Chapter 2 assignment:

Chapter 2
Read the entire chapter and answer the following questions.
Instructions:
1. Each detail is worth a point. For example, if a question is worth 6 points, you
must give 6
correct/exact/complete details from the chapter.
2. Answers must be ONLY from the chapters in the book and not online or other
sources. No points
will be given for answers that are not from the book.
3. Bullet mark your answers and write short simple answers. I will ask you to re-
submit your answers if
they are long and is not directly answering the questions.
4. "Bulleting" your answers still means that they have to be in full sentences. The
bullet points are for
you to keep track of the number of details to be included as each detail carries a
point.
5. Number your answers to correspond with the question number.
6. Do NOT retype the questions.
7. Each bullet point should have the detail that is the correct answer which is worth
one point for a total
of the points for that answer. Since these are open book assignments, it is very easy
for students to
reproduce what is in the chapter. Writing just the correct answers and to the point
will demonstrate to
you and me that you have understood the material well.
8. Upload a pdf file. No other format.
1. Who was a “feme sole”? Who was a “feme covert”? What rights did a “feme
sole” have that a “feme
covert” did not? What control did a “feme covert” have over real estate? What
control did she have
over personal property? (5 Points)
2. How was life different for women in New England compared to the
Chesapeake? Name three. (3
Points)
3. Who was Anne Hutchinson? Why was she banished her from the Massachusetts
Bay Colony? (3
Points)
4. Compare the work that European colonial women did (Chapter 2) with the work
that Native
American women did from Chapter 1? (5 Points)
5. How would you summarize the laws for women and men in the early colonial
period? (2 Points)
6. What was the justification for the different laws regarding “feme sole” and
“feme covert”? (3 Points)
7. Who was Margaret Brent? What remarkable thing did she do? What did you
learn about women's
economic and political rights from her action? (4 Points)

Chapter 2
40 CHAPTER TWO

WOMEN IN PUBLIC LIFE Women in Politics Women in War

Primary Source 2-4: Mary Rowlandson’s Captivity Narrative Brabbling Women Witches and

Witch Hunts

THINK MORE ABOUT IT READ MORE ABOUT IT KEY CONCEPTS

ady Deborah Moody, an English widow, arrived on the southwestern tip of present-day Long

Island, New York, in July 1643. The land was empty, momentarily unoccupied by Europeans or

Native Americans, but claimed by the Dutch. In 1645, this Dutch colony of New Netherland

granted Moody a patent to the lands she and some friends had settled upon. There Moody built

Gravesend, the only permanent colonial settlement planned and de-signed by a woman. The town

was built around a sixteen-acre square. Two

REMBRANDT’S YOUNG WOMAN AT AN OPEN HALF-DOOR Rembrandt’s portrait of a

Dutch woman leaning out of a “Dutch” door in 1645 could very well resemble Lady Deborah

Moody, given the fashionable attire and necklace worn by his subject. Lady Moody, as was true

for many colonial women, no doubt tried to maintain as many of her home customs as possible,

including her dress.

Women Colonists in Seventeenth-Century English America 41

roads bisected the square, dividing it into four sections, with ten house lots on each. A one-acre

commons anchored each section, and hundred-acre farms known as boweries radiated out in

triangular form from the center of the village, for all the world like the spokes of a bicycle wheel.

Moody was born in London in 1586. Her husband, Sir Henry Moody, died when she was only

thirty-three. Some twenty years later, she emigrated to the English colony of Massachusetts Bay

after converting to Anabaptism, a Protestant religious sect that opposed the baptism of infants,

then the custom in most Chris-tian sects. Massachusetts Bay Colony, which claimed all of the

lands known today as New England, tolerated very little difference of opinion in religious

matters. Moody’s beliefs conflicted with those of the Puritans in charge of Massachusetts Bay,

and they regarded her, according to Deputy Governor John Endecott, as “a dangerous woman.”

As did others, Moody left Massachusetts Bay to find a more hospitable home elsewhere in the

New World. The director-general of New Amsterdam, William Kieft, allowed Moody to settle

and organize Gravesend. Less concerned than the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay with creating a

religiously monolithic colony, the Dutch allowed Gravesend’s settlers to worship as they pleased

within their homes, although public worship in the colony continued to be that of the Dutch

Reformed Church, the official church of New Netherland. Dutch tolerance of religious dissenters

was one reason why Deborah Moody was able to organize Gravesend. Another reason was
because she enjoyed more rights as a woman under Dutch law than she did under English law.

Dutch law considered women partners with their husbands, rather than dependents. They were

allowed to enter contracts as legal individuals even if married. They could own businesses and

property, buy and sell goods and land, borrow money and make it. As surviving spouses, Dutch

widows inherited half of their husbands’ property outright and could administer the rest on behalf

of any other heirs. Dutch women active in business thus had long-standing legal rights to

property. However, those same rights, as well as women’s economic activities, were sharply

curtailed when the Dutch lost the colony of New Netherland to the English. The English brought

to their new colony laws, customs, and traditions that affected the colonists’ daily lives,

especially women’s lives. British law denied married women the freedom of action that Dutch

colonial women had. By the time the English took power, Moody had passed from the scene but

Margaret Harden Broeck, used to conducting business as a she-merchant since her arrival in

North America (see Chapter 1), watched the decline in the number of women actively involved

in commerce. In 1655, New Netherland had 134 women working as independent traders. By

1700, after the English had been in control for a generation, the records listed no women as

independent traders. No doubt many women still worked in the trading economy of the colonies,

as well as in the transatlantic trade the Dutch were famous for. Until her death in 1691, for

instance, Harden Broeck still actively supervised a fleet of vessels, trading in wheat, fur, and

even Native American wampum (oyster-shell beads used as money). As a woman colonist under

English law, however, her daughter Cath-ermine could not represent herself and protect her

business interests in a court of law, having to rely instead upon her husband to do so. English

laws regarding married women’s rights limited their abilities to act as entrepreneurs, and affected

all women colonists, regardless of their nationality.

42 CHAPTER TWO

Differences in women’s legal status and their abilities to participate in the colonial economy

reflected the control European powers sought to exercise over American spaces. All Europeans

brought to their colonies their religious tradi-tions, laws, and customs, affecting colonists’ daily

lives. The English were not the only colonists in North America in the seventeenth century, but

the even-tual success of the English colonies ensured the eventual dominance of English legal,

social, and economic systems. British colonists who settled the vast region along the Atlantic

seaboard carried their common cultural assumptions with them. These assumptions were affected

by both environment and demography, and two distinctive regional cultures emerged in English

America: one in the Chesapeake Bay area and one in New England. The rise of the tobacco econ-

omy in the Chesapeake region created a huge demand for labor, filled first by indentured

servants from England, then by African slaves. As a southern slave society developed, with

increasingly rigid laws to define and control slaves, the Chesapeake’s high mortality rates and

overwhelmingly male population had profound implications for white women’s lives in the

region as well. In New England, by contrast, the religious practices of Puritans, a remarkably

healthy climate, and the immigration into the region of entire families and few slaves resulted in

a different kind of English society there. While women colonists appear in historical records in

unusual circumstances such as in times of war or when behaving in ways society considers

inappropriate, for most colonial women, life within the household would continue to shape their

everyday lives.

CULTURAL TRANSPLANTS

Over the course of the seventeenth century, the English came to dominate the eastern edge of

North America with the exception of Spanish Florida. Other European powers never reached the
numerical force that the English did, even though they maintained colonies in North America.

Some colo-nies were made up almost entirely of soldiers manning forts, as was the case for the

Spanish in Florida and the Swedes in short-lived New Sweden, later called Delaware. The

French colonies in the New World stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes and the

Mississippi River Valley (including much of present-day Canada), but were populated almost

entirely by men—trappers, traders, and Jesuit priests—with a few Ursuline nuns also serving as

missionaries. French attempts to increase the number of settlers met with little success. New

families were created as marriages took place between Native women and French traders, with

important consequences for Native groups (see Chapter 3). The French government, however,

refused to recognize such marriages because they were not per-formed by the Roman Catholic

Church. To strengthen the colony, King Louis XIV (1643–1715) sent marriageable young

Frenchwomen, known as les filles du roi, or “the King’s Daughters,” to the New World to marry

French colonists. From 1663 to 1673, nearly 1,000 young women arrived in New France,

courtesy of the royal government. They received dowries, then grants for marrying and having

children. Eventually, settlers produced

Women Colonists in Seventeenth-Century English America 43

enough children so that New France became a series of small settlements rather than just a string

of trading outposts, but eventually royal attention to New France waned and by the end of the

seventeenth century only about 14,000 French citizens lived in New France. During that same

period, English immigration grew rapidly. By 1700, there were 250,000 English colonists in

North America. The English often transported whole families to their colonies and seldom

married Native Americans, preferring to wed other English colonists. They imported as well

common assumptions about the nature of society and the proper, God-given roles of women and
men. The numerical superiority of English settlers and the transplantation of their culture and

laws meant English traditions would become prevalent in what would someday become the

United States.

Western Christianity

Religious understandings about the proper role of women greatly affected the laws that were

transported to the colonies, and the degree to which those laws were modified by the

circumstances in which colonists found themselves. Many writers and preachers who explained

Catholic and Protestant theology, including Anglicanism (the official church of England and its

colonies) and Puritanism (the church of New England), emphasized that the original sin of Eve

made all women untrustworthy. Eve’s sin was to disobey God by enticing Adam to eat from the

Tree of Knowledge. God banished the couple from the Garden of Eden as punishment. As a

result of Eve’s disobedience, most Christians believed that woman’s proper place was within the

household, under the authority of the husband. Theologians also cited the teachings of the early

Christian writer Paul, who wrote in the New Testament that “women should keep silence in the

churches.” “Keeping silence” meant that women should neither teach, nor hold any authority

over men. In 1645, Governor John Winthrop of Massachusetts Bay Colony made note

approvingly of this patriarchal model, writing that “A true wife accounts her subjection [as] her

honor and freedom, and would not think her condition safe and free, but in subjection to her

husband’s authority.” Linking the governing of one’s family with religious beliefs as well as with

the civil government—the state—defined the early English settlements, as it did life in England.

Throughout the col-onies, the notion that civil government should be separate from the church

was foreign to most colonists. Many colonists thought God had led them to the New World, and

that the way to maintain His blessings on the venture was to be sure they did not turn their backs
on His rulings once they had arrived. Those rulings, defined by Western Christianity, held that

the patri-archy was the God-given plan for ruling both family and state. Religion and politics, a

source of unrest in the Old World, mixed more easily in the colonies. Virginia required heads of

households in the colony to pay taxes to support the state church, the Church of England, but al-

lowed dissenters to reside in the colony. Maryland, founded in 1632, allowed colonists to

practice Catholicism. After that colony passed the Toleration Act of 1649, followers of other

Christian sects could practice their faith there, as long as the practitioners agreed on the validity

of the Trinity

ALBRECHT DÜRER, ADAM AND EVE The biblical story of Adam and Eve informed much of

Western Christianity’s interpretation of women’s roles in society and their relationship to men.

This 1507 painting by Albrecht Dürer portrays Eve with the apple and the serpent, next to the

Adam she is about to tempt.

(the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit of Christianity). Pennsylvania, founded in 1681 by William

Penn, served as a safe haven that permitted members of all faiths to practice their religion

without fear of religious or political persecution. Even Quakers, a dissenting Protestant group

often persecuted in other colonies as well as in England, were safe in Pennsylvania, as were

Quaker women who could even be religious leaders.

Religiously minded colonial political leaders drew from church ideals to craft laws and define

acceptable behavior for the governed. The belief that women should be subject to their husbands

combined the ideas found in the Bible’s book of Ephesians, that women are to be subject to their

husbands as their husbands are subject to the church, with the more secular notion that the family

was a “little commonwealth,” where the leader ruled to ben-efit all those who were dependent

upon him. The “familie is a little Church, and a little commonwealth . . . a schoole wherein the
first principles and grounds of government and subjection are learned,” wrote English clergyman

William Gouge in 1622 in his work Of Domesticall DuWomen Colonists in Seventeenth-Century

English America 45

unit of English society. It included wives, children, servants, apprentices, and other dependents,

all of whom relied on the head of their household for both guidance and sustenance. An

Englishman had authority over, as well as re-sponsibility for, all within that household. Women

within the household, he wrote, must be subordinate to their husbands. “She may do nothing

against God’s will, but many things she must do against her own will if her husband require her.”

English Law

English civil law also defined acceptable behavior in the colonies, as well as defining political

power in government. In England, men of property controlled government. Property ownership

was the key to achieving po-litical power, since people who owned property were believed to

have a vested interest in ruling a society properly; that is, they would rule for the benefit of those

with and without property. In addition, voting rights were limited by one’s religion (voters were

Protestant and members of the state church) and one’s legal status (freemen could vote; servants

and slaves could not). Only a very few men in England could vote or hold office. In the new

colonies, these restrictions continued to define the franchise. One of the earliest acts toward

governing the colonists took place even before the Pilgrims, some of the earliest English

colonists, disembarked in 1620. Onboard their ship, the Mayfl ower, the men of the colony

signed Mayflower Compact, agreeing to obey the laws that the civil body of the Plymouth

Colony, their New England settlement, would devise. No women signed the compact. Indeed, no

women were allowed to vote or participate in politics in either seventeenth-century England or in

its colonies, since women were not thought intelligent enough or moral enough to do so, even if
they were property owners, Protestant, and free. Self-government was limited to men, who then

governed the women in their lives for their own good. Any voting that men did supposedly

benefited women, as men both represented and protected the interests of their dependents in their

society. In Plymouth Colony, government was at first limited to church mem-bers, so-called

saints, as opposed to “strangers,” meaning members of the colony who did not belong to the

church. In Massachusetts Bay Colony, founded ten years later, only men who were shareholders

in the company (who also had to be church members) could vote at first. Eventually, the

franchise was extended to all men who were neither slaves nor indentured servants. These so-

called freemen could vote for the governor and the rul-ing council. In Virginia Colony, voting

was also restricted. There, beginning in 1619, only elite men who were both free and property

owners could vote for their “burgesses,” as the representatives to the colonial government were

called. In the colony of Maryland, freemen quickly formed a two-house legislature to govern the

colony. As other colonies formed, self-government continued to exclude certain individuals. All

women—single, married, property owners or not—were unable to vote. Indentured servants also

had no right to participate in politics until after they were freed. Once slavery was made lifelong

and inheritable, slaves had no hope of participating ties . 46 CHAPTER TWO

in the formal political system. In these ways, the English colonies reflected the same limitations

on voting that the mother country had. Although the legal system did not transfer wholesale

across the

Atlantic, transplanted English laws served as the foundation for colonial laws. Each colony

modified traditional English laws to fit their circum-stances, imposing standards of acceptable

behavior and greatly affecting women’s lives in the new colonies. Substantive law found in the

Mayflower Compact and in colonial charters, organized and governed the various colonies,
defining colonists’ rights and duties. Statute law spelled out leg-islation and regulations in

legislative acts and, eventually, law books. Unwritten, common law, based on custom, tradition,

and legal precedent, was accepted by the courts because its evidence was deemed apparent to all.

