gender in early modern Britain. She is particularly interested in the way family and social relationships inform one another. Harris has written about siblinghood, genealogical practices, childhood, and singleness. She teaches British and European history, introductory and advanced genealogy courses, English paleography, and women's studies. She currently serves as the coordinator of the Family History BA Program at BYU.
Harris applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Being Single in Georgian England: Families, Households, and the Unmarried, and reported the following:
From page 99:Learn more about Being Single in Georgian England at the Oxford University Press website.No sibling began householding at the time they married; all who managed households did so, at least initially, as a single person. Running a household as a single person or in conjunction with married kin could be complicated. Single sisters often lived with married kin, or each other, and often acted as housekeepers for brothers with varying degrees of harmony and success. . . . The marriages of Elizabeth, James, and William and the turmoil over Thomas’s marriage and the attendant household reshuffling signals that even a family so exceptionally friendly and affectionate as the Sharps recognized how power structures of household governance could be tricky. Ultimately, the Sharps not only successfully navigated those tricky waters, but they flourished, expanding their households and social networks to encompass the highest members of London society.Remarkably, page 99 touches on the key biographical and analytical foundations of Being Single in Georgian England. The Sharps were fourteen siblings, eight of whom survived to adulthood, born in the 1720s and 1730s. Raised in a prosperous household, related to various high-ranking clergymen, they enjoyed educational, emotional, and material abundance. All Sharps played at least one musical instrument, enjoyed concerts, good company, and humor. They also married later in life if they married at all. They used their abundance to craft a family life centered more on horizontal relationships than on the hierarchies of marriage and child-rearing. Their experience gives a unique insight into the ways unmarried people experienced and influenced Georgian home life. Most eighteenth-century people spent many of their adult years unmarried. Whether from not yet being married, never marrying, or being widowed, unmarried adults were present in most families. Their contributions are not always visible in contemporary records, but the Sharps’ rich archive illuminates the various ways unmarried and married kin managed households, provided for children, and prepared for the future.
Sharp households were never truly independent and were not axiomatically hierarchical. The Sharps laid the foundation for their extraordinary domestic felicity in the 1750s, when all but John were single, and when they first began establishing households and buying sailing vessels as conveyances for river music-making. In some ways the sailing vessels were the siblings’ first collective home. In the 1750s, while aboard their boats, the siblings established socializing patterns, which were echoed in the witty common letters they exchanged. Both sailing and the common letters were recreational, but they also required careful management of resources and, in the case of the sailing vessels, servants. Those management patterns transferred to their permanent households in the later 1750s and 1760s. Because the siblings were not married when they established households they acted as if they inhabited joint households instead households managed by a married couple with a dependent sibling residing there. The connections they shared—financial, social, and material—made a flexible and durable family structure that could respond to illness, loss, and death without collapsing or disintegrating. The Sharps who were unmarried and childless not only participated fully with their married kin but were also essential to how married family members constructed their domestic and social lives.
What’s missing in this excerpt is the importance of childhood to shaping family expectations and patterns in adulthood; the contours of aunting and uncling on their own terms and not as watered-down versions of parenting; the siblings’ involvement in philanthropy and social reform; and the ways marital status and gender shaped the Sharps approach to their legacy and genealogy.
--Marshal Zeringue