First Generations, page 18
Working women could not expect to be paid well, nor could they expect wages on a par with men. In New England, the disparities were ensured by local authorities, who set the ceilings on wages for both sexes. As late as 1777, the maximum weekly wage for a New England domestic servant was the same as the maximum daily rate for male farm laborers in the summer. Female tailors could expect only 37 percent of what a male tailor earned. In the New England countryside, women’s agricultural wages were desperately low between 1715 and the 1750s. Women farm laborers in Pennsylvania fared even worse. The influx of immigrants into the middle colonies at mid-century both drove down the wages for everyone and increased the available male labor pool. Thus, Chester County, Pennsylvania, women found themselves shifted into domestic tasks such as spinning for less than fivepence a day.
Not all women who needed to earn a living found their employment in the homes or fields of their neighbors. Some ran small businesses of their own—dry goods or liquor shops, greengrocer-ies, taverns, inns, or millinary establishments. Some turned to prostitution. Others ran schools, while still others provided medical care not connected to childbirth, such as bone setting, a practice known as “doctoring.” Many of these women were members of households headed by a man of modest or dependent means, but others came from the growing ranks of widows, unmarried women, abandoned, deserted, or runaway wives that filled the eighteenth-century cities and were present in the small towns, rural counties, and parishes of every colony.
A great chasm separated an Eliza Lucas Pinckney, who lived off the profits made on slave labor, indigo, and rice from a Rachel Seal, who earned three shillings for making caps and hoods and “bleeding” farmer Hawley’s daughter. Yet both a plantation mistress and a woman servant were likely to be dependent on a male for their economic status. What was true in the seventeenth century remained largely true in the colonial world of the eighteenth: women enjoyed little unconditional control over the wealth of their society. Daughters did receive dowries, wives support, and widows a share of the realty and personalty in their husband’s estate. Yet the wealth that came to women was rarely theirs permanently or absolutely. A bride relinquished her dowry to her groom, a wife turned over her earnings to her husband, and a widow could enjoy the use of her husband’s real property but could not divert it from his heirs. Only three colonies—Pennsylvania, Maryland, and South Carolina—created the equity court system needed to ensure that a woman could retain a separate estate in marriage. Elsewhere, the ideal of marital unity—with its assumption of identical interests expressed in male prerogative—ensured white women’s lifelong dependence.
Re-creating women’s relationship to property and wealth is more difficult than it may first appear. Although the fiction of “marital unity” influenced most colonial jurists and lawmakers, the laws drawn up by each colony were not the same. Historians trace this lack of uniformity to a number of factors. First, colonies settled in the early seventeenth century were guided by English laws that had changed by the time Pennsylvania or Georgia was established. Second, colonies often ignored changes in English law regarding inheritance. Instead, colonial lawmakers and jurists insisted on preserving or even strengthening practices that England had decided to abandon. Third, some colonies simply ignored English law or custom because it did not mesh with local religious values, with demographic circumstances, or with emerging economic patterns. For legal scholars, many of the variations that resulted, especially between regions, make sense. But the motives for other, equally significant legal differences are, frankly, difficult to discern, especially when we cannot look to regional differences or religious ones for possible motives.
The almost bewildering lack of uniformity in colonial inheritance laws is not the only roadblock to our reconstruction of the relationship of women and property. The difference between formal legal rights and actual daily practice is equally important. Many women did not know of the existence of advantageous laws, and many more did not have the resources to use them. Only the wealthiest South Carolinians or New Yorkers, for instance, created the separate estates that equity courts made possible. And, if we understand the role that property and inheritance laws played in shaping women’s lives, we cannot be certain to understand women’s attitudes toward them. An eighteenth-century widow did not view the dispensation of her husband’s estate simply from a self-interested perspective but from her vantage point as mother and perhaps grandmother of her competitors for that wealth.
For most white women, there were two critical moments of contact with inheritance law and practice: dowry and dower. Both dowry, a daughter’s marriage gift, and dower, a widow’s share of the marital estate, were part of the inevitable competition among family members for the resources they collectively had created. Male heads of household had to weigh the advantages of preserving the integrity of the estate against the rightful claims to it from widow and children. This dilemma was reflected in the intestacy laws developed by each colony. In New York, Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina, primogeniture ensured that the bulk of the estate passed to the oldest son, once the widow’s share had been resolved. But most colonies rejected primogeniture, substituting instead a double share of the father’s real property for the oldest son. Of course, by writing a will, men in every colony could attempt their own solution to the conflict between preserving the estate intact and distributing it among their heirs. Whether a man had made a will or, like the majority of colonial fathers, died intestate, the smaller his estate, the more difficult it was to determine its ownership.
