The sociologist Andrew Cherlin makes this quite clear in his very readable 2009 book The Marriage-Go-Round. In the New England colonies, he notes, individual family members hardly expected time to themselves to pursue their own interests. There were too many children running around to allow anyone much peace and quiet (families in Plymouth averaged seven or eight kids each), and the architecture of the typical Puritan home conspired against solitary endeavors, with most activities concentrated in one main room. “Personal privacy,” he writes, “one of the taken-for-granted aspects of modern
...more
