Julia Bowes, "Every Man's Home a Castle: Parental Rights and the Makings of Modern Conservatism" (Princeton UP, 2026)

May 8, 2026

Dr. Julia Bowes, a gender historian who studies parental rights and public health, traces how nineteenth‑century fights over compulsory schooling, vaccination, and child labor coalesced into a national parental rights movement. She discusses how schools and vaccine mandates became flashpoints, how white paternal authority shaped the rhetoric, and the diverse coalitions that united around anti‑statist claims.

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INSIGHT

Parental Rights Rooted In Household Sovereignty

Parental rights history emerged from gender history and the doctrine of coverture that centered the male head of household as the political individual.
Julia Bowes traced gaps in scholarship about fathers' legal power and U.S. exceptionalism in parental rights, prompting the project.

INSIGHT

Blackstone Framing Shaped Early Parental Authority

Blackstone's 'empire of the father' framed fathers' legal rights over labor, education, and chastisement for legitimate white property-owning fathers.
Those rights coexisted with duties to educate and provide, and exclusions applied to poor and enslaved parents.

INSIGHT

Postwar State Power Fueled Compulsory Schooling

After the Civil War states expanded compulsory schooling and child-labor regulation as part of a broader nationalist drive to use state power to protect democracy.
Reformers linked education and child welfare to producing informed voters and national stability.

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“Parental rights” is a rallying cry for today’s American conservatives, signaling opposition to mandatory vaccination and “woke” public school curricula. In Every Man's Home a Castle: Parental Rights and the Makings of Modern Conservatism (Princeton UP, 2026), Dr. Julia Bowes traces the origins of the modern parental rights movement to the nineteenth century, when the introduction of compulsory schooling laws, child labor regulations, and vaccine requirements provoked a resistance rooted in the presumed right of white men to govern their homes. A wide-ranging coalition—including Irish Catholic immigrants in Illinois, Mormon enclaves in Utah, and Protestant clergy in Virginia—believed that the state had usurped the “natural rights” of parents and “invaded the home.”
Dr. Bowes shows how, by the turn of the century, those disparate voices had coalesced into national conservative movements. Anti-vaccinationists, alternative medical practitioners, and parents who opposed compulsory school medical exams joined forces to form the National League for Medical Freedom. Deciding a case brought by conservative Catholic lawyers, the Supreme Court declared parental rights a “fundamental liberty” protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. And the Sentinels of the Republic, a conservative citizen’s lobby, mobilized a campaign to defeat the proposed federal Child Labor Amendment, bringing together pro-family and free-market politics with far-reaching consequences.
Exploring the emergence of parental rights as an antistatist ideology through legal cases, legislative debates, and political movements, Dr. Bowes argues that the expansion of state power over children provoked such fierce opposition because the paternal rights of white men—considered the “rights-bearing” individuals of American democracy—were widely viewed as the mark and measure of their independence.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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