In any American bookstore, you’ll find abundant parenting literature that claims to define, through its advice, the shape, duration, and purpose of parenthood. These books have their antecedents in the parenting manuals and advice columns that flooded America in the early years of the nineteenth century, written by doctors, ministers, and middle-class women who claimed expertise. They argued that the rapid social changes of the early republic would lead to chaos in the absence of people of good character. Having the requisite good character allowed young people to marry well, socialize agreeably, form trustworthy business arrangements, and resist temptation in the dangerous world of Jacksonian capitalism. This parenting literature presented a new, intentional approach to childrearing that promised to facilitate safe, stable mobility for individuals and society, and assured parents–especially mothers–that with attention, care, and devotion, they could mold their children.
But Jane Minot Sedgwick was not a member of the rising middle class, anxious for her children to advance in the world. She wasn’t a farm wife facing the prospect of sending her son off to the city or her daughters off to the factory town without a supportive kin network. Thanks to an inheritance, she did not have to grapple with the difficult financial choices that other widows faced. She could–and did–choose to remain unmarried for the rest of her life. Yet Sedgwick’s journal reveals the ways in which antebellum parenting literature can obscure the struggles and goals of parenting that cut across class lines. Her journal is full of the anxiety, frustration, and grief of a woman traumatized by her husband’s reckless financial behavior, struggles with mental illness, and early death. It is dominated by the fear that she had failed her children in their crucial early years, and chronicles her attempts to right that wrong. Its usefulness as a source is not diminished by Sedgwick’s failure to write every day. Instead, in regularly taking stock of her children’s progress as the seasons changed, on holidays, and at her wedding anniversary, Sedgwick left behind a parenting journal that is both deeply and consistently reflective. Stretching from 1833 to 1853, well into the adult lives of her children, Sedgwick’s journal reminds us that this new intentional parenting could be a life-long process. Finally, its specific duration illuminates both the heady American faith in the perfectibility of the individual and the subsequent erosion of that faith, a central ideological shift in American thought manifested in the private anxieties of a widow raising four small children alone.