully enumerated, beloved children, equally divided between girls and boys. And in an age when most women, if they lived through their childbearing years, might still bear seven, eight, or nine children, Mason counted four offspring. All thrive because frugal restraint allowed plenty for everyone. Even though a son and daughter would unfortunately die during a later epidemic, Susanna Mason was done with childbearing. She was not alone.