First Generations, page 24
On gossip and reputation, see Mary Beth Norton’s insightful article “Gender and Defamation in 17th Century Maryland,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, XLIV (January 1987). See also Clara Ann Bowler, “Carted Whores and White Shrouded Apologies: Slander in the County Courts of 17th Century Virginia,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography LXXXV (1977).
CHAPTER 2: GOODWIVES AND BAD: NEW ENGLAND WOMEN IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
New England provides historians with more traditional sources than any other region. Letters, diaries, sermons, newspapers, and books abound, allowing scholars the opportunity to explore the mental and affective world of their subjects as well as the institutions, political and military developments, and economies that constitute the external setting for these New Englanders. Nevertheless, the most fully drawn portraits of seventeenth-century New England women come from scholars who took advantage of court records, both civil and criminal, and who employed available material culture sources to reconstruct the daily life of colonial wives, daughters, and widows. The most ambitious reconstructions are Laurel Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982) and Lyle Koehler, A Search for Power: The “Weaker Sex” in Seventeenth Century New England (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980). Working with some of the same sources, Ulrich and Koehler arrive at strikingly different conclusions about the quality of women’s lives in early New England.
Women’s roles in the great theological and institutional debates within New England Puritanism have been the subject of many studies. The Anne Hutchinson controversy has been covered in classic works such as Emory Battis, Saints and Sectaries: Anne Hutchinson and the Antinomian Controversy in the Massachusetts Bay Colony (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1962) and in Edmund Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1958), but more recent works have focused more fully on the gender aspects. See, for example, M. J. Lewis, “Anne Hutchinson, 1591-1643,” in Catherine Clinton and G. J. Barker-Benfield, eds., Portraits of American Women: From Settlement to the Civil War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991); G. J. Barker-Benfield, “Anne Hutchinson and the Puritan Attitude Toward Women,” Feminist Studies I (1973); Lyle Koehler, “The Case of the American Jezebels: Anne Hutchinson and Female Agitation During the Years of the Antinomian Turmoil, 1636-1640,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, XXXI (January 1974); Margaret W. Masson, “The Typology of the Female as a Model for Regenerate Puritan Preaching, 1690-1730,” Signs 2 (Winter 1976); Laurel Ulrich, “Vertuous Women Found: New England Ministerial Literature, 1668-1735,” American Quarterly 28 (Spring 1976); and Stephen Grossbart, “Seeking the Divine Favor: Conversion and Church Admission in Eastern Connecticut, 1711-1832,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, XLVI (October 1989). For a comparison of roles for women in the Quaker and Puritan sects, see Mary Maples Dunn, “Saints and Sisters: Congregational and Quaker Women in the Early Colonial Period,” in Janet W. James, ed., Women in American Religion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989).
Witchcraft and the witchcraft trials of 1692 have attracted the interest of scholars for many decades and prompted a variety of interpretations of the causes of the 1692 episode, the motives of both the accusers and the judges, the extent of witchcraft practice in colonial New England and its social meaning within the communities, not to mention some conflicting profiles of the typical “witch” within this society. See Marion Starkey, The Devil in Massachusetts: A Modern Inquiry into the Salem Witch Trials (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1949); Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974); Chadwick Hansen, Witchcraft at Salem (New York: G. Braziller, 1969); Carol Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (New York: Vintage, 1989); Kai Erikson, Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance (New York: Macmillan, 1966), and John Demos, Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).
A small but significant body of work exists on the legal and economic status of women in the region. Two studies of widowhood and its economic consequences are William F. Ricket-son, “To Be Young, Poor and Alone: The Experience of Widowhood in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1675-1676,” New England Quarterly 64 (1991); and Kim Lacy Rogers, “Relicts of the New World: Conditions of Widowhood in Seventeenth Century New England,” in Mary Kelley, ed., Woman’s Place: Female Identity and Vocation in American History (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979). Two works that explore gender-based differences in criminal prosecution are C. Dallet Hemphill, “Women in Court: Sex-Role Differentiation in Salem Massachusetts, 1636 to 1683,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, XXXIX (January 1982) and Henry B. Parkes, “Morals and Law Enforcement in Colonial New England,” New England Quarterly V (1932).
While demography has been central to the portraits drawn of Chesapeake women, New England scholars are just beginning to work in this field. For a look at the potential of this approach, see Richard Archer, “New England Mosaic: A Demographic Analysis for the Seventeenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, XLVII (October 1990). In a different vein, Karin Calvert’s Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood, 1600-1900 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992) suggests the potential for understanding women’s domestic life through the examination of material culture.
