20. Chapter 12 will deal at greater length with the powers of husbands over their wives.
21. Ruth Bloch, Gender and Morality in Anglo-American Culture, 1650–1800 (Berkeley, 2003), ch. 4.
22. For statistics on dependency, see Carole Shammas, “Anglo-American Household Government in Comparative Perspective,” William and Mary Quarterly, 52 (1995), 122. The large numbers are partly explained by the high number of slaves, and partly by the fact that over half the population in the colonies were minors. The proportion of the colonial population made up of servants and slaves was also considerably higher in the colonies, 26 percent as compared with 7 percent in England during the same period.
23. Shammas, “Anglo-American Household Government.” For the importance of entail in the colonies, see Holly Brewer, “Entailing Aristocracy in Colonial Virginia: ‘Ancient Feudal Restraints’ and Revolutionary Reform,” William and Mary Quarterly, 54 (1997), 307–46.
24. Moral justifications for patriarchy (which were strongest in New England) are covered in Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers, and Anne Lombard, Making Manhood: Growing Up Male in Colonial New England (Cambridge, Mass., 2003). For the importance of family life to New England men's identities, see Lisa Wilson, Ye Heart of a Man: The Domestic Life of Men in Colonial New England (New Haven, 1999).
25. Ashley Bowen's story is recounted in Daniel Vickers with Vince Walsh, Young Men and the Sea: Yankee Seafarers in the Age of Sail (New Haven, 2005).
26. On mobility in New England, see Greven, Four Generations, 122–6; and Linda Auwers Bissell, “From One Generation to Another: Mobility in Seventeenth-Century Windsor, Connecticut,” William and Mary Quarterly, 31 (1974), 79–110. For the theory that fathers forced sons to stay by threatening to disinherit them, see Greven, Four Generations. For the theory that labor scarcity gave sons bargaining power, see Vickers, Farmers and Fishermen.
27. On Quaker families, see Levy, Quakers and the American Family.
28. The structure of gentry families is examined in Daniel Blake Smith, Inside the Great House. A recent account of the troubled relationships between father and children in one plantation household is Rhys Isaac, Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom: Revolution and Rebellion on a Virginia Plantation (New York, 2004). It used to be thought that primogeniture and entail were rare even in the South. South Carolina had abandoned entail in its legal code of 1712, while Virginia was believed to have largely given up the practice, a view based on C. Ray Keim, “Primogeniture and Entail in Colonial Virginia,” William and Mary Quarterly, 25 (1968), 545–86. However, recent work by Holly Brewer suggests otherwise. See “Entailing Aristocracy in Colonial Virginia,” in which she shows that up to three-quarters of all estates were entailed at the time of the Revolution when Jefferson brought in his bill abolishing the practice.
29. The argument that the decline of patriarchy was linked to the American Revolution is made by Melvin Yazawa, in From Colonies to Commonwealth: Ideology and the Beginnings of the American Republic (Baltimore, 1985); and by Fliegelman, in Prodigals and Pilgrims. Kenneth A. Lockridge, On the Sources of Patriarchal Rage: The Commonplace Books of William Byrd and Thomas Jefferson and the Gendering of Power in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1992) offers a different reason for the decline, arguing that misogyny accounted for the patriarchal impulses of many men and that such attitudes were becoming less acceptable as a result of the Enlightenment. Cornelia Hughes Dayton, Women Before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1639–1789 (Chapel Hill, 1995), argues that patriarchal and misogynistic views in New England were actually strengthened as the legal system became anglicized. Allan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680–1800 (Chapel Hill, 1986), also argues that patriarchy was increasing in the eighteenth century.
30. Richard Godbeer traces the dramatic changes in sexual mores and behavior during the eighteenth century as the colonists developed a more individualistic set of ideas about desire and sexual identity, in Sexual Revolution in Early America (Baltimore, 2002).
31. It was a foreign visitor, J. Hector St. John Crèvecoeur, who first propounded the notion that America was exceptional in its social structure. In an oft-quoted passage from his Letters from an American Farmer (1782), he asked: “What then is the American, this new man?” The answer was clear: “He is an American, who leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds … Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.” “From involuntary idleness, servile dependence, penury and useless labor” in Europe the newcomer “has passed to toils of a very different nature, rewarded by ample subsistence.” The belief in the egalitarian nature of American life was then passed down in American mythology. Among the more notable expositions on this theme in the twentieth century was that by Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York, 1955). For a more recent discussion, see Jack P. Greene, The Intellectual Construction of America: Exceptionalism and Identity from 1492 to 1800 (Chapel Hill, 1993).
32. Robert E. Brown, Middle-Class Democracy and the Revolution in Massachusetts, 1691–1780 (Ithaca, 1955).
33. The Brown thesis incurred considerable criticism at the time of publication, not least for its flawed statistical methodology. See John Cary, “Statistical Method and the Brown Thesis on Colonial Democracy,” William and Mary Quarterly, 20 (1963), 251–76. For the thesis on frontier democracy see Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York, 1920).