A common-law marriage, for instance, was one where all in the com-munity acknowledged a

couple as married because all in the community could see a couple acting as if they were

married. Another kind of law, and the one most useful to colonial women, was equity law. Equity

law, practiced in chancery courts, supplemented or overrode other laws to protect constitutional

rights and enforce duties. Used primarily by elite women who had the most access to any courts,

equity laws could make the interpretation of statute law or common law more fair. For example,

ordinarily under English law a woman’s property became her husband’s at marriage. A married

woman could use equity law to protect her prop-erty and let her keep control of it after the

marriage took place. English laws were gendered, which meant that laws differed in the way they

treated men and women. They also differed in the way they treated single women and married

women. These differences meant that women were defined legally in different ways. Single adult

women were defined as feme sole, a term meaning “woman alone” or “single woman.” Single

women had many of the same legal rights as men. They could participate in the economy, for

example, by entering contracts, suing in court, owning prop-erty, and running businesses. They

had no political rights to speak of, but neither did most men in the seventeenth century. The

majority of women colonists married, and once married, their legal status became feme covert .

This meant that a wife was under her hus-band’s protection and authority. Her legal identity was

“covered” by her husband’s. Under this English law referred to as coverture, wives ceased to

exist as separate legal individuals. They underwent what was termed a civil death at marriage.

Coverture was based on Christian interpretations of mar-riage. Under coverture, the “two
become one,” a reference to the book of Genesis and its description of marriage. The “one” that

the two became was the husband, and the wife’s civil rights—particularly her property rights—

were defined by her husband’s status, severely limiting her former freedom to act as a legal

individual. In practical terms, coverture meant that women had little or no control

over “real” property, which was real estate, both land and buildings, and, in some colonies,

slaves. If a woman did own real property, her husband could control it, administer it, improve it

by building upon it—or not—and do to it pretty much as he wished. He could, however, sell land

that she Women Colonists in Seventeenth-Century English America 47

owned only if she agreed. As far as a woman’s personal property was con-cerned, under the law

of coverture she lost the legal ability to own personal items when she married. Once a woman

married, she no longer owned her clothing, her bedding, her jewelry, her books, her pots and

pans, and, in some colonies, her slaves. The ownership of her personal property passed to her

husband and he could do with it as he would, including sell it, dis-pose of it, or use it as

collateral for a debt. The last meant a woman might find herself evicted from her home and left

without a bed to sleep in or pot to cook in if her husband’s loan was called to be repaid and he

had insufficient funds to do so. Once married, a woman also lost the legal rights she had enjoyed

as a

feme sole . She could no longer sue or be sued or make a contract, not even a will that disposed

of her property without her husband’s consent. She could not act as a legal individual in her own

right. Given the precarious-ness of colonial life, this lack of power for women could be quite

trouble-some, as some colonial authorities came to recognize. If a husband traveled on business,

was captured by Indians, or deserted his wife, for instance, a woman could not run the family

business because she was not a legal in-dividual. English towns in the medieval era had similar
issues and devised a legal device called feme sole trader, which allowed married women to act as

if they were single for purposes of business. English colonists trans-planted and used the same

law, reflecting the reality of women having to survive in the colonies when the men in their lives

were gone or otherwise indisposed. It was often used by women who had been deserted by their

husbands. Since divorce by desertion was the most common form of di-vorce in colonial

America, the ability of women left alone to carry on was critical. Feme sole trader status

provided women with opportunities to take care of themselves. Women who were married also

enjoyed some legal protections de-signed in part to provide for them after the death of their

mates. A married woman had dower rights —specific rights to some of her husband’s property

simply because she was married to him. Even if she had not contributed financially at the

beginning of the marriage, dower rights acknowledged a woman’s economic contributions to the

household over the course of a marriage. A married woman received a set amount (usually one-

third) of a “life interest” in all the real property her husband owned at his death. That meant she

could use that property, called her thirds, during her wid-owhood. If the property was a farm, for

instance, she could not dispose of it or sell it, but she could live there, take care of the children

who would inherit it, stay on it even if the heirs wanted her to leave, harvest one-third of the

crops produced on it and sell them to support herself, and spend one-third of the interest of her

husband’s investments if she needed cash. Life interests usually lasted as long as widows did not

remarry. In some English colonies, dower rights also included provisions to take care of a wife if

a husband died without leaving a will. In such cases or when a husband left property to someone

other than his wife and did not provide for her in his will, most colonies allowed a widow some

support for herself despite any provisions in the will to the contrary. Decisions in 48 CHAPTER

TWO
these cases were sometimes made by chancery courts using equity law—those laws that made

“fairness” possible. What was probably more impor-tant than fairness for the community leaders,

however, was preventing widows from having to rely on the local government for poor relief.

The care of destitute widows (and orphans) often fell on the towns or counties in which they

lived. English Poor Laws, brought to the American colonies, called for taxes to supply the poor

with the necessities of life. These laws also could require towns to hire out poor widows or

women deserted by their husbands and left without means so they could earn their keep. Towns

might even pay a family to take someone in if the destitute individual could not work for her

keep, an expensive proposition. Thus, laws preserving some property for widows benefited the

town as a whole. Beyond the institution of a widow’s thirds, inheritance laws were gen-dered in

other ways. In some colonies, under the practice of primogeniture, the firstborn son inherited

everything unless the father made a will declar-ing otherwise. In other colonies, sons

automatically inherited twice as much as daughters did if the property owner died without a will.

Property own-ership was so fraught with peril for women at marriage that some elite women

used premarital contracts to avoid the limits on property ownership that they faced when they

married. These contracts were for the well-to-do, however, not for the common folks. Wealthy

elite fathers would use them to try to preserve their daughters’ property for grandchildren. By

giving a daughter control of her own property, family holdings might be protected from wastrel

husbands.

The English did not transfer laws dealing with government and prop-erty rights wholesale to

America, but modified some and wrote others to meet the circumstances in particular colonies.

What students of history must keep in mind, however, is that the laws of the land were not

always enforced. A frontier community more than 3,000 miles away from England, beset by
conflict with Native people and possessed of a tiny population struggling to survive, could not

hope to put every law into practice. Nevertheless, the ideas expressed in those laws had lasting

power in the American colonies, establishing an underlying framework that undergirded

women’s legal status in all the colonies.

REGIONAL VARIATIONS

English colonial settlements in the seventeenth century clustered along the eastern seaboard, with

easy access to the Atlantic. From these areas ships could resupply settlers with provisions and

settlers could eventually export raw materials to England, then import England’s finished goods

as part of the great trade system known as mercantilism. Under mercantilism, colonies were

regarded as both sources for raw materials and markets for finished goods, existing to increase

the wealth of the colonizing nation. While English colonies had much in common, there was

considerable variation early in the century between the two regions first settled. The firstcolonies

England established in North America were founded primarily for profit by joint-stock

companies, chartered by the monarch. Stockholders in the companies hoped for profits from gold

and other precious minerals, along with trade items from the Indians and raw materials harvested

from American forests, such as lumber for ship masts. The English were expe-rienced in settling

“plantations” as their earliest attempts were called, named the same as English plantations in

Ireland after that country had been forcibly conquered under Elizabeth I. The so-called wild Irish

the English had subdued in Ireland in the sixteenth century had a counterpart in the so-called

wild Indians of America. The English mindset that viewed the Native Americans, like the Irish,

as little more than beasts to be con-quered would guide their policies toward the Native men and

women of the New World throughout their colonies.

The Chesapeake
The earliest settlement at Jamestown, in the Virginia Colony, began in a region hostile to survival

—swampy land, brackish water, and an organized military alliance of Native Americans. Despite

attempts by Pocahontas to help the settlers keep the peace with the Powhatan Confederacy (see

Chapter 1), by 1622 the Virginia Colony was under attack by Indians de-termined to rid their

shore of the invaders. This attack failed, as did another in 1644, and the English foothold in the

region known as the Chesapeake (which included the colonies of Virginia and Maryland)

survived. The first company of adventurers who arrived in the colony in 1607 numbered 108. All

were men. Two women arrived the next year and several more in 1609, including one

Temperance Flowerdew, who eventually mar-ried the colony’s governor, George Yeardley.

Flowerdew, unlike many others, survived the early years in the colony. Most of her

acquaintances in Virginia died of deprivation during the horrible winter of 1609 to 1610, known

as the Starving Time. Powhatan, whose own people faced starvation in the midst of a terrible

drought, refused to supply the colonists with any of the corn his group had stored for the winter.

Although the colonists had some food in reserve, it was stored at Point Comfort, a dangerous

journey away from the protective fort. Women and children colonists could not safely make the

trip, and the colonists were forced to stay within the fort during the harsh winter. Virginia had

500 colonists that fall; fewer than 100 were alive at the end of the winter. Surviving colonists

told stories of eat-ing all their animals, including cats and dogs, then vermin, then shoe leather.

At least one man was executed after having killed and allegedly eaten his wife (see Primary

Source 2-1). Conditions were so bad that the survivors planned to abandon the colony. Their

plans changed in the spring of 1610 when new supply ships carrying 150 new colonists, again

almost all men, arrived.

Determined to prevent another such calamity, new laws were passed to teach the new arrivals the
importance of leaving the Indians alone to pre-vent retaliatory attacks, husbanding scarce

resources to prevent starvation, and keeping the fort clean to prevent disease. Male colonists

were forbidden

• GEORGE PERCY’S A TREWE RELACYON OF THE PROCEEDINGS AND

OCCURENTES OF MOMENT . . . IN VIRGINIA

George Percy, youngest son ofthe ninth Earl of Northumberland who would replace John

Smith as president of the colony in 1610,

wrote another version of Virginia Colony’s troubles. His work A Trewe Relacyon of the

Proceedings and Occurentes of

to “ravish or force any woma[n], maid or Indian, or other,” a crime now punishable by

death, and no one—“man or woman”—was allowed to run away from the colony and

join the Indians. No one was allowed to steal from a garden or kill livestock for food

without permission from the coun-cil. A laundress employed to wash the “foule linnen”

of another was not to trade it for poorer quality linen. If she did, she would be whipped

and “lie in prison” until she made restitution. Coercing colonists with such laws was

necessary, argues historian Kathleen Brown, since the colony had so few married English

women to provide sexual partners for the English colo-nists, to plan for food distribution

and consumption, and to perform other necessary domestic tasks. In 1614, the colony

entered a new stage of development when John

Rolfe, husband of Pocahontas, successfully grew a strain of tobacco that thrived in

Virginia and could be marketed to England. Tobacco, usually smoked in pipes or used as

medicine in the form of snuff, or powdered tobacco, was in great demand throughout

Europe. By concentrating on the production and sale of this crop, Virginia moved from a
precariously settled backwater to a profitable colony that required permanent, long-term

settle-ment that needed even more men and women as workers and servants.

Servants and the Tobacco Economy

Tobacco, long a staple for religious and medicinal purposes among Native Americans,

became known in Europe when European sailors returned with samples from the New

World in the sixteenth century. By the end of the century, the palliative powers of the

plant were promoted in literature such as Joyfull Newes out of the Newe Founde Worlde:

Of the Tabaco and of His Greate Vertues by Nicolas Monardes, a Spanish physician who

claimed tobacco would cure thirty-six ailments. Despite disagreement from opponents,

in-cluding the English king James I who wrote A Counterblaste to Tobacco in 1604 to

dissuade his subjects from the demon weed, tobacco proved popu-lar, addictive, and

increasingly expensive, as the Spanish sought to control its production and distribution.

Moment . . . in Virginia (1625) relates the disappearance of one anonymous woman

colonist. “And now famin beginneinge to Looke gastely and pale in every face, thatt

notheinge was Spared to mainteyne Lyfe and to doe those things w[hi]ch seame

incredible, as to digge upp deade corpes outt of graves and to eate them. And some have

Licked upp the Bloode w[hi]ch hathe fallen from their weake fellowes. And amongste the

reste this

was most Lamentable That one of our

Colony murdered his wife Ripped the childe out of her womb and threw it into the River

and after chopped the Mother in pieces and salted her for his food. The same not being

discovered before he had eaten Part thereof for the w[hi]ch Crewell and unhumane factt I

adjudged him to be executed. . . .”

Source: From Virginia: Four Personal Narratives (New York: Arno Press, 1972), 267.

Spanish tobacco from its colonies in the New World was pleasantly

fragrant, according to its devotees, and controlled by a Spanish monopoly. In contrast,

Virginia-grown tobacco was harsh, and Europeans would not smoke it. Colonist John

Rolfe began to experiment with Caribbean tobacco seeds, the same kind the Spanish tried

to keep exclusively to themselves, under penalty of death, and grew his first successful

crop in 1612. By 1616, he had developed an English version of tobacco that compared

favorably to the Spanish product. He had married Pocahontas in 1614, no doubt having

learned much from her about how to cultivate the tobacco plants that the Powhatan grew

so successfully. Rolfe and Pocahontas traveled with their son to England to discuss the

successful crop with British officials. Despite the king’s dislike of the noxious weed, the

market craved it, the taxes it brought to the treasury were substantial, and the Chesapeake

colo-nies had finally discovered a money-making enterprise that ensured their

continuation. By 1617, the colonies exported 20,000 pounds of tobacco; by 1629, over

750 tons left America for England. Tobacco cultivation was labor-intensive; women and

men both took part.

Tiny seeds were planted in seedbeds, then thinned, then transplanted—a four-month

process. When the plants were three or four feet high, they were trimmed and “topped” to

limit the number of leaves they produced, ensuring quality. They had to be inspected

weekly to remove side shoots called suckers, and daily to remove pests that could destroy

the entire crop. Harvesting was done by the individual plant, since all ripened at different

times. Leaves were individually hung to dry in tobacco barns, then sorted, twisted into

ropes, rolled into balls, and placed in casks for shipment. Planting started in Janu-ary; the
crop was usually harvested in August or September. Because it was so lucrative and

successful, the tobacco crop determined the way of life in the Chesapeake. It produced a

land-hungry society be-cause it grew best in previously uncultivated soil, stripping the

nutrients from the soil as it grew. Demand for land rekindled conflict with the Native

Americans in the region, and led to the uprisings in 1622 and 1644. It also demanded

massive amounts of unskilled labor, which meant indentured servants and slaves were

imported by the Virginia Company and, after the

SLAVES AND THE TOBACCO INDUSTRY In this engraving, an African slave woman

hangs the leaves to dry with her child (right), while another slave strips the leaf. The man

in the center rolls the leaves together, while the man on the left winds the rolled leaves to

prepare them into a tobacco rope for shipping. The ropes of tobacco were packed tightly

into casks for export.

company lost its charter and the colony became a royal colony in 1624, by the Crown.

