122
PARTISAN REVIEW
no way prevents their achieving happiness. The fact that children
had more duties toward their parents and society than they had
rights did not mean that love and affection were absent from familial
relationships. Nor does Ozment think that subordination of women
to their husbands necessarily made them unhappy. It is true that
women were denied power in the public world - what Ozment calls
the "external social and political issues ." But he argues, as have
many before him, that within the more private role of the housewife,
women had power and were treated well by their husbands . They
were not to be treated as servants or as slaves or as children. Domes–
tic discipline finally depended on the man of the house , but men
were to exercise this power with kindness and understanding. Accord–
ing to Ozment, there was no good reason why women should have
found the subservient position in itself degrading. It was not a bond–
age that stifled self-realization. The wife was not considered a simple
servant but a partner in the running of the household.
The curious feature of Ozment's defense of the Reformation
family is how much it reads like the defense which the Reformation
authors
themselves
put forward; Ozment the historian doubles as Oz–
ment the Reformation spokesman for the patriarchal family . He
thus does not (and cannot) adequately address objections which have
been fully developed only by modern "individualist" culture.
It
is one
thing to portray the defense of patriarchy in the sixteenth century ; it
is another thing to think this would be philosophically sufficient as a
twentieth-century defense of male superiority. Ozment writes as if
the arguments of modern feminism did not need to be seriously met.
His answers to the fundamental objection of modernity to the patri–
archal family- that its allocation of duties and debts, rights and
privileges, is unjust and irrational- are sometimes evasive, and
worse. At one point, he defends patriarchy against its modern op–
ponents by saying that judging "the past by egalitarian standards
that have yet to find a clear consensus even in the modern world is to
sow
disa~)pointment
wherever the historian turns." But with what
else but our own well-considered values should we judge the past,
the present , or the future? Someone else's values, or those of some
other time? Perhaps Ozment is suggesti-ng that we should not judge
at all.
If
so, then what of his own sympathetic account of patriarchy?
Does he think
he
is not judging? And it is surely wrong to think that
because a modern idea of justice has not gained everyone's assent ,
we should refrain from using it to judge the past , when the idea was
even less popular. On this account , our moral objections to the use