34. For wealth distribution in Maryland, see Paul G. E. Clemens, The Atlantic Economy and Colonial Maryland's Eastern Shore: From Tobacco to Grain (Ithaca, 1980); for Dedham, see Kenneth A. Lockridge, A New England Town, the First Hundred Years: Dedham, Massachusetts, 1636–1736 (New York, 1970); for Boston and other cities, see Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1979) and Race, Class, and Politics: Essays on American Colonial and Revolutionary Society (Urbana, 1986).
35. See James Henretta, “Economic Development and Social Structure in Colonial Boston,” William and Mary Quarterly, 22 (1965), 75–92; Billy G. Smith, “Poverty and Economic Marginality in Eighteenth-Century America,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 132 (1988), 85–118.
36. The emergence of a proletariat is implicit in Nash, The Urban Crucible. For a recent interpretation, see Ronald Schultz, The Republic of Labor: Philadelphia Artisans and the Politics of Class, 1720–1830 (New York, 1993). The concept of class has been used less commonly by historians writing about British America than by historians writing about Europe.
Chapter 12
White Women and Gender
1656 New Haven permits divorce for adultery, desertion, bigamy, or male impotence.
1664 Maryland provides that white women who marry enslaved African men must become indentured servants to their husbands' masters.
1691 Virginia prohibits interracial marriage.
1700 Witchcraft accusations end.
1718 Pennsylvania grants sole trader status to abandoned wives or those with absent husbands.
1739–42 Elizabeth Timothy manages the South Carolina Gazette.
1741 Eliza Pinckney introduces indigo to South Carolina.
1744 South Carolina grants sole trader status to married women engaged in business.
1745 Widow Roberts runs a coffee house in Philadelphia.
1749 Elizabeth Murray Smith (Inman) starts her dry goods and millinery business in Boston.
1766 Mrs Catherine Blaikley, “an eminent midwife” from Williamsburg, dies aged 76, having presided over 3,000 births.
1 Gender and the Settler Experience in the Seventeenth Century
THOUGH BRITISH NORTH American societies expanded the opportunities, power, and prestige available to middling white men, these
opportunities were by no means equally shared with the women in their families. Women in British settler societies were subject to a restricting set of legal rules and gender norms that created strong incentives for most women to defer to men, limiting their choices and their power. White women had few opportunities for real independence in the economically undeveloped, mostly rural societies of colonial British North America, and African American women had even fewer. At the same time, women were vital economic participants in these societies. Men who aspired to become independent yeomen or artisans depended in great measure not only on their own efforts, but on the daily, sustained productive energies of their wives. To some extent contemporaries recognized these women's economic contributions to their households, and indeed married women enjoyed a somewhat higher status than unmarried women in most cases. However, women's economic contributions to their society would not be recognized as a basis for expanding women's legal rights until long after the end of the colonial period.1
All societies, obviously, include both men and women, but societies differ dramatically in the ways in which they allocate power and divide up responsibilities between them. Scholars use the term “gender” to refer to the way in which a society differentiates between the two sexes. A society's “gender system” is the way in which this differentiation creates expectations for behavior and apportions power between men and women. Societies also develop values and beliefs that provide their members with seemingly logical or common sense explanations for their particular system of gender, which in many societies is linked with ideas about status categories such as class and race. The term “gender ideology” refers to these values and beliefs.
One important part of the gender system in English (later British) North American settler societies during the colonial period was a draconian set of legal rules which helped to prop up a male-dominated system of family and social life and created strong incentives for women to defer to their husbands and fathers, or at least not openly challenge their dictates.2 These legal rules made most women legally subordinate to fathers, masters, husbands, and even, if they became widows, to their grown sons, for most of their lives. As young women, they were subject to the legal rules governing either master–servant or parent–child relationships, including the requirement that neither servants nor children could marry without the consent of the household head with whom they lived. (They could not, however, be forced to marry against their will.) Though free adult women could marry, they would be regulated by a set of legal rules that gave enormous power to their husbands.
Thanks to the legal doctrine of coverture, developed in England during the late Middle Ages and strengthened during the seventeenth century with the growing systematization of the common law, a wife lost the legal right to control or manage any real property (that is, land) she had brought into a marriage. She lost all legal rights to any personal property she had owned before the marriage, along with any wages she earned during her husband's lifetime. In general, she would be unable to appear in court to defend her own interests in actions involving her property or contracts. Although in New England her husband was prohibited from hitting her, most colonies did not explicitly prevent a husband from “correcting” his wife as long as he did not cause her excessive physical injury. Because any property that she and her husband produced or purchased during the marriage would legally belong to him, the only right she had to it when he died was her dower right, that is, a right to use (but not to sell) one-third of her family's property. In most families that meant the widow was relegated to a back room of the house she had once inhabited with her husband, after her son and his family took it over.