Many of the emigrants to Virginia and the Chesapeake were indentured

servants, men and women who signed a document called an indenture that promised their

labor for four to seven years in return for an employer paying for their passage across the

Atlantic. England’s high unemployment rate, burgeoning population, and food shortages

in the sixteenth century had driven many into poverty. By the seventeenth century,

American colo-nies were seen as one way out of that desperate poverty, and many emi-

grants were among the truly desperate. Colonist Jane Wenchman, for instance, was

picked up by English authorities and charged with vagrancy, or being homeless. They

sent her to America as a servant, a sentence that probably kept her from starving in

England. Other women were forced into servitude when their husbands or parents died,
or the businesses they worked for closed. Of all the people emigrating to the Chesapeake

area over the course of the seventeenth century, 75 to 80 percent came as in-dentured

servants, contracting with employers to work for a fixed number of years in exchange for

the employer paying their fare. Women who emigrated as indentured servants were

prevented by law from marrying or becoming pregnant until their indenture was done. If

servants violated the terms of their indenture, they could have their terms of service

extended as punishment. Becoming pregnant was the most com-mon violation for

women. About 20 percent of the indentures contracted in the colony of Maryland, for

example, were extended because the servant became pregnant. Some of these pregnancies

resulted from forced sexual relations. Women in isolated colonial settlements found it

particularly dif-ficult to resist a determined master. Trying to prevent rapes, colonies

passed laws that penalized a master who impregnated his indentured servant. The

pregnant woman’s extra term of service was then sold to a different master, so that her

extra labor would not benefit the man who had sexually ex-ploited her. Colonial

governments also tried to identify the fathers of chil-dren born to indentured servants to

force them to support the child. If their fathers could not be determined, children were

apprenticed by local governments until they reached adulthood. Indentured servants who

finished their terms of service were released at the end of their years of service. Their

employers furnished them with “freedom dues,” which included clothes, sometimes a few

acres of land, tools and a ration of corn to tide them over until they could find work for

themselves. They also gained the right to marry. For many women emi-grants, however,

living conditions in the Chesapeake were so harsh that they died even before they

finished their indentures, and their ability to marry and start their own families was sorely
limited.

Slavery

While indentured servants often came to America under duress, they could look forward

to the day when they would be freed from their obligations. Other women coming to the

Chesapeake region in the early years of the seventeenth century did not have the same

option. African women arrived in Virginia in 1619, when three African women and

seventeen African men arrived on a Dutch ship that had taken them from a Portuguese

slave ship. The women and men were traded to local planters in exchange for supplies.

These Africans may have been regarded as indentured servants—that is, able to work off

their service and become free over time. England did not yet have African slavery (and

would not charter a royal slave trading com-pany until 1672), but the French, the

Spanish, and especially the Dutch traded in slaves, competing with one another to supply

workers for the sugar, coffee, and tobacco plantations located in the islands of the

Caribbean and the South Atlantic. Since these plantations primarily needed strong male

laborers, the vast majority of slaves sent to the islands were men. There were, however,

women forced into slavery as well—Africans cap-tured by slave traders and brought to

American colonies. Over the course of the seventeenth century, slaves became a critical

source of labor in the Chesapeake because of the labor required for the tobacco crop.

Slavery as a lifelong status, rather than a temporary condition for a set number of years,

was legally established in the 1640s and became an inheritable status soon thereafter. The

first evidence of that change came in 1649, when a Maryland man left three slaves and

“all their issue [chil-dren] both male and Female” to his heirs. In 1652 in Virginia, a

young African girl was sold, and the bill of sale included the phrase that the sale of her
self included “her issue and produce during her . . . Life tyme. And their successors

forever.” This kind of provision meant that children born to slaves were to be slaves

themselves, and that slaves were “chattel,” or personal property. Later court cases

continued to define children of slave mothers as slaves, a legal view that helped maintain

slavery in the English colonies. Laws that required fathers to support their illegitimate

children, no matter who their mother, were ignored in favor of laws that ensured

slaveowners would not be held accountable for impregnating slave women. Any children

born to slave mothers who had been raped because they were slaves were the property of

the owner. They were seldom acknowledged as his kin. Because slaveowners did not

suffer any financial and few social repercussions, some owners sexually exploited slave

women that they owned, often seeking to increase their supply of workers as the labor-

intensive agriculture in the region continued to grow. In the Chesapeake, women servants

and women slaves all worked in the

fields, laboring from sunup to sundown, first light until it was too dark to see, working

for fourteen to sixteen hours in the summer. Many women, despite being exhausted after

laboring in the fields all day, returned to their dwellings and turned to doing work for

their own families: caring for chil-dren and the sick, cooking food, quilting bedcovers,

and mending tattered garments. They also grew what crops they could to improve their

family’s meals, taught their children their history, and participated in religious rituals.

Demography and Family Life

The need for women in the Chesapeake, an overwhelmingly male region, was acute.

Englishwomen provided necessary domestic labor in the realm of food preparation and

storage, clothing, cleaning, and laundry, in addition to serving as sexual partners for
Englishmen, many of whom had discovered that Native women were not interested in

their attentions. In 1619, a ship-load of fifty-seven women came into port at Jamestown.

During the next three years, another ninety women arrived. Most came seeking husbands,

who were in greater supply in Virginia than in England. Many had their passage paid for

by men seeking wives or servants—120 pounds of tobacco each, six times the price for a

young male indentured servant. To provide wives for male English colonists, the

company needed to provide incentives for women to come to America. The Virginia

Company provided a “headright” to those who paid for the transportation of settlers—

fifty acres of land to settle and farm. Englishwomen, most of whom could never hope to

own land in England, could own acres of it in America, since the offer of a headright was

extended to women settlers who paid their own passage as well. Women could also marry

in the colony more easily than in England, where there was a shortage of marriageable

men through-out the seventeenth century. Company authorities were anxious for both

men and women to marry because married men and women caused less trouble in a

society than did single people. Married women also provided domestic labor and

produced children, both necessary for the growth and stability of the colony.

Most women who took advantage of the opportunities afforded by the Chesapeake

colonies were deemed “respectable” by English society, an im-portant characteristic for

the colonies’ organizers as they sought to create families in the New World. Ann Jackson,

who traveled to America with her brother, was the twenty-year-old daughter of a

gardener. Alice Richards came too, a widow at twenty-five. She had been recommended

to the Virginia Company for passage in part because, a church official wrote, “shee hathe

demeaned herself in honest sorte & is a woman of an honest lyef.” While some women
who came from England were young and married soon upon their arrival, 70 to 85

percent of emigrants in the first half of the seventeenth century came as servants and had

to complete their service prior to marriage. For women, such a relatively late age at first

marriage (in their midtwenties) meant they had fewer children, and despite the goals of

the colonies’ organizers, the population could not grow by natural in-crease. As a

consequence, the Chesapeake remained “a land of newcomers,” as historians Lois Carr

and Lorena Walsh have documented. English colonists in the Chesapeake were subject to

high mortality rates, largely because of the environment. By 1649, more than four

decades after the first settlement, only about 18,500 English lived in Virginia and 600 in

Maryland, for instance, despite the large numbers that had emigrated there (perhaps

60,000 by then). Many contracted diseases such as malaria, imported into the region from

infected immigrants who spread the disease to mosqui-toes; others died from typhus and

dysentery due to poor sanitation, and still others succumbed to salt poisoning from

drinking brackish water. Women were particularly vulnerable to the harsh conditions, as

pregnant women seemed particularly susceptible to malaria, and the additional rigors of

child-birth in the wilderness cost many women their lives. Demographers estimate that a

woman who reached the age of twenty in the Chesapeake region most likely would die by

age thirty-nine, and usually from childbirth; men would live five to ten years longer.

Native-born women, on the other hand, married at much earlier ages than did their

immigrant mothers, since the native-born women were not indentured and did not have to

wait to marry. Because of what demographers call a skewed sex ratio of far more men

than women in the Chesapeake through the end of the seventeenth century, wives were in

high demand, and most native-born women married before age twenty-one. In 1625 in
Virginia, 75 percent of the population were men, and by 1650, the ratio was six men for

every woman. In 1650 in Maryland, there were 600 men but only 200 women. As late as

1698 in York County, Virginia, there were 487 men but only 309 women. It was so rare

for a woman not to marry that when one unmarried woman died at a ripe old age in

Virginia Colony, the Virginia Gazette newspaper reported the fact that she was unmarried

as the lead to her obituary. Marrying Native American women was seldom seen as an

option for Englishmen. As the increasing English population sought ever more land

togrow still more tobacco, relations with the Indians deteriorated. The Native–English

marriage between Pocahontas and John Rolfe was one of diplomacy as well as affection

and was an anomaly among the two populations. Most Native women regarded

Englishmen contemptuously, deeming them poor providers and weak warriors. They saw

Englishmen begging Natives for corn to survive the winters, then stealing from them if

the grain was not forthcom-ing. They also saw Englishmen as lacking self-control.

Oppossunoquonuske, a female werowance (or chief) related to Powhatan, used

Englishmen’s desires against them, luring them out of the Jamestown fort by promising

them sexual favors from the women in her group, then ambushing them. Englishwomen

in the Chesapeake faced undreamt-of hardships, along with unknown opportunities. Life

was spartan and dangerous, and homes were tiny dwellings. Attacks from Indians angry

at the invasion of their lands were always a risk. Moreover, women’s daily round of work

was far different from that in England. The complex society they left behind pre-sumed

that most women’s work was inside the house and in the kitchen garden, not in the

agricultural fields. Women did conduct businesses in England, but their commercial

activities were largely connected to the do-mestic world, such as brewing beer, making
lace, sewing clothing, or help-ing their husbands run a tavern or inn. But in the colonies

of Maryland and Virginia, where growing tobacco had become the main preoccupation,

women worked in the tobacco fields alongside men, hoeing out the weeds, tilling the soil,

picking off the tobacco worms, and harvesting the leaves. In England such fieldwork

would have been the domain of men, but in the Chesapeake only wealthy married women

could replace their own labor with that of servants or, later, slaves.

Any notions these early women colonists may have had that they could start the kind of

businesses women ran in England, such as producing butter and cheese for sale, soon fell

by the wayside as the English colonists planted tobacco everywhere, from house to barn

and even in the streets. Not until late in the seventeenth century did the economy begin to

diversify, and women began to employ their skills in home industry, such as spinning

yarn and making clothing, as they continued to contribute to the family economy.

New England

While many Englishwomen migrated into the Chesapeake region as indi-viduals, usually

as indentured servants, in the New England colonies women most often migrated as

members of families. Here, religious impulses played an important role in their reasons

for migration. The New England colo-nies, which included Massachusetts Bay, Rhode

Island, and Connecticut, all had early settlements founded by religious dissenters who

sought a safe place to practice their faith. Several of these colonies, including the largest,

Massachusetts Bay, formed religiously closed communities. The founders of this colony

had dissented in England; in America they created intolerant societies in which all who

settled were required either to belong to a single established church or, at the least, to

conform to its rules and practices. Thus religious tensions roiled the New World, as they
did the old, with important consequences for the women who settled in New England.

Puritanism and Its Significance

In the sixteenth century England had undergone great upheaval over reli-gious issues.

King Henry VIII (1509–1547) split from the Roman Catholic Church and formed the

Anglican Church (the Church of England), a Prot-estant sect that denied the pope’s power

over the members of the church. The Anglicans kept many forms of the Catholic religious

service and hier-archy, but also incorporated many of the beliefs that Protestant groups

elsewhere in Europe had developed after the Protestant Reformation began in 1517. Two

were most important: the idea of the priesthood of all believ-ers, meaning no priests were

needed to mediate between people and God; and the second that scripture—the Bible—

alone was adequate for ruling Christians, rather than including Catholic Church laws as

well. The Reformation had been launched because of disagreements over theological

questions as well as complaints about corruption in the Catholic Church. By the

seventeenth century, religious dissenters in England and other coun-tries formed still

more Protestant denominations, including Presbyterians, Calvinists, Lutherans, and

Anabaptists. The two most important dissenting sects in England were the Separatists,

who sought to separate from the Anglican Church, and the much larger group, the

Puritans, who sought to purify it. In addition, reform-minded Catholics struggled to bring

the Prot-estants back into what they believed was the one true church. Politics intersected

with these religious divisions. In England, Henry

VIII’s elder daughter Mary (1553–1558) tried to reinstate the Catholic faith by force, but

failed. After Henry’s second daughter became Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603), she

carefully balanced the interests of Protestants and Catholics to preserve civil order. Under
her successor, James I (1603–1625), England remained Protestant, but James I launched

new controver-sies. To gain more power over his kingdom, he announced his belief in

“divine right absolutism,” an ideology that argued that monarchs were an-swerable only

to God. As common as this belief was among European monarchs, it conflicted with a

basic tenet of Protestant sects such as the Separatists and Puritans. They believed

themselves subject first to God, then to their king. Because they believed this, they

refused to join the Church of England. Since church membership was a requirement of

the state, these dissenters were regarded with suspicion and often discriminated against.

Members of these two groups searched for a way to live peacefully in England, but many

refused to compromise their religious ideals. They were among the first British emigrants

to the New World. Beginning in 1620, they settled in a region that came to be called New

England. The first group of English Separatists, known as the Pilgrims, arrived in 1620

off the coast of Massachusetts and settled in an area where diseases carried by earlier

European explorers and traders had destroyed the local Native population. Determined to

separate from the English church, the Pilgrims considered Anglican theology false, and

viewed belonging to the Anglican Church as a violation of biblical precepts. Persecuted

for their views in England, in 1607 they had fled to Holland, attempting to make a way of

life for themselves. After over ten years of economic discrimination by the Dutch, and

wanting to raise their children speaking English, the expatriates left Holland for Virginia,

where they hoped to found a settle-ment where they might practice their faith. Led by

William Bradford, 101 settlers and soldiers left Holland aboard the good ship Mayfl

ower. Eighteen women were among the passengers, three in their last trimester of preg-

nancy. Eleven girls also made the journey. A storm pushed the Mayfl ower off course, and
the Pilgrims landed not

in Virginia but much farther north, in the cold waters off the coast of Cape Cod. There,

the women spent the winter onboard ship, while the men built houses and storage

facilities. The fresh air and hard work may have kept many of the men alive—only half of

them died as compared to three-quarters of the women. By spring 1621, Plimoth

Plantation had been built, but half the colonists were dead.