CHAPTER 3: THE SISTERS OF POCAHONTAS: NATIVE AMERICAN WOMEN IN THE CENTURIES OF COLONIZATION
The reconstruction of Native American women’s experiences is a challenge to scholars trained in a discipline that relies on written sources. We have turned to anthropologists and ethnographers to gain a better understanding of the gender structures of Indian society and an appreciation of the role religion and ritual played in gender ideals for Native Americans and how that role has been conveyed to us as their historians. Thus, a reader interested in pursuing the subject ought to turn to such works as Robert S. Grumet, “Sunsquaws, Shamans, and Tradeswomen: Middle Atlantic Coastal Algonkian Women during the 17th and 18th Centuries,” in Mona Etienne and Eleaner Leacock, eds., Women and Colonization: Anthropological Perspectives (New York: Praeger, 1980); Eleanor Leacock and N. Lurie, eds., North American Indians in Historical Perspective (New York: Random House, 1971); Judith Brown, “Economic Organization and the Position of Women among the Iroquois,” in Ethnohistory 17 (Summer/Fall, 1970); A. A. Goldenweiser, “Functions of Women in Iroquois Society,” American Anthropologist 17 (1915); and Bruce Trigger, “Iroquoian Matriliny,” Pennsylvania Archaeologist 48 (1978).
The most useful written sources from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries remain the reports, journals, and observations of Europeans, many of whom were priests and missionaries. Historians have learned to approach these sources with caution, for they are the products of a largely unexamined European and Christian cultural bias. Nevertheless, when used with care, these observations and commentaries are rich with information about everything from child-rearing practices to marital customs to the gendered division of labor within Indian cultures. The best collection of such sources, complete with annotations and introductions that place the document in cultural and historical context is James Axtell’s excellent The Indian Peoples of Eastern America: A Documentary History of the Sexes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981). Peter Nabokov’s Native American Testimony (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1978) is also a useful primary source collection. In addition, see Charles T. Gehring and Robert S. Grumet, “Observations of the Indians from Jasper Danckaert’s Journal, 1679-1680, William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, XLIV (January 1987), and John Lawson’s”A New Voyage to Carolina” (1709), reprinted in Hugh Lefler, ed., North Carolina History Told by Contemporaries (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1956). Historians have begun to analyze changes in the European stereotypes of Native American women and to attempt to reconstruct Indian women’s roles within their communities without the European bias of early commentators. Two of the best of these new efforts are Theda Perdue’s excellent”Indian Women: Old World Perspectives, New World Realities” (paper presented at the OAH Conference, April 1982) and E. McClung Fleming,”From Indian Princess to Greek Goddess: The American Image, 1783-1815,” Winterthur Portfolio III (1967).
Interestingly, the focus of several of the most recent studies has been on white or black women assimilated into Indian societies. These include women who entered Indian culture voluntarily as runaway slaves or, initially, involuntarily, as captives taken during raids or in warfare. The most powerful attempt to understand the motives of captives who refused to be “redeemed,” or ransomed back into white society is John Demos’s remarkable study, The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994). But see also James Axtell, “The White Indians of Colonial America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, XXXII (January 1975); Alexander Medlicott, Jr., “Return to This Land of Light: A Plea to an Unredeemed Captive,” New England Quarterly, 38 (June 1965); and Norman J. Heard, White into Red: A Study of the Assimilation of White Persons Captured by Indians (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1973). For studies that include African-American assimilation into Indian culture, see Irving Hallowell, “American Indians, White and Black: The Phenomenon of Transculturation,” Current Anthropology, 4 (December 1963); K. Porter, “Relations between Negroes and Indians Within the Present Limits of the United States,” Journal of Negro History XVII (1932); and Pauline Strong, “Captives, White and Red, in Seventeenth Century New England” (paper presented at the Sixth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, June 1984). For an analysis of the captivity tradition in literature and in history, see Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola and James Arthur Levernier, The Indian Captivity Narrative, 1550-1900 (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993).
Many major studies of Indian tribes or of critical events in the history of Indian societies still have no entries under “women” in their indexes. However, there is a growing scholarship that effectively integrates women into the narrative and considers women’s roles in the political and economic life of Indian societies. See especially Anthony F.C. Wallace’s pathbreaking study, The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970); Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); James H. Merrell, The Indians’ New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500- 1643 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); and J. Leitch Wright, Jr., Creeks and Seminoles: The Destruction and Regeneration of the Muscogulge People (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986).
CHAPTER 4: IN A “BABEL OF CONFUSION”: WOMEN IN THE MIDDLE COLONIES
As Jean Soderlund points out in her essay “Women in Eighteenth-Century Pennsylvania: Toward a Model of Diversity” (Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography CXV, 1991), women in the middle colonies have been caught between two regional female stereotypes: the New England housewife and the Chesapeake planter’s wife. Nevertheless, recent work on New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware women has gone far to help the emergence of a distinctive regional identity. For family and demographic patterns, see Robert V. Wells, “Quaker Marriage Patterns in a Colonial Perspective,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, XXIX (July 1972); Stephanie Wolf, Urban Village: Population, Community, and Family Structure in Germantown, Pennsylvania, 1683-1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976); Daniel Snydacker, “Kinship and Community in Rural Pennsylvania, 1749-1820,” Interdisciplinary History XIII (Summer 1982); Robert V. Wells, “Family Size and Fertility Control in Eighteenth Century America: A Study of Quaker Families,” Population Studies XXV (1971); Joan Jensen, Loosening the Bonds: Midatlantic Farm Women, 1750-1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); and Barry Levy, Quakers and the American Family: British Settlement in the Delaware Valley (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
The uniquely activist role women played within the Quaker faith has been a subject of interest to several historians. See Mary M. Dunn, “Women of Light,” in Carol Berkin and Mary Beth Norton, eds. Women of America: A History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979); Mary M. Dunn, “Saints and Sisters: Congregational and Quaker Women in the Early Colonial Period,” in Janet W. James, ed., Women in American Religion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989); and Jean Solderlund, “Women’s Authority in Pennsylvania and New Jersey Quaker Meetings, 1680-1760,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, XLIV (October 1987).
