All Our Relations: Blood Ties and Emotional Bonds among the Early South Carolina Gentry

All Our Relations moves beyond the patriarchal household to investigate the complex, meaningful connections among siblings and kin in early America. Taking South Carolina as a case study, Lorri Glover challenges deeply held assumptions about family, gender, and cultural values in the eighteenth century. Brothers, sisters, and the extended family formed the foundation on which South Carolina gentry built their emotional and social worlds. Adopting a cooperative, interdependent attitude and paying little attention to gendered notions of power, siblings and kin served one another as surrogate parents, mentors, friends, confidants, and lifelong allies. Elite women and men 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 provides 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. All Our Relations challenges the historical understanding of what family meant and what families did in the past. The families Glover uncovers, often fragmented but fiercely loyal, seem at once starkly different from and surprisingly similar to our own.