English colonists who settled north of the Chesapeake faced far harsher winters but, at

first, they enjoyed more successful relations with Indians than did their southern colonial

counterparts. Disease and starva-tion took a toll on the colonists, and the weather was so

cold that the seeds the Pilgrims brought to plant for food did not germinate. With help

from the Pokanokets, members of the nearby Wamponoag nation, as well as from

Squanto (Tisquantum), a local Pawtuxet Indian who had learned English after being

kidnapped by earlier explorers, the remaining Pilgrims survived. They also benefited

from a peace alliance with the Pokanokets against the Narragansett Indians who lived to

the south of the colonial

GEORGE HENRY BOUGHTON, PILGRIMS GOING TO CHURCH George Henry

Boughton’s early-nineteenth-century painting of Pilgrims walking to church in the woods

of New England, with women and children protected by armed men preceding and

following them, gives some indication of the perils English colonists saw around them. It

also exemplifies the proper dependent role of Englishwomen—caring for children,

protected by men. settlement. The settlers harvested enough corn, furs, and lumber, that

by 1621 they were ready to hold a celebratory feast that Americans com-memorate today

as the first Thanksgiving. The colony’s relatively poor soil and lack of access to fishing
grounds and furs limited its growth, however, and it was soon overshadowed by

Massachusetts Bay Colony. There lived the second major group migrating to New

England—the

Puritans. Like the Pilgrims, the Puritans were religious dissenters, striving to cleanse

what they viewed as a corrupt Anglican church. Still, they were less radical in their

critique of the Church of England than the Separatists—they thought the Church was

salvageable. Like the Pilgrims, the Puritans migrated mostly as families, hoping to

replant a purer version of England in a much larger and more successful colony, formed

to the north and west of the Pilgrims in what is today Salem, Massachusetts. Some 1,000

religious dissenters arrived in 1630, and between 1630 and 1643, another 20,000 English

emigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony to settle in small towns and govern

themselves according to English law and Puritan religious tenets. They formed

communities in what became parts of current-day New Hampshire and Maine, as well as

Massachusetts. Led by men who held both religious and civil power at the same time, the

Puritans established com-munities where the church was the locus of both spiritual and

political power. Puritans believed that they had been chosen by God—they were “the

elect”—to establish what Massachusetts Bay Colony Governor John Winthrop, quot-ing

the Bible, called a new “Citty upon a hill” where the rest of the world could see how to

live if they wanted God’s blessings to be given to them.

Gender and the Social Order

With their goal of establishing a model community in mind, and aware, as John Winthrop

said, that “The eies of all people are uppon Us,” Puritans were concerned that colonists

behave properly. They had a rigid sense of what constituted proper behavior for women,
as well as men, and their laws and customs reflected these ideas. Many of those who

settled in the colony but disagreed with the Puritan worldview found themselves hauled

before the General Court, the ruling body for the Massachusetts Bay Colony. If they were

found guilty of disobeying the colony’s laws, including its reli-gious doctrines, they could

be banished from the colony—sent away from the community into the wilderness—or

sentenced to death, punishments equal in their end results. In this way, the colony tried to

remain true to its mission of reflecting God’s design for all to see.

Some dissenters who left or were expelled from Massachusetts Bay Colony formed

colonies of their own. Rhode Island, founded in 1636, owed its existence to Roger

Williams. He believed in tolerance, the absolute freedom of religious conscience, and the

absolute separation of church and state, so that government did not corrupt religion.

Connecticut, the other New England colony founded by a religious dissenter, was formed

by Thomas Hooker and others in 1637. Hooker believed in allowing all free-men, not just

church members, to vote and govern themselves. He led one hundred followers to

Connecticut to found a colony on those beliefs. THE TRIAL OF ANNE HUTCHINSON

PRIMARY SOURCE 2-2

Gov. John Winthrop of Massachusetts Bay Colony met his match in Anne Hutchinson.

Cowed by neither his intellect nor his posi-tion, Hutchinson took Winthrop to task in her

trial in 1637, insisting her revelations from God were true. He banished her not only on

the religious grounds of heresy, but also on the grounds she represented a threat to the

community and was unwomanly in her behavior. Gov. John Winthrop: Mrs. Hutchin-son,

you are called here as one of those that have troubled the peace of the com-monwealth

and the churches here; you are known to be a woman that hath had a great share in the
promoting and divulging

of those opinions that are the cause of this trouble . . . you have spoken divers things, as

we have been informed, very prejudicial to the honour of the churches and minis-ters

thereof, and you have maintained a meeting and an assembly in your house that hath been

condemned by the general assembly as a thing not tolerable nor comely in the sight of

God nor fitting for your sex, and notwithstanding that was cried down you have

continued the same. . . . Therefore we have thought good to send for you . . . that if you

be in an er-roneous way we may reduce you that so you may become a profitable member

here among us. Otherwise if you be

Another prominent dissenter was Mistress Anne Hutchinson. Born about 1591 in

England, Hutchinson emigrated to America in 1634. A healer, midwife, and mother of

thirteen, she was married to one of the wealthier settlers of Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Despite Puritan views that women had no authority in biblical matters and should not

teach men, she held discus-sion groups of both women and men in her home in the new

town of Boston, each week talking over sermons by the Rev. John Cotton, a leading

minister. During the course of her discussions, she argued that only Cotton and another

minister, her brother-in-law John Wheelwright, were preaching properly in their sermons

as they interpreted for their listeners the covenant of grace. Other ministers, she argued,

preached improperly regarding what was called the covenant of works. In her view,

Cotton and Wheelwright were correctly preaching that humans were saved from eternal

damnation by God’s grace—a gift of salvation—not by doing good works or behaving

well. This was basic Puritan theology. But Hutchinson then claimed that she knew this

because God had revealed it to her via “direct divine inspiration.” The Puritans did not
believe this was the way of God. Instead they believed that while the devil might reveal

himself to humans, God never did so directly, but only through His Word (the Bible) as

interpreted by ministers. Thus not only was Hutchinson teaching both women and men

and criticizing leading ministers and their preaching, she was also coming dan-gerously

close to espousing a heretical doctrine known as Antinomianism . This doctrine held that

Christians did not have to obey laws created by men, not even the moral standards of

their culture, because God’s grace had freed them from these strictures. Such a belief was

a direct attack on the authority of ministers, the church, and the government—the whole

of bstinate in your course that then the court may take such course that you may trouble

us no further. Mrs. Anne Hutchinson: . . . if you do condemn me for speaking what in my

conscience I know to be truth I must commit myself unto the Lord. . . . You have power

over my body but the Lord Jesus hath power over my body and soul; and assure

yourselves thus much, you do as much as in you lies to put the Lord Jesus Christ from

you, and if you go on in this course you begin, you will bring a curse upon you and your

poster-ity, and the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it. Gov.

John Winthrop: I am per-suaded that the revelation she brings forth is delusion. . . . The

court hath

already declared themselves satisfied concerning the things you hear, and concerning the

troublesomeness of her spirit and the danger of her course amongst us, which is not to be

suf-fered. . . . Mrs. Hutchinson, the sentence of the court you hear is that you are

banished from out of our jurisdiction as being a woman not fit for our society, and are to

be imprisoned till the court shall send you away. Mrs. Anne Hutchinson: I desire to know

wherefore I am banished? Gov. John Winthrop: Say no more. The court knows wherefore
and is satisfied.

Source: “The Examination of Mrs. Ann[e] Hutchinson,” in Early American Writing, ed.

Giles B. Gunn (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), 159–169.

Puritan society. The charge of Antinomianism often was leveled at dissent-ers who

challenged the authority of the churches or the clergy. Puritan civil and religious leaders

agreed that this view undermined their power and challenged their authority in a way that

threatened the entire community, particularly given the tenuous nature of the settlements

of the New World. In November 1637, Hutchinson was put on trial for heresy by the

Gen-eral Court, led by Gov. John Winthrop. (See Primary Source 2-2.) Her gen-der was

critical in determining her fate. As a woman, she was held in contempt by Puritan leaders

and their supporters for stepping out of the role the Pur-itans thought proper for women,

which was to keep silent in the church and allow the men to teach. In a society in which

religion was so closely linked to the state, her rebellion was against both. The trial

transcript that survives of Hutchinson being questioned by Gov. Winthrop shows his

anger with her not only for what he viewed as heresy, but also because she would not

sub-mit to male authority. Her behavior, Winthrop charged, was neither “comely in the

sight of God, nor fitting for your sex.” He was determined, he said to Hutchinson in front

of the court, to “reduce you that so you may become a profitable member here among us.

Otherwise if you be obstinate in your course . . . then the court may take such course that

you may trouble us no further.” Too many women, he said, were spending too much time

at Hutchin-son’s meetings listening to too much talk dangerous to the colony. Hutchinson

resisted Winthrop’s description of her activities and of her theological ideas, and resisted

also any authority he claimed he had over her. She challenged Winthrop directly, asking
“What law have I broken?” and demanding that he show her a Bible passage to support

his views. Such assertiveness by a woman was contrary to English views of women’s

proper place, and Winthrop criticized her as being “more bold than a man.” Per-suaded

that Hutchinson’s revelations were no more than “delusion,” Win-throp banished her.

Away from the protection afforded by the colony, Hutchinson, the General Court no

doubt hoped, would die. Instead she found friends and joined Roger Williams in

Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island. She stayed there for a while, but then moved to Long

Island where she died when Indians attacked her farm in 1643. On hearing the news, Gov.

Winthrop seemed satisfied with her fate, writing rather nastily that her death was “a

special manifestation of divine justice.” Mary Dyer, another dissenter who attended

Hutchinson’s Bible studies and was banished with her, suffered a harsher fate. After her

banishment, Dyer became a Quaker. A Protestant sect begun in the mid-1600s in England,

the Society of Friends, or Quakers, believed in individual inter-pretations of God’s work

in the world. Listening for the voice of God, the “inward light,” speaking to the

individual was a feature of Quaker religious services, or meetings. Both men and women

could be blessed with that inward light, and both were expected to speak out in meetings

if God di-rected them to. They had no ministers and no hierarchy. They also believed in

sexual equality and tolerated other religions. Such radical ideas led Puritans to condemn

and to persecute Quakers, and the sect was banned from Massachusetts Bay. Dyer, who

had become a Quaker preacher, re-turned to preach her Quaker beliefs and was arrested.

The General Court found that she had “denied our Lawe” and, citing her rebelliousness

against that law, hanged her in 1660. The stories of Anne Hutchinson and Mary Dyer

provide a window through which to view English customs and law as they affected
women in colonial New England. For the Puritans, as well as many other English groups,

women were defined not only by their duties as members of the family but also by their

deficiencies and their limits, both physical and mental. People believed women were

weaker than men in wit, will, and physical capacity, and at the same time, were so driven

by their emotions that they had to be controlled by social institutions, especially religion

and law. Ideas that Puritans and other Protestant groups held regarding women came from

Jewish and Christian teachings that blamed women for much that had gone wrong with

the world since the beginning of time. Because Eve first sinned and then convinced Adam

to do the same, all women were considered to be the “daughters” of the first woman, Eve,

and forever morally inferior to men. Accordingly, every woman needed to have a man in

her life to protect her interests, to see that she behaved, and to limit the damage she might

do to society by her uncontrolled behavior. English custom also presumed that all women

would have a man—father, husband, or son—to limit their behavior and that none would

make their own way in the world. According to this view, women would be—and should

be—dependent upon and submissive to men in the home, the church, and society. In New

England, where religion played a larger role in society and where women were a greater

proportion of the population than in the Chesapeake, such ideas about women and their

roles in society held particular power. Demography and Family Life

New England family life differed markedly from family life in the Chesapeake region. As

noted, in New England women arrived primarily as part of family groups, rather than as

single indentured servants or wives-to-be. Although more single men than single women

came to the colony (estimates indicate three to four single men for each single woman),

the majority of emigrants between 1620 and 1649 were married women and married men.
English emigrants married other English emigrants—men in their mid-to late-twenties;

women in their early twenties. The first native-born generation married even earlier, at

average ages of 25.3 for men and 20 for women. Men and women lived longer in New

England than in the Chesapeake, with life expectancies comparable to those of the mother

country. For those women who lived to age 21, life expectancy in New England reached

55. If a woman survived until menopause, the end of her child-bearing years, she would

probably live to a ripe old age in New England where, as early as 1644, colonist William

Bradford of Plymouth remarked on the longevity of settlers.

Colonial women in New England bore lots of children. Those born in New England

before 1650 had on average seven children, bearing the last at age 37. Over half of the

infants born in colonial America in the seven-teenth century reached adulthood and in the

New England colonies, survival rates could reach 80 percent or more. The clean water

and cold air of New England was conducive to good health, unlike in crowded London,

where only 20 percent of infants reached adulthood in the same era. Families in New

England also tended to stay intact, unlike in the

Chesapeake, where early deaths of adult parent often resulted in complicated

stepfamilies. The majority of New Englanders married one spouse and lived with that

person until death. Unlike the Chesapeake as well, by about 1650 or so, the population in

New England was increasing by natural means, as women produced large families. New

England’s low infant mor-tality rate and long life expectancy allowed the role of

grandparent to be invented, since so many adults lived long enough to see their children

marry and bring forth the next generation.

The family was an important source of labor in the preindustrial world, and by 1700, the
average colonial family size was seven children, a total that did not take into account the

miscarriages and stillbirths women com-monly suffered. Many women spent their entire

adult lives in the throes of childbearing and child rearing. For example, one New

Englander, Sarah Stearns, married Peter Place in December 1685. Their first child was

born November 1686. Their eighth surviving child was born in June 1706. For twenty

years, Sarah had been either pregnant, nursing, bearing a child, or recovering from

childbirth, as well as enduring the difficult years of raising small children. This pattern of

childbearing was not uncommon. The high birthrate doubled the population every twenty

years in the healthier New England colonies, and would continue to do so for some time.

The natural population growth meant that New Englanders imported far fewer servants or

slaves for their labor, resulting in a society very different than the one in the Chesapeake.

While the Chesapeake became a slave society, New England was a society with slaves.

The earliest slaves in New England were Native American women captured in warfare.

