The Reign of the Elder Sister: Sibling Relations and Family Order in Antebellum America

A new ethic of sibling love and equality was trumpeted in children’s stories and advice literature consumed by middle-class Americans of the early national period.  Family tracts of the colonial era had rarely mentioned siblings, since the intra-generational equality of this relationship was of little use among those who used the unequal relationships between husbands and wives, parents and children, masters and servants as models for society.  While actual siblings loved and helped each other, this bond was not celebrated in patriarchal society.  But sibling love did fit well with the revolutionary ethic of equality, and American brothers and sisters fairly gushed with the newly prescribed sentiment.

By the antebellum era, however, moralists began to make more of gender and age differences in sibling relations in a way that might seem at odds with the ideal of equality.  Of course historians have long noted the contradictory tendencies of antebellum America; that wealth inequality grew along with political democracy, for example.  Since the family is always a crucible of the social order, sibling relations likely played an important counterbalancing role in the emerging American democracy.  The sibling bond was put to the service of maintaining age and gender order.  While the sibling story told by antebellum prescriptive literature and personal papers alike grew more hierarchical, however, it was not of a piece with traditional patriarchy.  For the nineteenth century was witness to the reign of the elder sister, at least in the northeast, a development that both restored family order and marked the advent of the modern gender division of labor in kin work.