and pejorative label.^69 However, once a person reads the Puritan marriage manuals he
or she is almost certain to develop a different perception. These emphases can be
summarized as: the softening of the hierarchical understanding of marriage within a
patriarchal society, the recognition of the benefit of marriage beyond procreation, and
a greater celebration of intimacy and sex within marriage.
No one denies that the seventeenth-century landscape was highly patriarchal.
This was not a new development but a continuation of a practice that had existed for
centuries. However, within Puritanism there was a softening of the rigidity and
control that had marked previous generations. Robert Cleaver writing in 1592
declares:
A wise husband, and one that seeketh to live in quiet with his wife, must
observe these three rules. Often to admonish; Seldome to reprove; and never
to smite her.... The husband is also to understand, that as God created the
woman, not of the head, & so equall in authoritie with her husband; so also
hee created her not of Adams foote, that she should be troden downe and
despised, but he tooke her out of the ribbe, that shee might walke joyntly with
him, under the conduct and government of her head. 70
Thomas Gataker in a sermon preached almost forty years after Cleaver
continues the same imagery and expands it, “[s]he was made for man, & given to
man, not to be a play-fellow, or a bed-fellow, or a table-mate, onely with him (and yet
to be all these too) but to bee a yoke-fellow, a work-fellow, a fellow-labourer with
him, to be an assistant and an helper unto him, in the managing of such domesticall
(^69) Doriani, “Puritans, Sex, and Pleasure,” 125. cf. Verduin, “Our Cursed Natures,”
- 70
Cleaver, Godly Form of Householde Government, 201. William Gouge follows the
same principle and forbids the husband from beating his wife. Domesticall Duties,
394, 396. However, Whately maintains that under certain circumstances it may be necessary. Brides-Bush (1623), see esp. 107, 123, 125.