African women slaves arrived at least as early as 1638. Unlike in the Chesapeake, where

black women slaves worked in the fields, the majority of black slave women in New

England worked in domestic settings. They did the drudge work for the colonial elites,

particularly the laundry, as well as other gendered tasks such as sewing, knitting, caring

for children, and cooking. When hired out by their owners, they continued their domestic

work, earning money for their owners and themselves that might be used to buy their

freedom. Slave women, iso-lated inside houses and on small farms, had few chances to

form a community or a family as they might have had on the large farms or the

plantations that soon characterized southern agriculture. By 1700, there were only 820

blacks counted in a Boston census; some 41 percent of them were women. New
Englanders who had little need for slaves themselves did not hesitate to participate in the

lucrative business of trading for slaves, however. Boston traders pushed their way into the

market and by the 1670s were successfully importing African and West Indians to sell to

southern planters. The regional variations between Chesapeake and New England were

pronounced by 1640, by which time troubles in England between King Charles I (1625–

1649) and the Parliament drew their attention away from colonization efforts. Emigration

to the colonies lessened. A civil war erupted in England over fears that Charles I would

restrict religious liberty for Pro-testants, as well as over how much of a role Parliament

should have in gov-erning the country. From 1642 to 1646, Royalists or “Cavaliers”

fought with Parliamentarians or “Roundheads,” until the Puritan leader of the Round-

heads, Oliver Cromwell, won and helped impose Puritan rule over England after Charles

I was executed in 1649. Cromwell died in 1658, however, and two years later Charles II

(1660–1685) became king, restoring the monarchy. Colonial expansion by England

resumed in this period, known as the

Restoration. In 1662, Connecticut received its royal charter, as did Rhode Island in 1663.

New Hampshire became a royal colony in 1679. Farther south, in a region deemed the

Middle Colonies, New York (1664), New Jersey (1664), Pennsylvania (1681), and

Delaware (1682) became proprietary colonies whose charters were awarded to the king’s

supporters. Proprietors had to succeed at their enterprise, however, or lose their

proprietorship, as was the case for all but three of the thirteen colonies. In the Lower

South, the colony of Carolina (1663) included what later became North and South

Carolina, as well as Georgia, in the early eighteenth century. South Carolina became the

most prosperous of the three, trading in deerskins, Native American slaves exported to
the Caribbean, cattle, and eventually rice, a commodity so profitable and so labor-

intensive that slaves imported from Africa eventually became the majority population in

the colony. In each American colony, patterns of settlement varied because of fac-tors

such as the kind of settlers who came—male or female, slave or free—as well as their

religions, their countries of origin, the commodities they were able to produce for

themselves, and those they could export to the mother country. As England took over

colonies originally claimed by other nations English laws and customs took over as well.

As the seventeenth century drew to a close, cultural life in all the colonies more closely

reflected char-acteristics of English life. In particular, American colonial women’s daily

lives reflected those commonalities.

WOMEN’S DAILY LIVES

The most common gendered expectation the English had was that any woman in society

would be a goodwife. The goodwife, or “Goody” in the language of the time ( Goody was

comparable to the title of “Mrs.” today), was a married woman. She was expected to be

submissive to her husband, obedi-ent to the authorities, industrious in her housework,

pious in her religion, silent rather than complaining, and a good mother and housewife.

Despite these limits imposed by their gender, historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich has shown

that goodwives did take on male roles, filling in for their husbands as “deputy husbands”

when necessary. They took over husbandly duties when men left the home for various

reasons, such as to hunt, to settle land, or to ship out on a fishing or whaling trip. These

occasions required wives to take actions to benefit the families, such as planting crops,

running businesses, or buying products. Being a deputy husband, however, was a

temporary occur-rence. The vast majority of colonial women spent their daily lives
engaged in the labor it took to build new homes for their families. Historians of colonial

women have relied not only on the documents in which women appear—diaries, advice

books, court records, probate records, wills, church registers, tax lists, books of sermons

—to learn about

SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY LUXURY Spoons left behind by Lucy and Humphrey

Chadbourne of South Berwick, Maine, between 1645 and 1690. Such items provide

archeologists with informa-tion regarding the status of women within families: the spoon

handle to the left is engraved with an L as well as an H. Including his wife’s initial on

such a luxury item as a silver spoon may have indicated that Humphrey Chadbourne saw

his wife as a partner rather than simply a dependent. their lives, but also on the material

culture that survived them as well. Items women used often tell historians a great deal.

These items include garments they wore, cloth they wove, jewelry they delighted in,

storage baskets, candlesticks, and bed linens that filled their blanket chests, as well as ar-

cheological remains of their houses and gardens, and even their cemetery markers.

Colonial women, like Native American women, spent much of their lives surrounded by

their families and caring for them. Evidence of women’s daily life and work reveal much

about their experiences of infancy and childhood, courtship and marriage practices,

pregnancy and childbirth, and can all illuminate their past. However, as was the case with

Native American women’s lives, generalizations about colonial women’s lives have to be

made with caution. Many differences among women existed, depending on such factors

as their European background, their husbands’ occupation, their families’ wealth, their

proximity to the frontier, their religion, and their legal status. Even so, commonalities

existed among women in the early colonial period, and there were common patterns of
life for colonial women.

Infancy and Childhood

Children were precious commodities in the seventeenth century, and infant care was

women’s work. Women could learn about child care and feeding from advice books and

sermons, but most colonial women no doubt learned to care for their infants from their

own mothers or neighbor women. Breast-feeding was praised by physicians and ministers

alike, as breast milk was thought to have not only high nutritional content but also

considerable medicinal powers to keep babies healthy. Some critics viewed allowing an

infant to suck for too many months as spoiling the child, one writing that the practice

“doth them more mischief than the Devil himself.” Mothers added solid food to babies’

diets at anywhere from eight months to two years of age, depending on when children

were weaned, a task often un-dertaken by sending a nursing mother on a visit without her

child. Childhood itself was perilous. Diseases such as measles, mumps, chicken

pox, smallpox, dysentery, diarrhea, pneumonia, whooping cough, tetanus, and infections

of all kinds killed children in these days before antibiotics and vaccines. Accidents

injured and killed many as well. Colonial farms had cattle that could crush a small child,

or sharp implements that could injure a careless one. In colonial houses with open

fireplaces where fires were always burning, children suffered frequently from accidental

scaldings and burns. In times of war between colonists and Native Americans, children

were killed in the fray. Demographers’ best estimates are that about 25 percent of New

England children died before age five, with girls dying at a lower rate than boys.

English and Dutch writers in the seventeenth century emphasized the moral training of

children from baptism on. Baptism gave a child a suitable name, one the family regarded
as virtuous, so the child could be influenced from that day forward to live a virtuous life.

Parents viewed children as blank slates or white paper upon which their lives would be

written, and children needed parental guidance so that they could become morally strong

adults. Child rearing methods varied from place to place, and often according to the

parents’ religious beliefs. Puritans believed that infants were inherently sinful and that

their wills had to be broken through discipline, an outgrowth of the Puritans’ belief in

original sin (“In Adam’s fall, we sinned all” was a lesson often repeated when training

children to write). Like many other Europeans of the time, Puritans were strict

disciplinarians and tended to treat their chil-dren as miniature adults, attempting to shape

them into properly repentant individuals so that they too might achieve a state of grace.

On the other hand, Quakers in the middle colonies of Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New

Jersey raised their children less strictly. They believed children possessed a “light within”

that could best be coaxed into full flower by gentle nurturing. In the large colonial

families that were the norm in the seventeenth

century, caring for children was a gendered occupation. Mothers were the primary child

care provider until children were old enough to begin chores that would train them in

adult tasks. Across the colonies, childhood was meant to train children for their adult life.

By the ages of seven or eight, boys and girls both undertook sex-segregated tasks. At that

age, boys were breeched; that is, they began wearing short pants called breeches instead

of the dresses they and their sisters had worn since infancy. Boys would be sent with

fathers to the fields and the woods to learn to farm and to hunt, while girls worked with

their mothers to learn the household jobs for which they would become responsible.

Children joined the work in the fields at planting time, when the crops needed cultivating,
and at harvest times, as did both parents. Agricultural demands knew no gender

boundaries and not until parents could afford servants, slaves, or hired workers could they

hope to divide the many farm tasks into men’s work and women’s work. Responsibilities

for children in-cluded caring for younger children, chores around the farm, and formal

apprenticeships (mostly for boys), where children were sent out of the fam-ily to learn a

trade in return for room and board. While some rules regarding apprentices postponed

aspects of one’s adult status until the apprenticeship was completed, children were

generally considered adults at much earlier ages than in modern times.

Seventeenth-century education in the form of book-learning reflected regional variations

as well. In New England, the emphasis was on religious instruction; in New Netherland,

the content focused on the importance of international trade and commerce. In

Pennsylvania, with its large Quaker population that believed in equality for women,

education for girls and boys alike was more common than in other colonies. Schooling

was accom-plished at home as well as in dame schools (taught by women in their homes),

and eventually at elementary schools and grammar schools (which usually did not admit

girls). In all regions, some children were taught to read, write, and figure. The first free

public school was founded in 1639 in Dorchester, Massachusetts, outside Boston. The

first Latin grammar school and the first college in America (Harvard, 1636) were in New

England. Massachusetts Bay Colony even passed a law in 1647 requiring that towns of

fifty or more families hire a schoolmaster to teach boys and girls how to read and write.

In Pennsylvania, a law passed in 1683 declared that all children must be able to read and

write by age 12, and by 1689, the Quakers had started a public school for girls and boys.

In the south, however, outside of Virginia where a public school was open in Elizabeth
County by 1636, there were so few colonists in the seventeenth century that few schools

existed. Elite whites, North and South, usually educated their children with tutors, while

other whites’ education was limited to that necessary for earning a living. Higher

education in the south, beginning in 1693 at the College of William and Mary in Virginia,

was limited to boys who would lead the colonies in the future. Literacy rates at the end of

the seventeenth century, determined by whether one could write her name, were about 50

percent for New England girls, but only 10 percent for southern girls. With few

opportuni-ties for formal schooling, girls instead concentrated on learning tasks from

their mothers that prepared them for their roles as wives and mothers.

Courtship and Marriage

Adulthood meant marriage for most white women in seventeenth-century America.

Marriage was preceded by courtship. Stories of colonial courting practices nearly always

mention the New England practice of bundling, when courting couples were placed in a

bed with a board between them to prevent intimate contact. There, warm and cozy despite

the frigid New England winter, the couple could chat all night long, learning enough

about each other to decide if they wished to marry. Young men who wanted to marry

usually sought their fathers’ permission to begin courting. Young women weighed their

suitors’ economic as well as physical and emotional attributes. As had been the case in

Europe, colonists married largely for economic benefits, in unions often arranged, or at

least influenced, by par-ents. Children married when they had amassed enough goods to

support themselves in a household. The man often brought land to the marriage; the

woman usually brought household goods and utensils, even cattle and slaves, in what was

termed a portion or dowry. Love and affection were a happy consequence, not the main
reason for marriage. Seventeenth-century colonists believed that keeping one’s wits and

not being swept away by passion, romance, or courtly love made for a sound marriage.

That is not to say that romantic love did not exist among American

colonists. It did, and it survives in poetic form. America’s first poet, Anne Bradstreet, was

born in 1612. She emigrated to America with her husband in 1630, living in

Massachusetts Bay Colony with him and their eight chil-dren. She began writing poetry

in 1632, and some of her work was pub-lished in 1650 when her brother-in-law

appropriated a set of her poems and published them in England as The Tenth Muse Lately

Sprung Up in America, By a Gentlewoman of Those Parts (see Primary Source 2-3).

Brad-street was quite embarrassed by the public notice, even writing a poem about her

discomfiture at becoming a public figure. Poet she may have been, but public notice was

not a woman’s role. Colonial historians estimate that 95 to 98 percent of all white women

married. The institution of marriage was particularly important to the Puritans as a way

for them to build families and, due to their religious beliefs, to provide the only legitimate

outlet for sexual relations. Although the modern image of Puritans is that they were rather

grim, so concerned with stopping fun that they never had any, the historical records tell a

dif-ferent tale. Puritans celebrated sex within marriage, and thought that a husband’s duty

was to satisfy his wife’s sexual needs. One Middlesex County, Massachusetts, resident

was, in fact, excommunicated from the church after refusing to have sex with his wife for

two years. In another public record, in 1658, Benjamin Lane, answering the court’s query,

told the court he had not had sex with his wife, a claim she had made when requesting a

divorce. The divorce was granted. Outside marriage, sexual relations of any kind were

considered both a sin and a crime. The influence and power of churches were important
in determining which sin became a crime. Laws about property, particularly inheritance

laws, depended on men knowing for certain who their true children were. Laws

controlling sexual activity reflected those ideas. Sex outside marriage by an unmarried

man and woman was termed fornication, and punished by fines or flogging (whipping).

The two were also encour-aged to marry, since sex did lead to pregnancy. Unmarried

mothers were socially unacceptable; pregnant brides were not, and about one-third of all

brides during the colonial period were already pregnant at marriage. If a married woman

and an unmarried man had sex, that was known as adultery and was, in the early days of

Massachusetts Bay Colony, punishable by death. Such a penalty was very rarely paid

(historians have found only about six executions for adultery in colonial records). Most

transgressors were instead punished by fines or lashes, or by serving time in the public

pillory. This wooden structure provided miscreants with a seat, as well as holes in a board

to imprison their hands and feet, stretched out in front of them. Offenders in the pillory

were thus subject to public humiliation as well as discomfort.

Marriage was both a civil contract as well as a religious sacrament in some churches in

the colonial period, just as it is today. Parental consent was required if one or both of the

parties were under age, and the banns that announced the forthcoming marriage had to be

posted or read in a public place three times to let the community know of the impending

event, in case anyone knew of a reason it should not take place. Marriage ceremo-nies

could be quite simple, held in church or before a magistrate, the bride and groom often

clothed in nothing more than daily garb. Or they might be day-long affairs, such as the

wedding of Frederick and Catherine Philipse, who married in New York in 1692. The

wedding combined Dutch and English traditions: the bride wore an embroidered Dutch
crown and pet-ticoats of Asian silk. The party lasted for days and included an open house

and visits by the bride and groom to all the surrounding relatives. Once married, the

husband was required by law to support his

wife and family and to cohabit with them. The assumptions that the seventeenth-century

English made regarding a woman’s proper role as both ANNE BRADSTREET, “TO MY

DEAR AND LOVING HUSBAND”

Anne Bradstreet’s work provides a lovely portrait of the more aesthetic side of American

life in the very early settlement period. One of Bradstreet’s most famous works is a love

poem to her husband, pub-lished in 1678 after her death.

“If ever two were one, then

surely we. then thee;

a man, Compare with me ye women if you can.

I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold,

If ever man were loved by wife, If ever wife was happy in

Or all the riches that the East doth hold. My love is such that rivers cannot quench,

Nor ought but love from thee give recompense.

repay;

Thy love is such I can no way The heavens reward thee mani-fold, I pray. Then while we

live, in love let’s so persevere,

That when we live no more we may live ever.”

