Relationships: Now and Then :: Marriage Puritans Essays

Relationships: Now and Then Do we still live in the seventeenth century? It’s very interesting to look back at the differences and similarities in men’s and women’s relationships since then. My husband, Sean, and I were brought up very differently; he was only raised by his mother who provided everything for him food, shelter, and love whereas I had the more traditional family in being raised by both parents. My father was the provider, a construction worker who worked long hours five to six days a week, and my mother, a homemaker, tended the home doing the cooking, cleaning, and also caring for us children. Now that I’m older and have my own husband and children, I find myself using the traditional traits that I’ve seen and learned from my parents. Tending to my husband’s and children’s every need not only seems to be a normal feeling, but it’s a natural instinct for me. According to Edward S. Morgan in The Puritan Family: Religion and Domesti c Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England, â€Å"In each relationship God had ordained that one party be superior, the other inferior†¦.Wives were instructed that woman was made ultimately for God but immediately for man†¦.† In living in the twenty first century, relationships seem to be better now than they were in the seventeenth century. Men and women today are marrying for love and happiness, and also building their lives together as a team whereas the Puritans married because it was a law of God where the husband was in charge of his wife and being happy didn’t exist. Marriage in seventeenth century New England meant that duties were forced upon both husband and wife. It was the husband’s duty to support his wife and family, and the wife’s duty to care for her husband and tend to his home. Morgan states, â€Å"When [a woman] became wife, she gave up everything to her husband and devoted herself exclusively to managing his household.†¦ her duty was to ‘keep at home, educating her children, keeping and improving what is got by the industry of the man.’† Personally, I couldn’t see myself passing anything to my husband and after we got married I didn’t. While the little I did own continues to be mine, whatever we own now became ours whereas being a Puritan wife meant owning nothing and being owned.