The Strict Features of the Puritan Society

Can you envision a society where a child of twelve years can read and write better than a young adult of twenty-one years old? What about a society where a child sixteen or older is put to death for violating their parent’s rules? This society is so authoritarian on the upbringing of the children. This society educates the children to be very religious. “As another writer put it, “Children and Servants are … as Passengers are in a boat. Husband and Wife are as a pair of oars, to row them to their desired haven.”” (Hollitz) The Puritan society is a society where the parents teach their children the tenets of religion. School is to teach the children how to read and write. The father has the most authority and can overrule the mother.

The Puritan society had very strict characteristics needed to rear a child. In 1647, the Massachusetts General Court created a law to where reading must be educated in a school because “one chief project of that old deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures”. (Hollitz) The parents were to instill the children beliefs of religion. From primary source 8 on page 31, On January 13, 1696, the daughter, Betty Sewall, gave out an amazing cry because she was frightened she would go to Hell for her Sins. She believed her Sins were not pardoned by the Lord. The reading from the Sermon of Mr. Norton, “Ye shall seek me and shall die in your sins” was all the daughter could reminisce. (Hollitz) The primary source number 9, “The Well Ordered Family (1719)” by Benjamin Wadsworth has a few characteristic to describe the Puritan Society. He says children should not be left unaccompanied and that parents should govern their children at all time to restrain, reprove, and correct them. At all times, a child should obey their parents. It is to the responsibility of the parent to restrain their children from making sins. (Hollitz)

In a Puritan Society, they demand a good deal from a young child. They instructed young children to read and write and by doing, so the children composed diaries, journals, tracts, letters, histories, sermons, and notes on sermons. The children were not granted the privilege to expression emotions in portraits and were to clothe in an appropriate manner. (Hollitz) They would portray an age older and wealth by the attire and accessories in a portrait.