fathers.”44 Early-nineteenth-century industrialization’s removal of fathers from the home may have given them a stronger relationship with their children, as their time at home became more cherished and important. Economic changes also worked to fathers’ direct advantage. Fathers were the sole breadwinners, a role oftentimes fulfilled outside of the home. Thus, they controlled the family’s economic resources.45 To this end, fathers frequently found that the one way they could exert control over their children was by controlling their access to education. Many children had to convince their fathers that pursuing certain educational activities would be beneficial and worth the resource allocation.46 Era of Reform: The Early Nineteenth Century The Second Great Awakening left an indelible mark on paternal authority structures in the United States. Evolving theologies of sin and salvation played a dramatic role in reshaping how Americans thought about fathers. By the late eighteenth century, American Enlightenment rationalism began to influence the church. The dawn of the Second Great Awakening unleashed this influence full force. Within this paradigm, American Christians began to rethink their views of children; children were “religiously reevaluated.”47 In contrast to the Puritan era, children were no longer considered “infant fiends” whose wills needed to be crushed, controlled, and directed by authoritative fathers.48 Instead, Protestants of all denominations began to question strictly-interpreted Calvinist theories of human depravity. Nathaniel William Taylor, a Congregationalist theologian at Yale, argued that there is a distinction between “a disposition or tendency to sin which is prior to all sin and a sinful disposition,” contending that sinfulness was a human choice, not a human reality from birth (italics Taylor’s).49 For Taylor, “not a human being does or can become thus 44 Frank F. Furstenburg Jr., “Industrialization and the American Family: A Look Backward,” American Sociological Review 31, no. 3 (June 1966): 326-37, accessed April 22, 2017, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2090821. 45 Johansen, 100. 46 Ibid., 103-104.
47 Griswold, 11.
48 Ibid.
49 Nathaniel William Taylor, “Concio ad Clerum: A Sermon Delivered in the chapel of Yale College, September 10, 1828,” in The American Intellectual Tradition: 1630-1865, 7th ed., ed. David A. Hollinger and Charles Capper (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 1 : 255.
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