Colonial America

by Richard Middleton, Anne Lombard

  Even household architecture and furnishings in the seventeenth century reflected the emphasis on women's domestic production. Early immigrants to the North American colonies initially constructed simple cottages, mainly one-room affairs with a stone hearth for cooking and a loft to sleep in. New Englanders began to improve their houses within a few decades (unlike settlers in the Chesapeake, whose structures remained crude and poorly built for years, reflecting the instability of their society). Yet even when affluent seventeenth-century New Englanders began to improve their houses, the features they added were designed to make household production more efficient, such as cellars for food storage and a separate kitchen at the back. Aesthetic improvement and even comfort remained low priorities. Furniture was plain and utilitarian, consisting of simple wooden tables, benches, stools, beds, and coffers, with rush mats on the floor.

  2 Regional Variations

  Though becoming a wife in an economically independent household was a widely shared ideal, women's chances of achieving that ideal – or of achieving autonomy as a single adult – varied from one region to another, reflecting different regional economies and religious cultures. In addition, women faced different kinds of options and constraints depending on their social status as well as their age and point in the life course. Increasingly, by the end of the seventeenth century these options would also be linked to race, with white women enjoying considerably greater opportunities than African women.4

  Young single women who arrived in the Chesapeake during the seventeenth century were vulnerable and had little support. Most single white women arrived as indentured servants, alone, without family members who could protect them. The status of a female servant here was unenviable. She would confront years of back-breaking field labor in an unfamiliar and inhospitable place before being freed from her indenture, usually at around 24 or 25. She would be legally prohibited from marrying until her service ended (as would a male servant). With a gender ratio among her neighbors of three to six men for each woman, she would probably be isolated from contact with other women, and vulnerable to sexual predation from men. She would have virtually no legal protection and would face enormous legal and social restrictions.

  The story of Anne Orthwood provides a vivid illustration of a female servant's vulnerability in the early Chesapeake. An impoverished young woman from Bristol, England, with few prospects at home, Anne entered a four-year indenture and arrived in Virginia in 1662 at age 23. There she was sold and went to live in her new master's large, mostly male, household, including his family, a nephew, and nine or ten other servants and slaves besides herself. At some point Anne began a sexual relationship with her master's nephew under somewhat ambiguous circumstances. The man may have offered to buy out her contract and marry her, or he may have coerced her into accepting his advances. A servant woman who had been raped by her master or one of his male relatives had little legal recourse, since charges of rape were almost never successful with all-male juries and judges. In fact, a single woman ran great risks if she accused a man of rape. A woman who admitted to a sexual relationship potentially faced punishment for fornication. A servant woman without the money to pay her fine (or a master willing to pay it for her in exchange for an extra year of her service) would be punished with a public whipping on her bare back. In the face of such odds, unmarried women rarely brought rape charges against men who assaulted them.

  Whatever the actual circumstances of her relationship with the master's nephew, Anne became pregnant. Virginia's legal system would place most of the burden of this pregnancy and its aftermath on her alone. Under a law passed by the House of Burgesses in 1660, a female servant who gave birth during her term of service was required to repay her master for what she had cost him, including his loss of her work at full capacity during her pregnancy. Usually that meant an extra two years of service was added to her existing indenture. Then there was the problem of the baby. The local community would pursue the father to pay for child support, although the father could typically cover these costs by indenturing the baby to serve a master until he reached adulthood. In this case, Anne died shortly after giving birth, bearing the ultimate burden of an unwanted pregnancy. The surviving baby, named Jasper, was put out to a wet nurse and then bound out – at approximately six months of age – to a tobacco planter's family to work as a servant until he turned 24.5

  In the face of such profound restrictions on their freedom, servant women sometimes rebelled against prescriptive moral standards. They formed clandestine relationships, and induced abortions or committed infanticide to conceal unwanted pregnancies. They ran away and married in secret, and argued against magistrates and ministers instead of displaying the deference expected of women towards their social superiors. Such assertiveness could help a woman to escape from a dismal situation, gain a short-term respite from the pressures of her situation, or blow off steam. Yet there were great risks for those who refused to conform. Runaways were penalized by being forced to serve extra time if they were caught. While abortion was legal, at least early in the pregnancy, it was unreliable, and women could die from a badly performed procedure. Women convicted of infanticide were hanged. Women could be fined (or whipped) for uttering quarrelsome or “riotous” speech. Thus the pressures to conform to social expectations were great.6

  A white woman who outlived her indenture had considerable incentives to marry once she was freed. True, as a married women her freedom would still be circumscribed by her status as a feme covert. She would have no legal control over her own property, no right to make contracts on her own behalf, no right to the custody of her children in the case of marital separation. She was still likely to die in childbirth, if she did not die of malaria. The average life expectancy of a white woman in the early Chesapeake was around 40, compared to a male life expectancy of about 46, thanks to the added mortality risks associated with pregnancy. If her marriage was an unhappy one, she had no recourse to divorce under the laws of any of the southern colonies (and a woman who ran away from her husband forfeited all rights to her children and any property in the marriage). Still, as a married woman she would have considerably more autonomy than a servant or a single woman. As a wife, she would be in charge of household production, which was vital to a family's well-being. She would also have considerable authority over children, household servants, and the allocation of household resources.

