First Generations, page 25
Women’s family life is also explored by other historians. Particularly useful are Darrett Rutman, Charles Wetherell, and Anita Rutman, “Rhythms of Life: Black and White Seasonality in the Early Chesapeake,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History XI (Summer 1980); Herbert Foster, “African Patterns in the Afro-American Family,” Journal of Black Studies XIV (December 1983); Merle G. Brouwen, “Marriage and Family Life: American Blacks in Colonial Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography XCIX (July 1975); Joan Gundersen, “The Double Bpnds of Race and Sex: Black and White Women in a Colonial Virginia Parish,” Journal of Southern History LII (August 1986); Cheryll Cody, “Naming, Kinship and Estate Dispersal: Notes on Slave Family Life on a South Carolina Plantation, 1786-1833,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, XXXIX (January 1982); and Herbert Gutman, “Marital and Sexual Norms among Slave Women,” in Nancy Cott and Elizabeth H. Pleck, eds., A Heritage of Her Own: Toward a New Social History of American Women (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979).
Work patterns and the gendered distribution of tasks have been examined by several historians. Their scholarship has allowed us to identify the distinctive organization of labor on tobacco plantations and rice plantations and to trace the shift in women’s work roles between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They have also allowed us to consider the impact of an internal slave economy, independent of the work performed for the slave masters. The best sources are: John T. Schlotterbeck, “The Internal Economy of Slavery in Rural Piedmont Virginia,” in Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan, eds., The Slaves’ Economy: Independent Production by Slaves in the Americas (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1991); Carole Shammas, “Black Women’s Work and the Evolution of Plantation Society in Virginia,” Labor History XXVI (Winter 1985); Sarah S. Hughes, “Slaves for Hire: The Allocation of Black Labor in Elizabeth City County, Virginia, 1782 to 1810,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, XXXV (April 1978); Philip Morgan, “Work and Culture: The Task System and the World of Lowcountry Blacks, 1700 to 1880,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, XXXIX (October 1982); Philip Morgan, “Task and Gang Systems: The Organization of Labor on New World Plantations” and Lorena Walsh, “Economic Diversification and Labor Organization in the Chesapeake, 1650-1820,” both in Innes, Work and Labor in Early America.
The publication of Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman’s collection of articles, Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution (Evanston: University of Illinois Press, 1983) was a major step in reconstructing the lives of African Americans in the last half of the eighteenth century and the early years of the republic. In that volume Gary Nash explored the impact of emancipation on Northern blacks in “Forging Freedom: The Emancipation Experience in the Northern Seaport Cities, 1775-1820”; Allan Kulikoff looked at black migration in”Uprooted Peoples: Black Migrants in the Age of the American Revolution, 1790-1820”; and Richard Dunn offered a portrait of “Black Society in the Chesapeake, 1776-1810.” Other scholars have also focused on the impact of the war on African-American life and a few have looked explicitly at the experiences of black women during this era. See, for example, Debra L. Newman, “Black Women in the Era of the American Revolution in Pennsylvania,” Journal of Negro History LXI (July 1976); Jean Soderlund, “Black Women in Colonial Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography CVII (January 1983), and Suzanne Lebsock, “Free Black Woman and the Question of Matriarchy: Petersburg, Virginia, 1784-1820,” Feminist Studies VIII (1982).
Little work has been done on women’s resistance to slavery in the mainland colonies. Gerald Mullin, Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth Century Virginia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974) examines male and female runaways and rebels, but the best source on women remains Betty Wood, “Some Aspects of Female Resistance to Chattel Slavery in Low Country Georgia, 1763-1815,” Georgia Historical Journal XXX (September 1987).
CHAPTER 6: THE RISE OF GENTILITY: CLASS AND REGIONAL DIFFERENCES IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Historians have documented the distinctive differences based on social class and region in the lives of eighteenth-century colonial white women. The most inclusive discussions of these differences can be found in Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800 (Glenview, Ill.: Scott Foresman, 1980) and Cary Carson, Ron Hoffman, and Peter Albert, eds., Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1994). The reader should also look at Carole Shammas, “How Self Sufficient Was Early America?” Journal of Interdisciplinary History XIII (Autumn 1982) and at Lois G. Carr, “Diversification in the Colonial Chesapeake: Somerset County, Maryland, in Comparative Perspective,” in Carr, Morgan, and Russo, eds., Colonial Chesapeake Society.
On the development of genteel family relations, Jan Lewis has written most extensively. See her full-length study, The Pursuit of Happiness: Family Values in Jefferson’s Virginia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), but see also her “Domestic Tranquillity and the Management of Emotion Among the Gentry of Prerevolutionary Virginia,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, XXXIX (January 1982) and her joint study with Kenneth Lockridge, “‘Sally Has Been Sick’: Pregnancy and Family Limitation Among Virginia Gentry Women, 1780-1830,” Journal of Society History XXII (Fall 1988). Genteel child-rearing methods are central to Philip Greven’s excellent study, The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child-Rearing, Religious Experience, and the Self in Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977) and to Ross W. Beales, Jr., “Nursing and Weaning in an Eighteenth Century New England Household,” The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, Annual Proceedings, 1985 (Boston: Boston University Press, 1987).
