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tionate side of their conjugal duties most seriously . I am less sure that
Ozment is right with respect to the affectionate treatment of children.
The demand for the maintenance of a cool and superior distance
from one's children is quite developed in Puritanism . Fear was en–
couraged. Stone is on much more secure ground here.
But whatever datings are right, Ozment still confuses the affec–
tionate and caring family with the family that is justly ordered. Mas–
ters may behave in a steady and kindly way to their slaves, and
employers can be equally affectionate to their employees - no matter
how unjust the relation between the two groups is . Subordinates can
also show great love and warmth toward those who rule them. The
existence of affection says nothing about the moral correctness of a
division of rights and duties or about the allocation of superior and
inferior positions, as feminists have repeatedly pointed out .
Ozment's more interesting error, however, is his belief that the
Reformation family is justly ordered because its private life has a
public purpose . The irrational allocation of power to fathers does not
really bother him because the fulfillment of their responsibilities
helps the family successfully serve communal needs. Children are
raised as they should be, and so become adults with a developed con–
science. In the contemporary United States, with a young profes–
sional generation so oriented toward its own happiness and so lacking
in social concern, one can easily sympathize with Ozment's prefer–
ence for a family life which would produce a different sort of adult,
but patriarchy is still unjust, even if the families in which fathers
ruled had a predominantly public purpose .
It
is worth noting, how–
ever, that modernity has not been able to successfully promote, on
the level of the public imagination, an idea offamily and married life
which is egalitarian and just in its internal structure and at the same
time devoted to the communal good.
The revisionism with respect to the humanity of family, mar–
riage, and the general conceptions of men and women undertaken
by historians of the sixteenth to the nineteenth century is by no
means uniform, but a distinctly conservative trend is clearly at work.
Beyond the historian's natural interest in challenging received beliefs
about the past, there is an unwillingness to see modernity as morally
advanced over earlier phrases of Western culture. For Auerbach, the
public myths of Victorian life nourished women more than we have
known . For Gay, the private life of Victorians, carefully kept from
the scrutiny of public culture, was richer and more humane than we
had thought. For other reasons, Rose, Pollock, and Ozment are