  With the high ratio of men to women in the Chesapeake before the late 1600s, a free woman would probably also have a number of options in choosing a husband. In fact her marriage could become an important route to upward mobility since married women here were likely to become widows with property. A woman's marriage was unlikely to be a long one; the average marriage in seventeenth-century Chesapeake lasted only 10 to 15 years before the death of one of the partners. But if she was the survivor, not only would she receive her dower right (giving her control over a third of her husband's land, servants, and slaves for her lifetime), but she would have considerable control over the rest of her husband's property, held in trust for her children. Chesapeake men knew they were likely to die before their children were grown, and wrote wills leaving their widows with more than their dower thirds, often naming them as executors of their estates as well. Men's hope was to maximize their chances of keeping their children together, so in many cases they gave their widows control over considerable amounts of property to manage on behalf of their children. This meant that many widows controlled significant financial assets when they entered the marriage market for a second or third time. Thus widows in the Chesapeake during the seventeenth century assumed more financial responsibilities during their lifetimes (and had more bargaining power in arranging the terms of subsequent marriages) than did most English women.7

  Though marriage would continue to be a route to higher status for women throughout the colonial period, after about 1660 that status in the Chesapeake became increasingly restricted on the basis of race. During the earliest years of colonial
settlement, prevailing gender norms had permitted marriages between whites and blacks. In fact there was considerable social interaction between white and African servants and small farmers, and interracial marriages were not uncommon. Many English people appear to have viewed skin color as an adaptive response to climate; the idea that race was a sign of profound differences between different groups of people had not yet developed. Then beginning in the 1660s legislators in Virginia and Maryland began to impose a variety of penalties on women who entered into mixed-race unions. To a large extent these new rules seem to have been designed to strengthen the property rights of owners over children born to their female servants and slaves. Lawmakers began to pass laws prohibiting interracial marriage, specifying that children born to enslaved African women would become slaves belonging to the women's owners, and barring enslaved African women and men from marrying at all. They imposed harsh penalties on white women who bore mixed-race children out of wedlock. By 1700 or so such laws were being put into place in all of the major slaveholding colonies, and many of the northern colonies eventually followed suit.

  The long-term consequences of these laws on the lives of women and men were profound. Enslaved African women in most colonies could not marry legally at all. Even free African women had few potential marriage partners, since they could marry neither enslaved African men nor white men, and were cut off in many cases from legal marriage as a route to respectability and increased status. Since African women were generally barred from legal marriages, their sexual relationships were usually defined as outside the bounds of the law. Black women became increasingly subject to harsh stereotypes that portrayed them as less virtuous and more sexually lascivious than white women.

  Free white women who wanted the heightened status that came with marriage now had to marry white men, for the legal disadvantages of sexual relationships with black men were severe. Since interracial marriage had been prohibited, all mixed-race children would by definition become bastards, legally excluded from inheriting property from their fathers. In addition, the mixed-race children of poor free white or black mothers were often bound out as servants, not until age 21 like poor white children but for 10 years longer, to 31. White women who gave birth to mixed-race children could be fined, publically humiliated, or forced to become indentured servants for extended periods, even if they had been free at the time they gave birth. For white women, then, many of the social benefits of marriage – enhanced status, the companionship of their children, the satisfaction of seeing their children marry and have their own children – would be available to them only if they chose white partners.

  The effect of these new legal rules was to begin to define female status in racial terms. In English society married women usually enjoyed a higher status than unmarried women, since wives had considerable control over household resources, children, and servants, and enjoyed a presumption of sexual respectability that unwed women often did not. In British North American societies, especially in the South, that higher status would now be associated not only with marriage but with whiteness, since white women were virtually the only women allowed to marry. Also, since white women could become wives only by marrying white men, any intimacy between white women and black men would be stigmatized. By the eighteenth century, the allegation that a white woman had had sex with a black man became the most vicious and debasing insult that could be leveled against her, reflecting the extent to which white women's reputations for chastity were now becoming bound up with the notion of white purity.8