Changes in inheritance patterns and in the laws regulating women’s right to own or manage property are the subject of numerous studies. For the best overview of the laws governing women’s relationship to property, see Salmon, Women and the Law of Property in Early America and her review article, “The Legal Status of Women in Early America: A Reappraisal,” Law and History Review. But see also the several fine studies of particular regions or localities, including: Lois G. Carr, “Inheritance in the Colonial Chesapeake,” in Hoffman and Albert, eds., Women in the Age of the American Revolution; Jean B. Lee, “Land and Labor: Parental Bequest Practices in Charles County, Maryland, 1732-1783,” in Carr, Morgan, and Russo, eds., Colonial Chesapeake Society; Linda Speth, “More than Her ‘Thirds’: Wives and Widows in Colonial Virginia,” Women and History 4 (1982); Lisa Wilson, Life After Death: Widows in Pennsylvania, 1750-1850; Carole Life After Death: Widows in Pennsylvania, 1750-1850; Carole Shammas, “Early American Women and Control Over Capital,” in Hoffman and Albert; and Lorena Walsh, “The Experiences and Status of Women in the Chesapeake, 1750-1775,” in Walter J. Fraser, Jr., R. Frank Saunders, Jr., and Jon L. Wakelyn, eds., The Web of Southern Social Relations: Women, Family and Education (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985).
Historians have begun to look more closely at poverty, widowhood, and the opportunities for work available to women in economic need. See, for example, Alfred Young, “The Women of Boston: ‘Persons of Consequence’ in the Making of the American Revolution, 1765-1776,” in Harriet Applewhite and Darlene Levy, eds., Women and Politics in the Age of the Democratic Revolution (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993); Carole Shammas, “The Female Social Structure of Philadelphia in 1775,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography CVII (1983); Gary B. Nash, “The Failure of Female Factory Labor in Colonial Boston,” Labor History XX (Spring 1979); Gloria Main, “Gender, Work and Wages in Colonial New England,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, LI (January 1994); and Gloria Main, “Widows in Rural Massachusetts on the Eve of the Revolution,” in Hoffman and Albert.
CHAPTER 7: “BEAT OF DRUM AND RINGING OF BELL”: WOMEN IN THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Women’s participation in the decade of protest that preceded the Revolutionary War has been richly covered in the many books, both scholarly and popular, that began to appear as the bicentennial of the American Revolution approached. This intense interest in eighteenth-century women culminated in the publication of two major studies, Mary Beth Norton’s Liberty’s Daughters and Linda Kerber’s Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), works that set the parameters of discussion and debate about the topic for over a decade. Even before the bicentennial celebration spurred these modern authors, however, a nineteenth-century writer, Elizabeth Ellet, produced three volumes of biographical sketches entitled Women of the American Revolution (1848-1850). Ellet’s work was a paean to the white, primarily elite women, like Martha Washington, who she believed inspired patriotic actions in their husbands and sons. The first scholarly examination of women’s role in pre-Revolutionary activity also preceded the bicentennial by some three decades. In 1947, Elizabeth Cometti published an article that described the arenas of women’s patriotic activity and the forms that activity took. Her “Women in the American Revolution,” New England Quarterly XX (September 1947) remains the starting point for anyone interested in the topic. The best modern treatment can be found in Norton’s Liberty’s Daughters. Among the dozens of popular studies that have been published, the best are Elizabeth Evans, Weathering the Storm: Women of the American Revolution (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975) and Sally Smith Booth, The Women of ‘76 (New York: Hastings House, 1973).
Few scholars since Cometti have analyzed the significance of how women’s Revolutionary participation sharpened their political consciousness or have traced the traditions women drew upon when they protested and demonstrated, although Mary Beth Norton and I address these issues in our introductions to the essays in Women of America. Two recent articles have focused our attention on these issues: Alfred Young, “The Women of Boston: ‘Persons of Consequence’ in the Making of the American Revolution, 1765-1776,” in Applewhite and Levy, eds., Women and Politics in the Age of the Democratic Revolution; and Laurel Ulrich, “Daughters of Liberty: Religious Women in Revolutionary New England,” in Hoffman and Albert, eds., Women in the Age of the American Revolution. For an earlier analysis of women’s participation in a comparative perspective, see Carol Berkin and Clara Lovett, eds., Women, War and Revolution (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1980).
The best study of women camp followers remains Walter H. Blumenthal, Women Camp Followers of the American Revolution (New York, Arno Press, 1952). For the best discussion of the problems engendered by a home-front war—scarcity and rape, in particular—a reader can turn to Kerber’s Women of the Republic and to Mary Beth Norton, “‘What an Alarming Crisis Is This’: Southern Women and the American Revolution,” in Jeffrey Crow and Larry Tise, eds., The Southern Experience in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978). A fuller sense of the impact of the war, particularly on Loyalist exiles, can also be acquired from Mary Beth Norton, “Eighteenth Century American Women in Peace and War: The Case of the Loyalists,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, XXXIII (July 1976). For a discussion of the impact of the war on African-American Loyalist refugees, see Vivian Kruger, “Born to Run: The Slave Family in Early New York, 1626-1827” (1985 dissertation, Columbia University).