Source: From The Treasury of American Poetry, ed. Nancy Sullivan (New York: Barnes

& Noble, 1993), 1.

subservient and obedient to her husband occasionally came into conflict with the realities
of married life. For example, accusations of neglect and physical abuse of wives

occurred, and some colonies passed laws, beginning in the mid-seventeenth century, to

outlaw physical abuse. Divorcing an abusive or unloved husband was possible in some

colonies, but the methods of divorce varied greatly. Governor Peter Stuyvesant of New

Netherland granted one man’s petition for divorce. The General Assembly of Rhode

Island granted a separation to the same man’s wife. In Northampton County, Virginia,

Mary Buckland’s husband Richard had deserted her and lived with another woman with

whom he had a child. The court not only granted the divorce, but also ordered Richard

whipped and banished from the county.

Divorce or legal separation in the colonial period did not occur for light or transient

causes, such as incompatability. People usually could di-vorce only by permission of the

government—a long, complicated, and expensive process that often had as its goal the

promotion of domestic and civil tranquility, rather than individuals’ desires to rid

themselves of part-ners with whom they were incompatible. In other words, for a divorce

to be granted, a couple’s problems had to be public enough to disturb the common

welfare of the community. Far more often, when relationships failed, partners left their

marriages by simply leaving. Desertion was the most common method of divorce.

Pregnancy and childbirth among colonists were exceedingly common, and exceedingly

dangerous for both mother and child. In the seventeenth cen-tury, maternal mortality rates

(the percentage of women who died due to childbirth) on average were 1 to 1.5 percent of

all births (compared to 0.0075 percent in the United States in 2000). Overall, one of every

five adult deaths among women was related to childbirth, many due to dehydra-tion,

exhaustion, hemorrhage, or post-childbirth infections, known as puerperal fever. In both

Europe and America, childbirth rates, combined with the environment, played a powerful

role in determining life expec-tancy. In city centers such as London, crowding, poor

sanitation, and disease resulted in an average life expectancy of only thirty-five to forty

years. In the Chesapeake, bad water, disease, and harsh living conditions resulted in a

similar life expectancy, while New England’s environment was conducive to life

expectancies in the low sixties for both women and men. Giving birth to children in

difficult environments greatly affected the age at which a woman would die. Throughout

the colonies, women had reason to fear childbirth.

Despite this fear, in an era when no reliable birth control existed, co-lonial women had

lots of children. The average number of children per woman was between five and eight.

Colonial women who wanted to limit the size of their families often had little success.

People did not fully un-derstand the mechanics of conception, except that sexual

intercourse was definitely involved. Midwives were the source of birth control

information. They might recommend breast-feeding, which tends to suppress ovulation,

and can sometimes prevent a subsequent pregnancy, or douching with cold water

immediately after intercourse. They also might recommend absti-nence, the success of

which depended upon a husband’s cooperation, as did withdrawal of the penis prior to

ejaculation—not a certain method, but one that was inexpensive and private. Midwives

also knew of herbal medicines such as pennyroyal and mugwort that brought on

menstruation, known as one’s “courses.” Surviving records from the period include

sermons preached against abortion, making it clear that abortion was another method

women used in their attempts to control fertility. Pregnancy was a difficult time for

colonial women and, as was true for

Native American women, myths and superstitions abounded. Looking at a rabbit might

cause the baby to have a hare-lip; looking at the moon might produce a “lunatic,” since

the moon was thought to have a role in causing insanity. Seeing a horrible sight could

cause the child to be disfigured, as could a mother’s longing for an unattainable item. For

colonial women, pregnancy was a time of fear and sorrow as well as anticipation, when

anything could go wrong and often did. A host of female relatives and friends attended

the birth itself, offering comfort, experience, and company in a communal setting. The

pain of childbirth was not eased by drugs, and women who complained were reminded of

the sin of Eve, for which labor was seen as a fair punishment. Midwives attended births

to help with the medical aspects, and, occasionally, legal issues. If a woman were

unmarried, for instance, and the father of her child was not known, the midwife ques-

tioned the mother about the child’s father while she was in labor. Local communities did

not want to support unwed mothers and illegitimate chil-dren, so the midwife made every

effort to determine the father’s name when the woman was most vulnerable.

After childbirth, elite women might be confined to bed, sometimes for a month or more.

The vast majority of women, however, resumed their chores as soon as they could and as

best they could. Slaves and servants, including those impregnated by their masters,

received little time off, and their health often suffered because of this. They might also

find themselves separated from their children, who could be sold in the case of slaves, or

bound out to service for a term of years.

Adult Women’s Work

What colonial women did on a daily basis to survive in the new lands of America would

wear out any modern-day citizen. Although differences existed in the amount and type of
physical labor women did—rich women did less labor than poor women, and women

with slaves or servants supervised more laborers than women who had no workers—

almost all women worked hard, particularly in the early days of colonization. Whether

paid or unpaid, the unremitting toil most women undertook contributed to the economies

of the households, communities, and colonies through their labor.

Historians can only guess at the number or proportion of women who worked for wages

in the colonial period. They do know from surviving court records and newspaper

advertisements that, despite society’s pre-sumption that a woman would always have, and

indeed ought to have, a man to take care of her, there were always some women who

worked for money to support themselves. The most common business in which women

made money was running a farm or plantation. The first record of female ownership of a

farm run for profit, as opposed to being one run for simple subsistence, appears in

Jamestown, Virginia, in 1610. Women wage earners often used their traditional role of

caring for chickens and cows to produce eggs, milk, butter, and cheese which they sold in

the marketplaces of their communities. They produced other goods as well: in 1653,

Dionis Coffin brewed beer in Newberry, Massachusetts. Her daughter, Mary Coffin Star-

buck, ran a store on Nantucket Island off the coast of Massachusetts. Star-buck also took

full advantage of her Quaker religion’s ideals regarding the equality of the sexes by

working as a minister as well, although it is not clear whether she was paid for that task.

The growth of towns in the second half of the seventeenth century increased the

complexity of the colonial economy and women’s role within it. By 1700, Boston had a

population of nearly 7,000; New York 5,000; and Philadelphia, 4,500. Southern towns

were smaller: by 1690, Charleston, South Carolina, had a population of only about 1,200,
and was still the fifth largest city in the colonies. In towns, the easiest way for women to

make money was doing “women’s work” for pay. In other words, women could expand

their own domestic world to make money by taking in boarders, keeping a tavern,

cooking, doing laundry, or running households for those who had no women available to

do the labor that kept life going. When women earned income in skilled trades, they

usually did so as widows or as the wives of journeying husbands. Colonial women

worked at all sorts of trades: milliners (making hats), dressmakers, blacksmiths,

metalworkers, coopers (making barrels, tubs, and other containers), and printers. A few,

like Mary Coffin Starbuck, even worked as ministers, but only among such sects as the

Quakers and Moravians, since the Catholic Church and most Protestant denominations

did not allow women to be religious leaders. Women were also midwives, shopkeepers,

and teachers who ran dame schools. In agricultural communities, particularly in the

southern colonies with their labor-intensive crop such as tobacco, women sometimes

hired themselves out as day-laborers, performing many of the same tasks as male

workers, although they were usually paid less. Young women and girls also served as

apprentices, learning the trades by working for brewers, grocers, silk-stocking makers, as

well as weavers, locksmiths, and wheelwrights, who made and repaired the carts and

wagons that trans-ported goods in the colonial world. Women’s paid work contributed to

the family’s economy and brought women into the larger market economy as well. But

women also labored within the household, caring for their families and extended kin, as

well as supervising others who lived with them, including apprentices, slaves, and

indentured servants. Feeding, clothing, cleaning, and caring for the family’s health

occupied all women to some degree.

Most important was the preparation of food and its preservation for

future use. On a daily basis, this task included both indoor and outdoor work, and it never

ceased. Winter and summer women had to maintain a fire for heat and for cooking and

had to maintain it from coals, since there were no matches. That meant a woman had to

be able to bank the fire at night by raking ashes over the coals so they would survive

overnight and could be used to ignite kindling the next morning. The fire burned con-

stantly and was a safety hazard for women with long skirts and for small children who

had not yet learned of its dangers. Open-hearth cooking, common throughout America

until the eighteenth century, depended upon large pots suspended on iron hooks that

swung out into the room so in-gredients could be added. Fires were built from readily

available wood, as colonists cut down America’s forests to heat their homes and cook

their food. Women had kitchen gardens for growing herbs and vegetables. Herbs were

used for both medicines and seasonings, and vegetables were used in the stews and soups

that most people ate daily. Colonists favored crops they could store over the winter

months: pumpkins, winter squash, and root vegetables, such as yams, turnips, beets,

onions, leeks, carrots, and parsnips. Learning from their experiences after many of the

seeds first brought over by colonists from England failed to germinate due to New

England’s cold climate, New Englanders imitated the local Indians who taught them how

to grow corn. Both northern and southern colonists used corn as a staple to produce

traditional English dishes such as bread, porridge, and pancakes, while they learned how

to grow the wheat, oats, and barley they had raised in England.

Colonists also brought swine, cattle, and chickens with them. Women were in charge of

the animals such as chickens and pigs, raising them, catch-ing them, and killing them.
They then cleaned or “dressed” them, plucking off the feathers and removing the innards.

Cooking cleaned animals was the last of a long line of chores needed to move food from

outdoors to the table, and cooking itself was a very demanding chore. The kettles and

pots that hung on the hearth hooks weighed forty pounds or more. At first, colonists had a

monotonous diet. Most lived on soup and

bread, salted meat or salted fish (before refrigeration, salt was used to draw out the

moisture from foods that made them spoil), and corn cakes, which were flat biscuits made

with cornmeal. As Indians taught colonists trapping and hunting methods, the settlers

added lobster, oysters, clams, eels, tur-tles, crabs, seagulls, sturgeon, deer, rabbits, and

turkeys to their diet. Most colonists drank what they drank in England: beer women

brewed from grain, and eventually cider that women made after the apple trees they had

planted matured. Virginia children after 1611 and New England chil-dren after 1624,

when the first dairy cows were brought to America, had milk to drink. As they gathered,

planted, and harvested fruit, colonists drank fruit juices made from native berries that

usually got “hard” (i.e., they fermented into alcohol) before they were consumed. The

liquids con-sumed by colonists were produced largely by women, as part of their

traditional tasks.

Gathering and preparing adequate food supplies, particularly for the

long, cold New England winters, meant the difference between life and starvation. In all

the colonies, women salted meat and fish to preserve them (they had to soak the salt off

and then boil the meat before eating it); they stored root vegetables in root cellars under

or near their small houses; they dried squashes and fruits. Eventually, they would pickle

vegetables and make relishes that added spice to their meals, but spices such as sugar,
cin-namon, or nutmeg were luxury items until supply ships from Europe began to appear

more regularly after the mid-seventeenth century. Food was fuel for the backbreaking

work of settling the country. Masters were required to feed their indentured servants, and

men and women who failed to pro-vide their servants with adequate food could be hauled

before the author-ities and fined for their deficiencies.

Colonial women also were in charge of clothing their families. The wealthy purchased

fine fabric, the poor coarse, but clothing was handmade, and women were the

manufacturers of clothing. Keeping a family clothed meant constant labor, and it was rare

to see a woman sitting without some sort of needlework occupying her, since making

clothing was so time-consuming. Such labor-intensive work meant most people had very

few changes of clothing. A woman might have three dresses, if she were lucky: one for

formal occasions, such as church, one for everyday, and one to wear while another was

drying. Elite women, who could purchase fabric and who might have servants or slaves to

create elaborate gowns, had larger arment.

Producing clothing allowed colonial women to indulge any sense of aesthetics that they

retained in the midst of a hard life, and for most, handwork was their only “leisure”

activity. What was especially pleasant for its practitioners was that women could do

needlework outside the house in the fresh air, and could also do it while visiting with

friends. Quilting, ap-pliqué, patchwork, crewel work, and embroidery were common

among women of all classes and races. But even handwork could be utilitarian; girls

often used needlework samplers to show they had learned their letters, as well as to

display their sewing skills.

The task of keeping anything clean in the colonial era was often a hopeless task.
Seventeenth-century Americans were dirty. In a society with-out running water and

without the custom of bathing, keeping a body clean meant washing a face and little else.

The production of soap required a multistep process and resulted in a harsh product called

lye soap, which reddened faces and cracked hands. Clothing was usually cleaned by

brush-ing off mud and dirt as needed. When clothes had to be washed, they first were

soaked in water, then beaten with feet, clubs, or arms, or rubbed on stones. Then the

heavy, wet clothes were lifted out of the water, rinsed in more water, wrung, starched,

dried—often by spreading them over bushes—smoothed with irons heated in the fire, and

put away. When settlements became organized and self-sufficient enough to allow

women to have the time to wash, wash days usually occurred once a month in summer

and seldom if ever in winter, particularly in the northern colonies. The fre-quency with

which one’s clothes were washed quickly became a marker of economic and social class.

If servants or slaves were available to do the wash, it was done more often, and the

employer or slaveowner could wear more ornate clothing, which could be changed more

often because servants or slaves did the dirty work.

Cleaning the house itself was another lost cause in the early part of the colonial period.

The first houses in the country, made of materials called wattle and daub, were built of

timbers and had earthen floors. Other dwell-ings were built into the sides of hills, and

some early settlers used caves for shelter. In northern houses, fireplaces were first at one

end, then in the center of the hall; in the southern colonies, fireplaces were built, with

wooden chimneys, at one side of the one-room houses that first served as homes for the

majority of colonists. At first windows were just holes left in the sides of the houses and

covered with shutters, or they were filled with panels made of oiled linen to let in light
while keeping out the wind. Glass windows began to appear in homes of the well-to-do

after midcen-tury. In both the northern and southern colonies, most floors were first made

of beaten dirt. Cleaning the house in the early years of settlement consisted of dumping

the trash out the window into the side yard, or toss-ing it out the front door. (Trash dumps

in the front yard might dismay modern sensibilities, but archeologists love them for the

insight they provide into what colonists ate and how they lived in their rude homes.)

Interior cleanliness for early colonists focused mostly on the beds. Colonists slept first on

the floor, then on planks, then on rope beds, and finally on mattresses stuffed with cotton

or straw. By spring, mattresses were filled with fleas, lice, and bedbugs. To clean them,

women emptied out the stuff-ing and burned it, then restuffed the mattress with fresh

matter. In the later colonial period, as interiors grew more elaborate, women’s work

increased. Women cleaned walls by whitewashing them with lime mixed with water, an

inexpensive kind of paint that also killed germs, although colonists did not know that.