How did daughters fare when men sat down to address this problem? Most fathers with any means made dowry provisions for their daughters that were transferred before the parent’s death. Thus a daughter’s share of the family resources might not appear in her father’s will. But whether she received her share on the occasion of her wedding, or at her father’s death, alloting a daughter’s inheritance was always problematic. If a daughter took land into her marriage, it generally passed into the control of her husband. As long as she remained childless, she had absolute rights to her own property and it did not become part of her husband’s estate. But with the first child, her father’s gift became her husband’s asset; as a “tenant by curtesy”—the legal recognition that he was the guardian of their children—he acquired control over the property’s use and determined who would inherit it. A bride’s personalty became the property of her groom even more quickly. Faced with the possibility that “marital unity” would not be blissful, or that a husband might not always be guided by protective impulses toward his wife’s welfare, wealthy fathers sometimes devised means to restrict ownership of the property they gave to their daughters. For example, a Maryland planter might not grant his daughter land in fee simple—that is, as an outright, unrestricted transfer of property—but gave it only as a life estate, naming her children as its ultimate owners. This ensured that a less than perfect husband could not sell the land, even if he did have the right to manage it.
Although a Chesapeake planter might view land as a risky gift to his daughters, some, especially from the wealthier classes, chose to take that risk. Between the 1730s and the 1780s, for example, more than one-fifth of all daughters of landowners in Charles County, Maryland, received use or ownership of land. In early eighteenth-century Baltimore County, two-thirds of the planters with 400 acres or more gave land to their daughters. And in Virginia, one-fifth of the testators between 1735 and 1775 provided their daughters with real property. Often, the intention was to provide security for an unmarried daughter, even if it worked to a son’s disadvantage. By giving an unmarried daughter the use of property as long as she was single, a father delayed its transfer to the actual heir—her brother.
Most planter fathers shied away from transferring as much real property to daughters as they gave to sons. Instead, they provided daughters with one of the most valuable personal assets they had: slaves. Daughters of wealthy planters received more slaves than did sons in Maryland, in South Carolina, and perhaps in the other Southern colonies as well. And they received more female slaves than male. In Charles County, for example, 60 percent of the female slaves provided to children went to daughters, while 60 percent of all male slaves went to sons. The assumption was that female slaves would produce additional assets—children. To protect these gifts from abuse by irresponsible sons-in-law, fathers carefully worded the terms of their bequest: slaves went to daughters “in full and perfect property” for her use and for the use of the heirs of her body—and for “no other person.”
Propertied fathers in other regions, where slaves were not as numerous and a less critical resource, had less flexibility in resolving the problems of providing for all children and protecting what they provided to their daughters. In the Northern colonies, fathers did what they could to ensure that their own death did not set in motion the dissolution of the family. Sons may have been considered the rightful heirs to property, but they were often required by their father’s will to care for their mothers and their unmarried sisters until another man took up the burden of their dependency.
A daughter who remained forever single or childless might realize a measure of economic independence and autonomy from her inheritance. But most women expected to marry and to bear children. They had the satisfaction of knowing that their fathers wanted to provide for them, even if it meant the dilution of the value of the estate. But they surely understood that their parent’s intention was not the same for them as for their brothers. When a colonial father wrote his will, he did not envision a permanently independent or entrepreneurial daughter; he saw instead a child who needed, and deserved, protection.
A wife was expected to relinquish all management and control over her dowry. A widow, however, could expect to take out of a marriage some portion of the wealth she had contributed to it. Eighteenth-century colonists, like seventeenth-century society, continued to protect a woman’s dower rights. Dower acknowledged her economic contribution to the marriage—not simply the property she had brought into it as a bride, but also her industry and energy during her years as wife and mother. English common law established that the widow of an intestate man was entitled to the use of one-third of all land owned over the course of the marriage and, until English law changed, absolute rights to one-third of his personalty. If there were no children, the widow received half his personal estate. In either case, a widow was entitled to reclaim her own “paraphernalia.”
All colonies acknowledged, and protected, dower, although they did not always calculate dower in the same fashion. The differences could be significant. For example, most colonies, when calculating a widow’s dower share, included all the property a husband had owned over the lifetime of the marriage. Pennsylvania and Connecticut did not. A widow in these colonies could expect her “thirds” only in the property he held at his death. There was no agreement among the colonies on what property fell into which category. Here, too, the consequences could be serious. In Eliza Lucas Pinckney’s South Carolina, and in Maryland as well, slaves were defined as personalty. Widows in these colonies thus enjoyed absolute ownership of the African-American men and women they received. This meant that Eliza Pinckney was able to will her slaves to her children or grandchildren—or to any heir she might choose, simply because her husband’s home had been in Carolina. Friends in Virginia were not as lucky. There, slaves were realty and thus a widow held them only during her lifetime. Nor did the colonies always protect a woman’s property rights in the same ways. Many colonies carved out the dower share before any other claims could be made on a man’s estate. But neither Pennsylvania nor Connecticut was willing to exempt dower from the claims of creditors. Indeed, in Pennsylvania, a man’s creditors had to be satisfied first, leaving the widow any assets that remained. Connecticut was less severe; it made creditors wait until a widow’s death before collecting their due. Yet neither Pennsylvania’s Quakerist tendencies toward gender equality nor Connecticut’s legacy of radical Protestantism prevented these two colonies from sacrificing a widow’s rights to commercial considerations.