Seventeenth-century Anglo-American gender ideology rationalized women's subordination to men on various grounds. Among these the most common was the theory that women were intellectually weak and ruled by their passions and therefore needed the moral and intellectual guidance of men. Typical of such views was a pamphlet The Lady's New Year's Gift, or, Advice unto a Daughter, published in London in 1688 and frequently reprinted. The author began by observing to his reader what seemed (to him) a fundamental truth: “There is Inequality in the Sexes, and that for the better Oeconomy of the World, the Men, who were to be the Law givers, had the better share of Reason bestowed upon them; by which means your Sex is the better prepared for the Compliance that is necessary for the performance of those Duties which seem to be most properly assigned to it.” He continued: “We are made of differing Tempers, that our Defects may the better be Mutually Supplied: Your sex wanteth our Reason for your Conduct, and our Strength for your Protection; Ours wanteth your Gentleness to soften and entertain us.” While seventeenth-century male writers sometimes described women in positive terms, they usually emphasized virtues that reinforced women's subordination to men in a family setting. The ideal woman was a faithful and loving consort, strictly obedient to her husband's commands, and an industrious help-meet who worked to do her husband's bidding on his farm or in his shop.
Seventeenth-century gender ideology included more overtly misogynistic ideas as well, emphasizing women's supposed sexual unreliability, their inability to manage money, and their vanity or greed. All of these qualities supposedly required women to have men to govern over them. These views were to a certain extent reinforced by the Bible, especially the early chapters on the creation. It was Eve who had eaten the apple and brought about the Fall, thanks to her greater susceptibility to temptation. As punishment she had been told, “Thy desire shall be to thy husband and he shall rule over thee.” The repercussions of stories like these were profound: every aspect of a woman's life was affected by the assumption that she was physically, mentally, and morally inferior and must at every stage be kept dependent.
Given the legal disadvantages of marriage, it is worth asking why free women in the North American colonies married at all. The reason is that marriage generally offered greater autonomy and status than remaining single. In the rural areas and small towns where most settlers lived, women had few employment options outside the household context, other than washing or household service. Most spinsters lived with relatives in a demeaning dependency. As wives, women would become partners in an economically self-supporting household. It was virtually impossible for a household to achieve economic independence without the economic contributions of at least two adults, generally a husband and a wife. And thanks to their importance to a household's economic wellbeing, wives' household work could garner the respect of their neighbors in ways it rarely, if ever, does in a modern industrialized society.
Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century convention in British North America divided productive work for the household by gender. Men were supposed to provide their wives with the supplies they needed for housekeeping – flour, firewood, meat, and the like. Women were supposed to turn those supplies into the products that their households needed to stay fed and reasonably comfortable, without going into debt. Doing all of this effectively required intelligence and skill. Wives managed the garden as well as the dairy, kept the fires lit, provided the household with clothing, preserved food, cooked, spun, baked bread, made cheese, and kept their larders well stocked and organized. It was largely women's efforts and skills that determined what standard of comfort a family would enjoy.
Indeed, wives were understood to bear considerable responsibility for the economic well-being of their families. A wife was a deputy husband, expected to promote her family's economic interests in whatever way necessary. That meant she provided back-up labor if her husband needed her in his shop or in his fields. It meant she would manage her husband's property or run his business if he was away, represent his interests in dealing with creditors, even go to court to defend his interests (though not her own individual ones). When her husband died, the widow could be the executor of his estate, conduct negotiations for her children's marriages, and run the family business until her adult sons took it over. Sometimes she would continue to manage that business herself for the rest of
her life.
Whether married or single, a free woman could usually also sell or trade anything extra that she produced – her cider or eggs or butter – to obtain other necessities and household products. If she were married, she could generally market her goods without interference from her husband, since it was understood that in marketing her surplus produce she was supplementing the resources available to her household. In addition, there were a few other ways for women to earn extra cash. The most lucrative opportunity available to free women in most regions of the colonies was midwifery, which was dominated by women at least until the 1760s, when some male doctors began to offer gynecological services. Midwives learned their trade through practice and experience, and if they became successful, could command considerable fees.
Although women in the Anglo-American colonies must have noticed the cultural message that they were incompetents who needed men to guide them, for the most part married women defined their identities in terms of their contributions to building economically successful family farms and businesses. Most of the few diaries left behind by eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century white women emphasize economic activities: work done, goods produced, trades completed.
Figure 19 Typical eighteenth-century kitchen hearth from the Abraham Browne, Jr. House, Watertown, Massachusetts. Courtesy of Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts.
Women also reinforced the importance of their household work by emphasizing domestic skills in the training they gave their daughters, as well as young female servants. Girls in farming families spent years learning the arts of making cider and beer and cheese, slaughtering hogs, drying and curing meat, manufacturing soap, carding wool, knitting, and spinning good, strong thread. As they grew older, girls made significant contributions to household labor alongside their mothers. In exchange for their labor, most young white women in the colonial era expected their parents to reward them for their economic contributions to the household by providing them with a dowry, or marriage portion, before they wed. The dowry usually consisted of household goods, blankets and bedding, tools for the kitchen, and possibly furniture, though if there was more wealth in the family it could include livestock or even land. Young women and their parents often spent years amassing the goods that would make up the dowry, which would make an important contribution to a couple's ability to become economically self-supporting.3
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