The discussion of women’s property rights, inheritance patterns, and economic strategies in widowhood in the middle colonies reflects the multicultural and highly commercialized character of the region. Dutch inheritance patterns are traced in David E. Narrett, “Dutch Customs of Inheritance, Women, and the Law in Colonial New York City,” in William Pencak and Conrad E. Wright, eds., Authority and Resistance in Early New York (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1988) and in Linda Biemer, Women and Property in Colonial New York: The Transition from Dutch to English Law, 1643-1727 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983). For Pennsylvania, see Marylynn Salmon, “Equality or Submersion? Feme Covert Status in Early Pennsylvania,” in Berkin and Norton, eds., Women of America: A History and Marylynn Salmon, Women and the Law of Property in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986). On widows, see the debate that emerges in Lisa Wilson (Waciega), “A ‘Man of Business’: The Widow of Means in Southeastern Pennsylvania, 1750-1850,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, XLIV (January 1987) and Deborah Gough, “A Further Look at Widows in Early Southeastern Pennsylvania,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, XLIV (October 1987). Wilson develops her arguments more fully in Life After Death: Widows in Pennsylvania, 1750-1850 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992).
Women’s work roles, particularly among the poorer classes, are examined in Paul G.E. Clemens and Lucy Simler, “Rural Labor and the Farm Household in Chester County, Pennsylvania, 1750-1820,” in Stephen Innes, ed., Work and Labor in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); in Sharon Salinger, “‘Send No More Women’: Female Servants in Eighteenth Century Philadelphia,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography CVII (1983); and in Carole Shammas, “The Female Social Structure of Philadelphia in 1775,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography CVII (1983).
CHAPTER 5: THE RHYTHMS OF LABOR: AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMEN IN COLONIAL SOCIETY
Historians of African-American women have done little work on the colonial era. Much of what we do know about black women in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries comes from scholars interested in the demographic conditions that led to the development of relatively stable slave communities and slave families. While women are central to these interdependent institutions, they are often presented as instrumental figures rather than as the direct subjects of the narrative. Few of the articles that deal with African-American work patterns or with the free black populations of the North and South are directly focused on women. Much of the work done on the seventeenth century focuses on the origins of a clearly defined slave system and on the debate over when this system was set in place. For historians of women, therefore, the challenge lies in extrapolating information about their subjects.
For example, the lives of free black women and their families can be explored in works that argue for the existence of viable free black communities in the early decades of settlement in the Chesapeake region. See Warren Billings, “The Cases of Fernando and Elizabeth Key: A Note on the Status of Blacks in Seventeenth Century Virginia,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, XXX (July 1973); Timothy Breen and Stephen Innes, ‘Myne Owne Ground’: Race and Freedom on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1640-1676 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); Douglas Deal, “A Constricted World: Free Blacks on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1680-1750,” in Lois G. Carr, Philip Morgan, and Jean Russo, eds., Colonial Chesapeake Society (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Michael Nicholls, “Passing Through This Troublesome World: Free Blacks in the Early Southside,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography XCII (1984); Ross M. Kimmel, “Free Blacks in Seventeenth Century Maryland,” Maryland Historical Magazine LXXI, no. 1 (Spring 1976); Robert Twombly and Robert Moore, “Black Puritan: The Negro in Seventeenth Century Massachusetts,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, XXIV (April 1967); James Brewer, “Negro Property Owners in 17th Century Virginia,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, XII (October 1955); and John Russell, “Colored Freemen as Slave Owners in Virginia,” The Journal of Negro History I (July 1916).
The most important works of demography that help us understand women’s life-cycle experiences and their role in the community are Russell R. Menard, “The Maryland Slave Population, 1658 to 1730: A Demographic Profile of Blacks in Four Counties,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, XXXII (January 1975); Allan Kulikoff, “The Beginnings of the Afro-American Family in Maryland,” in Aubrey C. Land, Lois G. Carr, and Edward C. Papenfuse, eds., Law, Society and Politics in Early Maryland (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977); and Kulikoff’s major synthesis of Southern African-American demography, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680-1800 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986). Kulikoff’s argument that slave communities were well established before the American Revolution is challenged by Jean B. Lee in a provocative article, “The Problem of Slave Community in the 18th Century Chesapeake,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, XLIII (July 1986). However, Philip Morgan’s “Slave Life in Piedmont Virginia, 1720-1800,” in Carr, Morgan, and Russo, Colonial Chesapeake Society, appears to corroborate Kulikoff’s position.