EPILOGUE: FAIR DAUGHTERS OF COLUMBIA: WHITE WOMEN IN THE NEW REPUBLIC
The search for the significance of the Revolution in women’s lives has been as intense as the search for the significance of women in the Revolutionary struggle. In the early 1970s, Linda Kerber published two important articles on a postwar shift in gender roles and ideals to what she called “republican motherhood.” Since the publication of these essays, “Daughters of Columbia: Educating Women for the Republic, 1787-1805,” in Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, eds., The Hofstadter Aegis (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974) and “The Republican Mother: Women and the Enlightenment—An American Perspective,” American Quarterly XXVII (Summer 1976), the debate over an ideological and functional transition in women’s lives during the Revolutionary era has continued unabated. The question of the nature, origins, and extent of change has been linked to questions of a change in status for women in the new republic. To explore this debate, the reader can turn to the following: Joan Hoff Wilson, “The Illusion of Change: Women and the American Revolution,” in Alfred Young, ed., The American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1976); Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Women’s Sphere” in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); Norton, “Eighteenth-Century American Women in Peace and War: The Case of the Loyalists”; Nancy Cott, “Divorce and the Changing Status of Women in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, XXXIII (October 1976); Mary Beth Norton, “The Paradox of Women’s Sphere,” in Berkin and Norton, eds., Women of America; and, finally, to the two full-scale treatments of these issues, Norton’s Liberty’s Daughters and Kerber’s Women of the Republic. For an analysis of the historiography up to this point, the reader can turn to my “Remembering the Ladies: Historians and the Women of the American Revolution,” in William Fowler, Jr., and Wallace Coyle, eds., The American Revolution: Changing Perspectives (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1979). In 1987, Jan Lewis revived and altered this debate by challenging the centrality of motherhood to the new ideology for American women. In her provocative article, “The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, XXXXIV (October 1987), Lewis argued that a woman’s role as virtuous wife was the critical element in her new civic identity. Ruth Bloch argues for the same emphasis on a virtuous wife in two important articles, “American Feminine Ideals in Transition: The Rise of the Moral Mother, 1785-1815,” Feminist Studies IV (1978) and “The Gendered Meanings of Virtue in Revolutionary America,” Sign: Journal of Women in Culture and Society XV (Spring 1990).
Several historians have focused their attention on the material rather than the ideological impact of the Revolution on women of the new republic, framing the issue in terms of “gains” or “losses.” This question of progress is central to Joan Hoff Wilson’s article “The Illusion of Change,” as it is to the meticulous and important work of Marylynn Salmon on women’s legal rights and restrictions. The reader should turn to Salmon’s “‘Life, Liberty, and Dower’: The Legal Status of Women after the American Revolution,” in Berkin and Lovett, eds., Women, War and Revolution and to her Women and the Law of Property in Early America. Carole Shammas picks up the question of women’s economic and legal power after the Revolution in her article “Early American Women and Control over Capital,” in Hoffman and Albert, eds., Women in the Age of the American Revolution. Other scholars have looked at the impact of the Revolution on women’s educational opportunities. The best work on this subject is Ann D. Gordon, “The Young Ladies’ Academy of Philadelphia,” in Berkin and Norton, eds., Women of America, but readers should also turn to Kerber and Norton’s 1980 studies for coverage of this important reform.
Recently, historians have turned their attention to the existence of a dichotomy between “public” and “private” spheres and its significance for women in shaping a civic or political identity. For an introduction to this aspect of the discussion, see Linda Kerber, “‘I have Don … much to Carrey on the Warr’: Women and the Shaping of Republican Ideology after the American Revolution,” in Applewhite and Levy, eds., Women and Politics in the Age of the Democratic Revolution; “Beyond Roles, Beyond Spheres: Thinking about Gender in the Early Republic,” a Forum in William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, XLVI (October 1989); and Cynthia S. Jordan, “‘Old Words’ in ’New Circumstances’: Language and Leadership in Post-Revolutionary America,” American Quarterly XL no. 4 (December 1988).
INDEX
The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages of your eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.
Adams, Abigail
Adams, John
African Americans: African traditions of; black life cycle of; in Chesapeake colony; childbearing among; child-rearing among; creole (native-born) vs. immigrant slave experience of; family and kinship among; free blacks; internal economy of slaves; laws and; life expectancy of; marriage among; midwives among; mortality of; population of; racial discrimination and; records of; religion of; after Revolution; in Revolution; runaway slaves; sex ratios of; slave culture of; slave quarters of; slave trade and; slavery in North of; slavery in South of; on tobacco plantations; women’s work of
Algonquin peoples
American Revolution, see Revolution, American
Andros, Edmund
Anglican Church
Bates, Ann
