The Making of the Domestic Occasion: The History of Thanksgiving in the United States
Journal article by Elizabeth Pleck; Journal of Social History, Vol. 32, 1999
Journal Article Excerpt
The making of the domestic occasion: the history of Thanksgiving in the United States. by Elizabeth Pleck Four historians, Leigh Eric Schmidt, John Gillis, Penne Restad, and Stephen Nissenbaum, have recently published books about the history of Christmas and several other major holidays in nineteenth-century Europe and the United States. Their interpretations provide an organizing framework for understanding the evolution of another holiday, Thanksgiving, between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth century. My aim is to account for the rise of Thanksgiving as a "domestic occasion" among the antebellum middle class, the extent that poor and working-class families adopted the holiday by the early twentieth century, and the addition of new elements to the celebration by the 1930s. Schmidt, Gillis, Restad, and Nissenbaum traced the change in patterns of festivity between colonial days and the mid-nineteenth century. Communal celebration, often raucous, usually outdoors, which involved lower-class males demanding treats from the wealthy gave way gradually to private celebrations of the middle class, sedate but joyful. This historic change in the pattern of celebration I call the rise of the "domestic occasion."(1) By a domestic occasion, I mean a family gathering held in the home which paid homage to the ideal of the "affectionate family." Such a family was a privatized nuclear one, with a nurturant mother creating a proper home atmosphere, and providing children with a protected and supervised upbringing. Although the ideal of the affectionate family was a nuclear one, the domestic occasion was often a gathering of extended kin, a family homecoming. Sometimes families invited neighbors or strangers so that these non-family members would not feel lonely on a day of family gathering. The domestic occasion was a culturally dominant form, practiced at first mainly by the upper classes and middle classes, which spread throughout the society in the twentieth century. The four historians mentioned above regard the domestic occasion both as an expression of the middle-class ideology of the affectionate family and the result of it. This ideology divided the public and private into two separate spheres. The private sphere, that of the home, became "the empire of the woman," a quasi-sacred space over which the mother as homemaker presided.(2) Middle-class women, with or without the help of servants, organized and arranged the domestic occasion and found it an affirmation of their role in the home, despite occasional complaints about the burden of shopping and worries about indulging children.(3) John Gillis, Leigh Eric Schmidt, and Stephen Nissenbaum offer additional explanations for the rise of the domestic occasion. Gillis sees it as a "moment in time" or "special time" for the family. The industrial revolution, he argues, gave birth to clock time, industrial discipline, and the schedule. Domestic occasions were scheduled events of family gathering during an epoch when some relatives had moved away from home and the family breadwinner was spending fewer hours with his family during the week. In addition, both Leigh Eric Schmidt and Stephen Nissenbaum explore the commercial origins of the domestic occasion. Nissenbaum shows that the luxury gift was central to the rise of the domestic Christmas. He notes that merchants were advertising gift books, published once a year, as one of the first Christmas and New Year's presents by the 1820s.(4) Nissenbaum further argues that the urban upper class felt threatened by gang violence and unlicensed drunkenness during the Christmas season. They favored the homey, seemingly old-fashioned Christmas as a sober alternative to "hideous" cries from the street. Clement Moore's poem, "A Visit from St. Nicholas," popularly known as "The Night Before Christmas," written in 1822, described and helped further the ideal of a domesticated Christmas. Soon after Moore's poem was reprinted in newspapers, New York City replaced its relatively ineffective private watch with a professional police force. Thereafter the police arrested unruly masqueraders on Christmas, and the public came to regard drunken license on Christmas Eve as disreputable.(5) Nissenbaum admits that the rowdy way of celebrating Christmas never disappeared, but instead he believes it became stigmatized as crime, rather than as harmless festivity.The four authors share a social constructionist approach toward the history of the domestic occasion. They place it in the category of an "invented tradition," a phrase devised by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger. Hobsbawm and Ranger considered an invented tradition a ritual implying continuity with the past, even though that continuity is largely fictitious.(6) Hobsbawm and Ranger traced the history of public rituals, not private ones, although their concept is elastic enough to apply to both. They argued ... |
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