Glass windows were cleaned with water and lye soap, usually by servants or slaves, since

houses with glass windows belonged to the well-to-do. Dust from unpaved roads, garden

dirt, horse manure, and barnyard debris were all tracked into the house as most people

lived in rural communities and were in and out of the house all day. As society became

more complex and sophisticated in the south, wealthy families moved cooking tasks

away from the main house into outbuildings, eliminating a source of dirt from the public

rooms, such as dining rooms, that they added to their homes. In the north, cooking tasks

remained in the main house, but the kitchen gradually shifted to the back of the house,

confining greasier dirt to that smaller room.

Colonial housewives responsible for cleanliness probably were not dismayed by all the
dirt in their houses. After all, dirt was a fact of life, most folks thought fresh air

unhealthy, and no one associated dirt with disease. Colonists were more concerned about

the last, as the diseases of three continents—Europe, Africa, and America—met in

colonial America. The New World had a few diseases it shared with European arrivals as

well, the most notable of which may have been syphilis. But by far, the majority of

diseases killing off the intermingled populations were from Europe. The most common

diseases colonists suffered from were those due to poor sanitation and water and those

spread by respiratory means or contact: dysentery, typhoid, tuberculosis, scarlet fever,

“fluxes” (which was any type of abnormal bodily discharge), “fevers” (which could be

almost anything and often referred to malaria), smallpox, diphtheria, mea-sles, and

whooping cough. Elites, both women and men, used what few physicians existed in

colonial society, but most physicians were so ignorant of biology that they wound up

killing patients rather than saving them. Women healers were not usually known as

physicians, but there is evi-dence of at least one woman who served as a doctor in the

colonial period when little if any formal training was required to be regarded as such.

Katherine Hebden, a Marylander, shows up in the historical record in 1644 when her

husband went to court on her behalf against one Edward Hall. Acting as a physician,

Hebden, claimed the suit, “did chiguery [surgery] upon the legg of Thomas Greenwell,”

one of Hall’s servants, but Hall had not paid her for the operation. Hall had to pay the rest

of Hebden’s bill—190 pounds of tobacco. Hebden also prevailed in later court cases, a

clear indication that the community regarded her as a doctor, not just an informal healer.

Katherine Hebden’s status as a wage-earning physician is highly un-usual. The majority

of medical care was provided by adult women to their own families as a matter of course,
and by women who worked as midwives. Herbal medicines were the state of the art,

along with the belief that the body had a balance of what were called humors that were

out of balance when the patient was sick. Midwives and doctors both used bloodletting,

blistering, purges, and emetics to clean out the body’s various systems in hopes of

rebalancing the humors and thus curing the patient. In most cases of ill health, however,

women cared for their families themselves, doing the best they could.

WOMEN IN PUBLIC LIFE

The material world in which women lived in the seventeenth century has remained

largely invisible in most history textbooks, despite its importance to everyday women.

More commonly told has been the story of women in the public eye, women who became

visible because they appeared in court documents or other public documents most

historians use to write history and to understand women’s roles in the early colonial

period. Political women, women who played a public role in wartime, women who

behaved badly, according to seventeenth-century society’s expectations, were anom-alies,

but all are recorded in the public record as playing their parts in colonial history.

Women in Politics

Although women colonists were not allowed to participate in government, they no doubt

followed the issues, and a few elite women occasionally involved themselves in political

matters. The actions of one woman, Margaret Brent, offer a rare example of women

acting in the political realm. In 1647, Brent asked the Maryland Assembly to be allowed

to vote in the assembly proceedings. A single woman, she had arrived in Maryland in

1638. She was financially very successful, owning her own land, importing and selling

servants, loaning money to new settlers, appearing in court when needed, and generally
managing her considerable financial enter-prises on her own. Brent was a trusted friend

of the colony’s governor, Leonard Calvert. When he died in 1647, Calvert’s will made

Brent execu-tor of his estate, ordering her to pay all his bills. These bills included wages

the colony owed to soldiers charged with protecting Maryland. Calvert had promised the

soldiers that they would be paid, relying on not only his own wealth but also funds from

the American estate of his brother, Lord Baltimore. But when Calvert died, Lord

Baltimore was in England, unable to respond to the mounting crisis of hungry, unpaid

soldiers threatening to mutiny. The Maryland Assembly could have raised taxes to pay

the sol-diers, but they did not want to do that, since they knew that Calvert had promised

to pay the soldiers himself.

Given this stalemate and facing a possible rebellion by armed and hun-gry soldiers,

Brent, as Calvert’s executor, decided she had to act. She went to the Maryland Assembly.

They transferred to her Lord Baltimore’s power of attorney that his dead brother had

held, so that she could sell Baltimore’s cattle and thus raise funds to pay the soldiers. At

the same time, Brent asked the assembly for the right to cast two votes: one for herself as

a landowner in the colony; a second vote for her role as the representative of Lord

Baltimore. The assembly and the governor refused her petition for the votes and, although

Brent had successfully averted the crisis, Lord Baltimore was furious at what he regarded

as her high-handed actions in selling off part of his estate. He eventually drove her from

the colony, but the assembly complained to him that he had treated Brent unfairly. The

assemblymen did “Verily Believe,” as they told Baltimore in a letter, that his estate was

safer “at that time in her hands then in any mans else . . . for the Soldiers would never

have treated any other with . . . Civility and respect.” Rather than criticism and “bitter
invectives,” wrote the members of the assembly, “She rather deserved favour and thanks

from your Honour for her so much Concurring to the publick safety.” Brent’s unusual

freedom of action stemmed in part from her unmarried status and her wealth. Property

gave women power, just as it gave men power, and the fewer the women in a community,

the more power they could exercise. In the Chesapeake, in particular, the many colonial

widows exercised considerably more power than did married women, but even mar-ried

women could be given their husbands’ power of attorney to act on their behalf. Colonel

Francis Yeardley, for instance, appointed his wife Sarah to act as his attorney so she could

conduct his business, presumably even before he traveled out of the colony. Such

conveyances, as these were called, survive in the public records of the colonies as

evidence that women did appear in public colonial life, in addition to working within the

domes-tic world of the household.

Women in War

Because of the expanding settlements in the seventeenth century, the fron-tier between

Native Americans and Europeans was never very far away. Indians traded with the

English up and down the Atlantic coast and the rivers that provided passage into the

continent’s interior. By 1650 in New England, hunters had exhausted the local supplies of

beaver and the English began demanding land in payment for the European goods that the

Indians wanted. Soon, territorial conflicts arose between the English and the Indi-ans, as

well as between Native American groups who fought with their traditional enemies. The

battles drove Native Americans from their home-lands, usually farther west. The English

then occupied those lands, building farms and settling towns. The conflicting goals of

Indians and English led to some of the blood-iest warfare in American history and
including women as both leaders and victims. The Pequot War in New England in 1637,

for example, pitted the English against the Pequot and resulted in the utter destruction of

that group. Their defeat left the Wampanoag Indians as the major power in the area.

Massasoit, the Wampanoag chief who had befriended the English in Plimouth Plantation

as early as 1621, tried his best to maintain a peace between his group and the English. It

was not to last as the English con-tinued to encroach on Indian land. Finally, Massasoit’s

daughter-in-law Wetamoo, sachem of the Pocassets, allied her forces with Massasoit’s

grand-son Metacomet, sachem of the Wampanoags and known to the English as King

Philip. Another woman sachem, Awashunkes of the Sakonnets of Rhode Island, declined

to join with them, preferring to side with the English with whom the group had strong

trading ties. Other Native groups from the area, however, joined Metacomet and

Wetamoo. Together they attacked the English. King Philip’s War lasted a year, from 1675

to 1676, and was, propor-tional to the population of the area, the bloodiest war in

American history. Indians ambushed English soldiers and burned dozens of English

towns. English militia marched against Indian villages and slaughtered men, women, and

children. In February of 1676, Indians captured Mary Rowlandson of Lancaster,

Massachusetts, a settler who later wrote a nar-rative of her captivity, which ended after

nearly three months. (See Primary Source 2–4.) Her narrative became wildly popular, a

best-seller of its time. For a time Rowlandson may have been the best-known woman in

seven-teenth-century colonial New England. Her narrative provided not only vivid

descriptions of daily life with the Indians, but also the opportunity to spread her religious

ideals, as she presented her captivity and eventual re-lease as evidence of God’s hand. An

ordinary woman, Rowlandson became a historic figure when Native and English worlds
collided and when a public record resulted.

Indian resistance in New England was matched by that in Virginia and led to a rebellion

there. By the 1660s in Virginia, declining tobacco prices and a rise in taxes brought on

hard economic times. Recently freed servants had trouble finding enough land to settle

on. Settlers in the far western reaches of the colony, called the “backcountry,” fought with

Indians in the region, and the Indians fought back. As the violence escalated, settlers de-

manded that colonial authorities protect them. Nathaniel Bacon, a newly arrived settler,

not only attacked nearby Indians without authorization, but also went to war against the

Virginia governor Sir William Berkeley when Berkeley refused to send troops to aid

Virginians on the frontier. Susque-hannock Indians continued raiding farms, killing

servants and overseers. Bacon believed that the colonial government should declare

Indians to be “outlaws,” that is, outside the protection of English law and therefore fair

game for settlers who feared for their lives and property. He also believed that Berkeley

and the elite group ruling through the House of Burgesses were “corrupt and

irresponsible.” Gov. Berkeley considered backcountry strife to be of little import. He was

far more interested in preserving the general peace with the Indians, who were in fact

protected at the time by English law.

Bacon had considerable support, not only for his attacks against the

Indians, but also for his attacks against the eastern elites ruling Virginia. Women took part

in this war as well. Sarah Grendon, a Bacon partisan, supported Bacon’s Rebellion by

spreading word of his ideas and his victories as well as criticizing Gov. Berkeley and his

wife, Lady Frances Berkeley. MARY ROWLANDSON’S CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE

Mary Rowlandson’s record of her captivity in 1676 illustrates some of the Native
American ways that English settlers still found disquieting over fifty years after colo-

nization began. “The first week of my being among

them, I hardly ate anything; the second week, I found my stomach grow very

faint for want of something; and yet it was very hard to get down their filthy trash: but the

third week, though I could think how formerly my stomach would turn against this or

that, and I could starve and dy before I could eat such things, yet they were sweet and

savoury to my taste. . . .

Other women in the backcountry wrote letters, attended meetings of the rebels, and spoke

out against the governor. The governor’s wife did not sit idly by. In defense of her

husband, Frances Berkeley traveled to England, explained her husband’s actions to the

king, then brought home three ship-loads of troops to help put down Bacon’s Rebellion in

1676. Bacon, attempting to force Virginia authorities in Jamestown to attack the Indian

raiders, successfully stood for election to the House of Bur-gesses. He then marched on

the colonial capital, where he took four lead-ing citizens, “the prime mens wives,”

hostage, using them as human shields while he built fortifications to place Jamestown

under siege. According to Ann Cotton, a Virginia woman whose letter to a friend

recorded the scene, Bacon made all four women stand atop his siege works while he

strength-ened them. He then allowed the women to leave. The governor’s troops attacked

his fortifications but the attack failed. Mistress Cotton facetiously suggested that the

charms of the ladies had “plugged up the enemy’s shot” and only an equally virtuous

power would be able to defeat the enemy. After the governor’s troops left, Bacon burned

Jamestown. The conflict that had inflamed the entire colony ended unexpectedly a month

later in October 1676 when Bacon suddenly died of the “bloody flux,” an intestinal
ailment, some four months before Lady Berkeley made it back with the English troops.

Many of Bacon’s women supporters were tried and sen-tenced to corporal punishment.

Rebel Sarah Drummond, whose husband William was hanged for his part in the rebellion,

lost the estate she ordi-narily would have inherited. Harsh punishment for women rebels

as for men seemed to be the case, and women were publicly criticized for the

inappropriateness of their behavior—not as rebels so much as women.

Brabbling Women

Elite women, such as Lady Berkeley, did appear from time to time in colonial records.

Widows, especially numerous in the Chesapeake, appear The chief and commonest food

was Ground-nuts: They eat also Nuts and Acorns,

Harty-choaks, Lilly roots,

Ground-beans, and several other weeds and roots, that I know not. They would pick up

old bones, and cut them to pieces at the joynts, and if they were full of wormes and

magots, they would scald them over the fire to make the vermine come out, and then

boile them, and drink up the Liquor, and then beat the great ends of them in a Morter, and

so

eat them. They would eat Horses guts, and ears, and all sorts of wild Birds which they

could catch: also Bear, Ven-nison, Beaver, Tortois, Frogs, Squirrels, Dogs, Skunks,

Rattle-snakes; yea, the very Bark of Trees; besides all sorts of creatures, and provision

which they plundered from the English.” Source: From “The Sovereignity and Goodness

of God . . . ,” in American Colonial Prose, ed. Mary Ann Radzinowicz (New York:

Cambridge University Press, 1984), 89, 96.

often in property transactions, wills, deeds, and lawsuits. Generally speak-ing, however,
colonial women tended to appear in the military history of the English colonies as victims

of attacks, as Rowlandson did, or, as in the case of Cotton’s description of the wives, as

hostages. Englishwomen most often showed up in public records when they deviated

from the role of goodwife that English law and tradition had assigned them. Lady

Berkeley appears precisely because she acted outside the common role most women held.

While some admired her assertiveness, overall Lady Berkeley’s actions were met with

dismay. Her public speechifying against Bacon put Lady Berkeley into a category called

“brabbling” women. Brabbling women were those who spoke in public, but whose

speech and actions were termed disorderly by their society.

Other disorderly women showed up in public records if they were act-ing the role of the

“wench,” a woman who broke the rules, perhaps even broke the law and was caught. She

might be a tavern keeper who sold drink illegally to Indians. She might be a prostitute.

She might sass authorities, rather than obeying them. She might be lazy, she might skip

church, she might be a “common scold,” a woman who scolded others in public and

indiscriminately. Communities arrested, tried, and punished women who slandered others

or otherwise defied authority with fines and whippings. Punishments also included tying

guilty parties to a chair on a pole near a pond and ducking them under the water. Women

acting outside the role of goodwives, acting as politicians, speaking publicly in a society

that said they should be silent, acting in ways that society thought they should not, all

represented a threat to the hierarchy and to the authority of the govern-ment and of men.

Despite possible repercussions to themselves, women also used infor-mal networks and

gossip to affect people’s lives and to exercise power by reporting on unacceptable

behavior in ways that could punish others, usu-ally by damaging their reputations.
Authorities in colonial communities were well aware of the power of women’s gossip in

the small worlds in which they lived. A whispering campaign could degenerate rapidly

into that most serious attack against women who did not live up to societal mores: an

accusation of witchcraft.

