All Our Relations Blood Ties and Emotional Bonds Among the Early South Carolina Gentry - Gender Relations in the American Experience

This study moves beyond the patriarchal household to investigate the complex, meaningful connections among siblings in early America. Taking South Carolina as a case study, Lorri Glover challenges deeply held assumptions about family, gender and cultural values in the 18th century. Siblings and kin formed the foundation on which South Carolina gentry built their emotional and social worlds. Adopting a co-operative, interdependent attitude and paying little attention to gendered notions of power, siblings and kin sered one another as surrogate parents, mentors, friends, confidants and life-long allies. Elite men and women simultaneously used those family connections to advance their interests at the expense of unrelated rivals.;In the course of charting the emotional and practical dimensions of these sibling bonds, Glover aims to provide new insights into the creation of class, the power of patriarchy, the subordination of women and the pervasiveness of deference in early America. Blood ties, she finds, affected courtship, marriage choices, approaches to child-rearing, economic strategies and business transactions. The book challenges the historical understanding of what family meant and what families did in the past.