If a man left a will that denied a widow her “thirds,” most colonies allowed her to reject the legacy and sue for her rightful share. But the decision to renounce a legacy did not imply an ungenerous or an unjust husband. For the wife of a debt-ridden farmer, merchant, or planter, dower might simply be the wiser choice, since most colonies refused to protect a testator’s legacy from creditors. Lawmakers may have assumed that a widow did not know the extent of her husband’s debts or assets, for they gave her from six months to a year to make the decision to renounce or accept a legacy. This grace period allowed her time to discover the extent of her husband’s debts. Some colonies also willingly granted extensions to newly widowed women. Such consideration was made up of equal parts kindness and practicality, for a widow deprived of her “thirds” was one more woman the community would have to support.
Dower was thus a public as well as a private concern. And most colonies took steps to protect it, even before a husband’s death. Recognizing that the most significant portion of a woman’s dower came from her husband’s real property, the Southern colonies in particular did not allow a husband to sell any of his realty without the knowledge—and consent—of his wife. The procedures established tell us much about gender assumptions in eighteenth-century colonial America. They were based on the assumption that obedience to a husband’s will was so ingrained, so pervasive, and so central to a married woman’s identity that the mere presence of a husband would prevent her from expressing her true opinion or desires. Colonial courts demanded, therefore, that the wife be examined in private regarding any possible land sale.
Were the colonial courts’ assumptions of women’s timidity or subservience valid? We cannot say. It is difficult to picture Eliza Lucas Pinckney, who laid claim to her father’s oak plantation as a teenager, meekly acceding to her husband’s sale of properties. But all women were not so bold or confident. We do know that many men took their wife’s compliance for granted, ignoring the private examination procedure altogether and disposing of land without her prior knowledge—and sometimes without informing her at all. We also know that few wives demanded that such sales be declared invalid. Their motives, unrecorded, remain unclear. Perhaps they were loath to publicly reprimand their spouse. Perhaps they felt it was important, or admirable, to put their faith in their husband’s judgment—at any cost. Or perhaps they gave greater priority to the future prosperity of their children than to their own. To such women, profitable land sales might seem an end that justified the means.
Allowing a husband free rein to build his fortune through land investments and sales may have been one of the few positive gestures a mother could make to influence her children’s future. Women owned a negligible share of the wealth in colonial society and so had little to pass on to the next generation. Like her children, a woman was a dependent, and her dependence put her in direct competition with her sons and daughters for family resources. A widowed mother—left a share of the family home, the family’s land and slaves, or the profits from a family farm until her death or remarriage—was an obstacle, though perhaps a loved or honored one, to a son and his full inheritance. Wives knew this. And although they may have had limited knowledge of their husband’s assets or debts, they also knew that any inheritance strategy developed by a responsible man had to balance obligations to her with obligations to his children. That some men found such choices difficult can be seen in the will left in 1757 by Virginia farmer Samuel Cobb. A man of modest means, Cobb gave his wife, Edith, all his land, not for use but in fee simple, and he gave her most of his personal property as well. He explained his decision to give Edith “extensive Power,” writing: “She has been my Wife near Forty Years during which Time hath always been Kind, loving and obedient to me without affection. My children are hers I commit them to her care.” Cobb understood well the choice he had made between his children and his widow. “As my circumstances are now I could not provide for both,” he wrote bluntly, “and I do think it my Duty to provide for a Wife now in Decline of life who so well Deserved it from me.”
Not every man of the time would make the same choice Samuel Cobb did. Over the course of the eighteenth century, colonists employed a variety of inheritance strategies. Poorer men tended to leave more to their widows. Men with small children, especially in newly settled regions, tended to do the same. Like their seventeenth-century predecessors, they relied on their widow to act as the caretaker of their estate, preserving it for their heirs. Men with adult children, on the other hand, often favored these children over their widows in their wills. In Bucks County, Pennsylvania, some men abandoned the practice of leaving the farm to their widow, giving her instead a portion of the family home and some share of the yearly farm profits. This allowed a husband to provide adequately for his wife, and a father to give his children what immediate economic assistance he could. In other areas, men took more drastic steps. In Baltimore County, Maryland, 15 percent of the men who left wills in the first quarter of the century left their widow nothing at all, dividing their estate among their sons and daughters.
Strategies were not simply a matter of what a widow or a child received but of when a son or a daughter gained control of their inheritance. Fathers could—and did—speed up the process by placing restrictions on their widow’s legacy. Where once a widow’s use of land extended over her lifetime, for instance, her husband now might stipulate that it cease if she remarried. For these husbands, a desire to provide more speedily for sons and daughters combined with a desire to keep their inheritance out of the hands of another man.