Witches and Witch Hunts

Accusations of witchcraft were part and parcel of colonial life. Witchcraft was the use of

“magic,” power that the authorities declared came from a witch’s association with the

devil. The earliest recorded witchcraft ac-cusation in the North American colonies was

most likely the one in 1626 against Goodwife Wright, a midwife in Kecoughtan parish in

southeast Virginia near present-day Hampton. Goodwife Wright was accused of

foretelling the future and causing breast sores on a nursing mother. In 1647, in Windsor,

Connecticut, Alice Young was convicted and executed, the first recorded execution of a

witch in the colonies. Witchcraft accusa-tions against women were also made in other

colonies, such as Pennsylvania and New York. It was in New England, however, where

witchcraft ac-cusations appear most often. Four women were executed in New England

for being witches between 1648 and 1649, including a “physic” or doctor, Margaret

Jones, who was hanged in Boston in 1648. In 1649, Eunice Cole, a woman previously

taken to court for mean-spirited and slander-ous speech, came to trial on witchcraft

charges in New Hampshire. She survived three trials, each time for “unseemly speeches”

as well as “famil-iarity” with the devil. Cole had a truculent attitude that defied social

norms for women, giving those who disliked her the ammunition to strike against her, a

common fate for a number of assertive and aggressive women. Witches were almost

always women in colonial America, and nearly all of them exhibited behavior that did not
fit the role model of a good-wife. Seventeenth-century colonists believed women accused

of witchcraft were handmaidens of Satan, causing problems throughout their commu-

nities. Witches might sour milk, cause fevers, or sicken people. They might make their

victims turn away from religion, turn away from their marriages, and commit all sorts of

dastardly deeds. Accusations of witch-craft, which might rest on something as simple as

an icy glare from an insulted neighbor, were based on perceptions of behavior and

reputation, the sorts of things that women’s networks of conversation and gossip could

readily supply. Women’s work, upon which everyone depended and which centered

around the household, also made women more vulnerable to accusations of witchcraft.

Women, after all, were the ones who usually milked the cows and took care of the sick. If

milk turned sour or people died, who easier to blame than the woman in proximity? If

people suf-fering found a woman whom they thought caused their trouble because she

was a witch, they would then bring the accused witch to the au-thorities for them to do

something about her. Authorities derived their ideas of what a witch was from works that

described witches’ behavior and appearance, such as Malleus Maleficarum, published in

1484. They also used books that recorded specific cases of witchcraft, such as Boston

minister Cotton Mather’s Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcrafts and

Possessions, published in 1689. When it came to figuring out whether someone was a

witch, the au-thorities thought about it differently than did the general population. Pop-

ular thought regarding witches was subjective. Claiming that a woman “turned me into a

newt,” for example, is an example of a witchly activity that is a subjective experience. A

man who had been turned into a newt was the only one to experience it unless he was still

a newt, which was unlikely, since he was offering testimony and newts cannot speak.
Author-ities tried not to be influenced by such personal feelings or opinions. In-stead,

they searched for objective evidence, using a scientific approach. An official might

declare, for example, that a witch “weighs as much as a duck.” The accused would then

be weighed by the authorities to determine in fact whether she weighed as much as a

duck. Once authorities selected the objective measure, they could act with legal and

physical means to produce a conviction. They could also rationalize techniques usually

forbidden, such as torture, to gain confessions from accused witches, since protection of

the community was paramount. In Salem, Massachusetts, witchcraft accusations and

trials reached a frenzied peak in 1692. Between May and October, over 150 people,

mostly women, but also some men and even a few children, were arrested and imprisoned

on charges of witchcraft. Nineteen were convicted; eighteen were hanged, and one man

was pressed to death by stones. The town seemed truly possessed—by hysteria, if not by

witchcraft. The panic began when several teenage girls began having “fits” and accusing

others in the community of bewitching them. As was the case elsewhere, the first women

accused were women outside the social norm of a goodwife. Tituba, a slave of the

Reverend Samuel Parris, started it all by telling fortunes and stories about voodoo

practices in the West Indies where she was from. Accused of witchcraft, she implicated

Bridget Bishop, a woman who fought with all three of her husbands, kept two taverns,

and dressed less modestly than people thought she should. Next was Sarah Good, a

homeless, destitute woman who was heard muttering angrily as she begged for work to

support herself. Tituba was imprisoned and Good was hanged. As the witch hunt

continued, the accusations began to touch the kind of people less commonly accused,

such as Rebecca Nurse, an elderly woman with four sons and well thought of by the
community, but vulner-able to attack since she had not remarried to reestablish her proper

role as a goodwife. She was hanged. Tavern owner John Proctor and his wife Elizabeth

were also accused. Proctor, who criticized the witch-hunt vo-ciferously after his wife was

accused, was imprisoned, convicted of witch-craft, and hanged in August of 1692.

Elizabeth was spared because she was pregnant. Most disquieting was the hanging of

Salem’s former min-ister, George Burroughs. Accused and brought to court from Maine,

where he lived after leaving Salem, Burroughs insisted he was innocent and, on Gallows

Hill, recited aloud the Lord’s Prayer, something no witch was thought capable of. Such

contrary evidence of conviction was enough to push the authorities toward doubt. One of

the leading prosecutors, the Reverend John Hale of Beverly, north of Salem, said shortly

after his wife was accused, “It cannot be imagined that in a place of so much knowledge,

so many in so small compass of land should abominably leap into the Devil’s lap at

once.” Once doubt appeared, the wheels of bureaucratic justice began to

grind. Despite more deaths (an 80-year-old was pressed to death by heavy stones after

refusing to acknowledge he was a witch, and six more women and two men were

hanged), the hunt began to lose its ferocity. Newly appointed Governor William Phips

ordered the end of the hunt. Inspired in no small part by accusations that touched upon

his wife, Lady Mary Phips, the governor also required “clear and convincing” evidence to

prove guilt. By May of 1693, those accused still languishing in jails were all freed.

The Salem witchcraft trials have long been the most visible sign of women in

seventeenth-century America. Historians have puzzled over the witchcraft craze in Salem

and surrounding Essex County for years, sug-gesting various interpretations. A

psychological interpretation took into account that the accusing girls had such poor
marriage prospects that they attacked any love interests to punish them for their

unavailability. A physiological interpretation argued that a blight called ergot on the rye

grain used to make bread the accusing girls ate gave them hallucinations interpreted as

witchcraft. Other scholars argued that economic and social tensions were the cause of the

hysteria. As the number of historians study-ing women and the impact of gender in

history increased, historian Carol Karlsen thought to ask the question that no one had yet

asked to that point: why were witches almost always women? Her interpretation cen-

tered around women who behaved in ways society found unsettling or dangerous. Such

women might be accused of witchcraft as a way to main-tain the male hierarchy in the

face of a changing or chaotic world. More recently, historian Mary Beth Norton has

argued that unrest along the colonial frontier’s contested territory contributed greatly to

the witchcraft craze, as colonists searched for supernatural explanations for colonial de-

feats in Indian wars.

All these explanations exemplify the way that historians work when trying to explain the

past. None of them can reveal the whole story. All of them together allow pieces of the

past to come to light. They also make clear the importance of including women in the

history of the country. If witchcraft and accusations related to witches had much to do

with property and economics, with wars against Indians lost by the colo-nists, with

religion and spiritual understandings of people’s place in the New World, they also had

much to do with gendered expectations of how women were supposed to act in society

and under the law. In the seven-teenth century, the English saw the New World filled with

possibilities. Interference with those possibilities, by competing colonial powers, by

Native Americans, by women trying to bypass the social hierarchies de-signed to control
them, by any forces at all, had to be met and conquered if the New World was going to

pass into the control of the Europeans who desired it. THINK MORE ABOUT IT

1. Return to the opening vignette about Lady Deborah Moody. One of the themes of this

book is that the narrative of women’s lives in what

became the United States has not been one of continued, steady progress toward greater

rights. How does her life and that of other Dutch women colonists demonstrate this

point?

2. Define the legal idea of feme covert . How is the status of women under coverture

different from that of feme sole and feme sole trader? Explain how English laws about

women played an important role in the life of the British American colonies.

3. As tobacco became a successful crop, Virginia became a land-hungry society. Discuss

how this land hunger shaped the lives of diverse women in the Chesapeake colonies. Be

sure to consider the effects on Natives, the enslaved, indentured servants, and other

newcomers to these colonies.

4. By the end of the seventeenth century, the New England and Chesapeake colonies had

developed quite differently in terms of economy, society, and religion. What were the

major consequences of these differences on women’s lives? In what areas were women’s

lives similar in both parts of colonial British America?

5. In colonial societies of the seventeenth century, women were expected to live by a

fairly strict set of social norms, some inscribed in law, others followed by custom, and

many bolstered by religious beliefs. Using specific examples, outline the norms that were

thought to govern women’s conduct and describe the consequences to women who

stepped outside these bounds. (One good place to start is by rereading Primary Source 2-
 2 on the trial of Anne Hutchinson.)

6. In what ways did women in the colonies contribute to the economic and social welfare

of their households during the seventeenth century? Offer precise detail about these

contributions. How did their position as active participants in colonial households mesh

with their legal subordination to their husbands, fathers, or masters?

7. What did you learn in this chapter that you did not know before? How does this new

information help you understand the overall story of women in American history? What

topics would you like to explore further?

 “feme sole” was a married woman who was allowed to enter into contracts and own

property in her own name.

• “feme covert” was a married woman who lost her legal identity upon marriage and

could only act through her husband.

• “feme sole” had the right to enter into contracts and own property independently,

whereas a “feme covert” did not.

• “feme covert” had no control over real estate, as it was typically owned by her

husband.

• “feme covert” had limited control over personal property, which was also typically

owned by her husband.

 Women in New England had more rights and freedoms compared to those in the

Chesapeake.
 • Women in New England were more likely to be part of families and communities,

whereas women in the Chesapeake were often isolated and dependent on their husbands.

• Women in New England were more involved in the economy and had more

opportunities for education and personal development.

• Anne Hutchinson was a woman who challenged the traditional role of women in Puritan society

by speaking out against the authority of the church and the community.

• She was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for her radical views and for challenging

the authority of John Winthrop and other leaders of the colony.

• European colonial women were more likely to be involved in domestic work and childcare,

whereas Native American women were often involved in subsistence farming and gathering.

• European colonial women were often isolated from their communities and dependent on their

husbands, whereas Native American women played a more central role in their communities.

• European colonial women had limited economic opportunities and rights, whereas Native

American women had more autonomy and control over their lives.

• Women were subject to their husbands and had limited rights and freedoms, whereas men held

power and authority over their families and communities.

• Women were often isolated from their communities and dependent on their husbands, whereas

men were seen as the breadwinners and leaders of their families.

6

• The justification was based on the idea that women were inferior to men and needed to be

protected and controlled by their husbands.

• Margaret Brent was a woman who claimed a place at the table in the Maryland Assembly,

which was an unprecedented move for a woman at that time.

• She argued that she had earned the right to speak as a counselor because she had rendered

service to the colony.

• This action shows that women had some economic and political rights, but they were still

limited and subject to male interpretation.

Parapherized:

• "Feme sole" was that married woman who was allowed to enter into contracts and own

property in her own name.

• "Feme covert" was that married woman who lost her legal identity in marriage and could only

act through her husband.

• "Feme sole" had the right to enter into contracts and own property independently, whereas a

"feme covert" did not.

• "feme covert" had no control over real estate since it was normally owned by her husband.

• "feme covert" had limited control over personal property, which was also normally owned by

her husband.

2.

• Compared to women in the Chesapeake, women in New England had greater

independence and rights.

• They were a part of their families and communities.

• They were frequently alone and reliant on their husbands.

• In New England, women had greater access to education and possibilities for personal

growth, as well as greater economic involvement.

3.

• Anne Hutchinson was a woman who questioned the customary status of women in

Puritan culture by speaking out against the church's and the community's authority.

• Because of her extreme beliefs and defiance of John Winthrop and other colony officials,

she was exiled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

• 4. Native American women were frequently involved in subsistence farming and

gathering, but European colonist women were mostly limited to household chores and

childrearing.
 • Native American women held more prominent positions in their cultures, but European

colonist women typically led solitary lives reliant on their husbands.

• Native American women had greater independence and authority to manage their own

lives, while European colonial women had fewer economic prospects and privileges.

5.

• Men had the power and authority in their households and society, while women had little

rights and were subservient to their husbands.

• Men were seen as the family's leaders and breadwinners, while women were frequently

ostracized from society at large and reliant on their husbands.

6.

• This served as justification for their authorization to guard and manage their spouses,

who were beneath them.

7.

No woman in the early colonial era accomplished what Margaret Brent did when she asserted her

right to a seat at the Maryland Assembly table as the owner of two estates. She argued that she

had earned the right to speak as a counselor because she had served the colony.

• This demonstrates that although women did have certain political and economic rights, they

were nevertheless restricted and subject to male interpretation.

ready for posting

• "Feme sole" was that married woman who was permitted to enter into contracts and own

property in her own name.

• "Feme covert" was that married woman who lost her legal identity in marriage and

could only act through her husband.

• "Feme sole" had the right to enter into contracts and own property independently,

whereas a "feme covert" did not.

• "feme covert" did not have the right of disposition over real estate as it

was usually owned by her husband.

• "feme covert" had limited rights over personal property as it was usually owned by her

husband also.

2.

• Women in New England enjoyed more freedom and rights as compared to their

counterparts in Chesapeake.

• They belonged to a family and community.

• They were often lonely and dependent on their husbands.

• There was greater availability of educational facilities and avenues for self-
 improvement for women in New England, and they were economically more active.

3.

• Anne Hutchinson was one such woman who challenged the traditional role of women in

Puritan society by challenging the authority of the church and the community.

• For her radicalism and opposition to John Winthrop, among other colony leaders, she

was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

4.

• Whereas Native American women frequently engaged in subsistence agriculture and

gathering, the activities of European colonist women were largely confined to

household duties and childcare.

•Whereas Native American women often played crucial roles in their societies, the typical

life of European colonist women was a lonely one dependent upon their husbands.

• Native American women had greater independence and authority to manage their own

lives, while European colonial women had fewer economic prospects and privileges.

5.

• Men had the power and authority in their households and society, while women had

little rights and were subservient to their husbands.

• Men were seen as the family's leaders and breadwinners, while women were frequently

ostracized from society at large and reliant on their husbands.

6.
• This was the rationale behind their right to protect and control their wives, who

were inferior to them.

7.

None of the women of the early colonial period made the claim that Margaret Brent

did in demanding a place at the table of the Maryland Assembly as the proprietor of two

estates. She claimed to have earned her right to speak as a counselor because she had

served the colony.

• This proves the fact that some political and economic rights were provided to women;

however, it was nonetheless limited and up to male interpretation.