  Women's options in seventeenth-century New England also depended on their marital status, although their prospects were typically quite different from those of their counterparts in the South. Young, single white women in New England typically lived in nuclear families with their parents or other adult relatives. In general they were less vulnerable to sexual assault by men from outside their families, since their sexual behavior was supervised by their fathers. On the other hand they had even less sexual freedom than single women in the South. New England colonial governments expected fathers to prevent disorder in their families, and pregnancy outside of wedlock was a serious form of disorder. If fathers failed to supervise their children adequately, town governments had other mechanisms for ensuring sexual chastity. Young people could be fined for being out late at night without parental consent. Legal penalties for fornication and unwanted pregnancy were more likely to be imposed here than in the South. Another difference from the South was that in seventeenth-century New England these penalties fell upon both the man and the woman. Young people who committed fornication could be publicly whipped or heavily fined, even if they married after the behavior had occurred. Early New Englanders took these prohibitions seriously. In seventeenth-century England, rates of premarital pregnancy were as high as 25 percent (that is, one-quarter of all newly married women had a first child before they had been married for eight months), but the corresponding rate in New England during the same period was less than five percent. Daughters (and sons) in New England not only had to obtain paternal consent before they could marry; in some jurisdictions their would-be suitors even had to get a father's consent before beginning a courtship.9

  Once a white woman in New England married, on the other hand, she could expect to enjoy a long life, a relatively stable marriage, and many children. The average life expectancy for a seventeenth-century white woman in New England once she reached her twenty-first birthday was about 61. Of course as a feme covert she would have little or no control over property for as long as her husband lived. In fact her control over separate property was less than it would be for a wife living in England during the same period. Upper-class families in England were able to place legal restrictions on any real estate belonging to their daughters so that it could not be alienated by the husband, usually by placing their property into a trust. In seventeenth-century New England, though, trusts were unenforceable. The Puritans looked with suspicion on devices that aristocratic families could use to perpetuate their control over future generations, and instead sought to maximize the control that male household heads had over family property. Wifely independence was not something that Puritan governments wanted to encourage.

  The one device which the Puritans did permit for protecting women's separate property was a jointure, or marriage settlement, according to which the bride's family contributed a sum of money or personal property as a dowry. In return, the groom or his family set aside an equivalent amount in real estate in the bride's name. The property was still managed by the husband but could not be alienated to pay off creditors. If the couple did subsequently wish to sell, they could do so only with the agreement of the wife. In reality, this requirement offered little protection to a woman, since all that her husband needed to sell her property was her signature on a document that he had her sign at home.

  Although the Puritans discouraged the preservation of separate property for women, they did take seriously the ideals of marital harmony and marital love. It is hard to measure how many husbands abided by their ministers' admonitions to behave kindly and lovingly towards their wives, but many Puritan men, writing in diaries or letters, described their marriages in highly idealistic terms. And in an attempt to ensure that marriages remained harmonious, Puritans also provided certain legal protections for wives in colonial New England that other colonies did not. They were virtually unique in the Western world in allowing absolute divorce, under limited circumstances, since they took the view that marriage could be dissolved if one partner violated its terms so badly that the marriage could not continue. New Haven's legal code in 1656, for example, allowed a full divorce with permission to remarry for wives who had been abandoned, wives whose husbands were impotent, wives (or husbands) of bigamists, and victims of adultery. Puritans also seem to have taken allegations of spousal abuse more seriously than colonists in the South, intervening through the courts to police and fine wife-batterers. On the other hand, once fines had been imposed, Puritan magistr
ates insisted that women in abusive marriages go back to their husbands and admonished both spouses to behave lovingly towards each other in the future. Cruelty was not a permissible ground for obtaining a divorce in New England until the 1780s. And New Englanders' vigilance in policing male misbehavior appears to have declined during the eighteenth century, after the Puritans lost control over several of the New England governments and legal systems became anglicized.10

  White women probably had the greatest range of options, on the whole, in the middle colonies of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Unique circumstances in these colonies offered greater opportunities for women who chose to remain unmarried and encouraged the development of relatively egalitarian marriages. Under Dutch law in New Netherland before 1664, daughters tended to inherit the same shares of family property as sons when their parents died, and married Dutch women kept their own property when they married. Married Dutch women in New Amsterdam also retained their ability to make contracts (and to sue to enforce them) under Dutch law. Legal control over property gave women economic options, and a considerable number of women (wives as well as widows) operated their own shops in New Amsterdam during the seventeenth century. Quaker women in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, too, enjoyed unusual influence within their churches, where they were allowed to preach the inner light and even to serve in missions, often traveling hundreds of miles in the company of one or two colleagues. The Quakers encouraged marriages in which both women and men would be spiritual help-meets to each other, and Quaker women assumed a more important role in parenting than was typical in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century white colonial families. Some Quaker writers encouraged women not to marry if they could not find partners who would encourage their spiritual development.11