Parents of Poor Children was Patricia Crawford’s last work before her untimely death in 2009. It is difficult to review a book when the author is unable to comment and answer any criticism. Reading Crawford’s work, however, puts this concern to rest. Her excellent account of early modern parents rearing children while confronting poverty demonstrates the connections between class, gender, nation, empire, and family while simultaneously illuminating shared ideas of fatherhood that influenced the Poor Laws and their enforcement. Using a substantial and artful mix of secondary and primary sources, Crawford details the appalling set of choices placed before poor mothers and fathers. The bulk of her evidence comes from charitable organizations, court cases, and documents generated in compliance with various Poor Law regulations. She also touches on elite attitudes found in letters, sermons, and treatises.
Crawford has two key arguments: one centers on clarifying current interpretations of early modern families that have relied too heavily on the experience of financially and socially stable families, thereby allowing their views to color historical interpretation of the poor (114); a second argument focuses on what she terms “civic fatherhood”—in other words, the shared ideas of fatherhood that influenced how ecclesiastical and civil authorities viewed poor families and the men within them. For poor fathers, she argues, patriarchy was “janus-faced”—at once granting them access to ideas of adult masculinity and subjecting them to elite male civic authorities (16, 149).
Organized into five chapters—beginning with a chapter each on mothers and fathers of illegitimate children, and moving on to discussions of child rearing and concluding with a strong chapter criticizing the attitudes and limits of civic fatherhood toward poor families—Crawford draws attention to how elite and middling definitions of family colored every aspect of poor parents’ childbearing and child rearing. Adopting early modern labels that classified single mothers as bastard bearers and men as only “reputed” fathers, Crawford highlights how ideas of gender, class, and morality on the part of Poor Law authorities and charitable administrators affected how they approached poor families, local governance, and the distribution of poor relief.
Though she stated her interest was in what poor parents did, not necessarily how they felt, she does suggest that studying poor parents’ actions demonstrates that they were deeply “invested” in their offspring’s well-being (19–20, 161, 253). This investment, however, did not match middling and elite notions of parenting. In this way, elite attitudes to parenting and poverty created a system that harshly judged single mothers and rendered single fatherhood “a contradiction in terms and virtually impossible” but concurrently “created the specific legal and economic context that made mothering [and fathering] difficult” (41, 61, 73, 108). What emerges is a long story of ever-increasing state involvement in the lives of poor families. With the streamlining of Poor Law legislation at the end of Elizabeth’s reign, the parish assumed the role of seeking reputed fathers and maintenance from them—instead of waiting for mothers to seek redress. Then, over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, magistrates, justices, and administrators of charity hospitals, schools, and parish poor relief intruded deeper and deeper into poor families’ lives—establishing themselves as “civic fathers” better suited to govern the disorderly poor families.
It is these civic fathers who receive Crawford’s harshest criticism for their supposedly Christian notions of their own moral superiority (208–10, 220, 238). Crawford admits that between 1580 and 1800 little changed for those born into poverty—other than perhaps a disintegration of their position in the social fabric (192). Civic fatherhood, however, became clearly less flexible and more authoritarian and imperial over time. Reading Parents of Poor Children, it is not difficult to agree with Crawford’s assessment, although, while poor parents are portrayed as having a range of (unattractive) choices in their efforts to keep their children with them and cared for, “civic fathers” sometimes come across as stock villains—focused on misogynistic, bigoted, and arrogant control of everyone from their own wives and children to poor families and colonial subjects. No doubt misogyny, bigotry, and arrogance abounded, but Crawford does not linger on what, if any, other socially and culturally possible courses of actions existed. Her hint that by “the end of the eighteenth century, the public face of civic fatherhood could involve an element of compassion for pauper children” suggests that there remains areas of future research on shifting attitudes toward the poor and their children (230).
Even with that minor criticism, Crawford’s book affords an exceptional account of a type of parenting largely unexplored in previous scholarship. Her account of poor parents’ efforts to keep their families together despite overwhelming obstacles is a story that challenges many previous assumptions about early modern family life. Additionally, her analysis of civic patriarchy should influence how future scholars view the operations of gender, family, and the nation-state.
