Colonial America
Page 49
Still, the extent of women's autonomy even in the middle colonies should not be exaggerated. After the English took over New York in 1664, Dutch families there began slowly to give up their relatively egalitarian marriage customs and conform instead to English law and custom. Dutch men began leaving all their real estate to their sons. Instead of dividing marital property equally between husband and wife, courts adopted the English practice of restricting the widow to one-third of the husband's estate. Since women in New York had no mechanism under English law to enforce their contracts, many of them stopped trading or running shops on their own. There had been 134 female traders in New Amsterdam in 1653, but by 1774 in the considerably larger city of New York there were no more than 43.12 Quaker wives were subject to the same legal handicaps in Pennsylvania and New Jersey as wives in the other English colonies, becoming femes coverts when they married and having no access to marital trusts to protect separate property. Widows were rarely allowed to administer their husbands' estates without interference, and were almost never involved in trade or in managing money. Everywhere in the English colonies, the gender system was heavily weighted in favor of free, married white men, who had considerably more economic power than their wives and daughters.
Gender ideology applied to men as well as to women, and here too it helped to rationalize and strengthen a patriarchal social system and to encourage marriage. Colonial gender ideology suggested that manly men were rational, self-controlled, and responsible, and therefore the logical candidates to lead their households and govern their wives. At the same time, colonial gender ideology in many ways suggested that free white male household heads were morally superior to many other men as well as to women. The ideal man praised in most sermons and advice literature was almost never young, dependent, or black. Youths, servants, and enslaved Africans were consistently depicted as passionate, uncontrolled, violent, and irresponsible, while the supposed paragons of virtuous manhood were usually older than 30, free, and white. This ideological construction of manhood helped provide a logical explanation for a world in which married, adult white men owned most of the property, made most legal and political decisions, and possessed the ability to govern almost everybody else.
Gender norms suggesting that married household heads were more manly than young rakes also provided a considerable incentive for men to marry and begin families. Since manly men were thought to be more potent, that is more capable of siring children, men also had an incentive to father large families to prove their manhood. The abundant supply of relatively cheap land provided the means for families to support themselves economically, as long as everybody worked. In fact, norms combined with economic opportunities to encourage men to channel their energy into productive work. A married man who provided adequately for his family was considered to be more manly than a bachelor or a poor provider. If he provided an ample supply of economic necessities for his wife to use in her half of the family enterprise, he was entitled to deference from his wife, children, and servants. The duty to provide was a condition of the right to rule. Neighbors were likely to shake their heads with disapproval at a household head whose wife complained of being left without provisions, or whose child was poorly dressed or malnourished. Thus a man's standing in the community depended to some extent not only on having a wife who bore many children but also on having a wife whose hard work allowed her family a comfortable standard of living.13
When demographic conditions prevented considerable numbers of men from marrying, as in the Chesapeake during the seventeenth century, men sometimes developed alternative ways to assert their manhood. The men who took part in Bacon's Rebellion, for example, evidently believed that standing up to the perceived injustices of their government and defending their communities against Indian trespassers was more important than demonstrating their rationality, responsibility for a family, or self-control. Indeed white men in the British American colonies would display a disturbing tendency to assert their manhood through collective displays of vigilante violence against Native Americans, a tendency that very likely became more pronounced in backcountry regions during the eighteenth century. Assertions of the right to use violence were always a component of male gender norms. On the other hand, the ideal man in the British North American colonies was decidedly not the aristocrat who would have been idealized in much of Europe at this time. The ideal colonial man was praised for his productivity, not his adherence to a chivalric code of honor or his valiant conduct in battle. At least until the mid eighteenth century, colonial Anglo-American men proved their manhood as patriarchs rather than as soldiers or warriors.
3 Gender in a Commercializing Culture: The Eighteenth-Century Refined Lady
The expansion of transoceanic commerce in the eighteenth century brought the societies of British North America into the empire, transforming the Atlantic coastal settlements from isolated frontier outposts into increasingly prosperous and commercial British provinces. As the transmission of news and information speeded up and consumer goods became more available, colonists' expectations about appropriate standards of living began to change. Gender ideology, which had been closely tied to ideas about economic productivity and household living standards, changed along with the colonists' new economic reality. Nowhere was this transformation more visible than in the ideas of the emerging colonial gentry.
The growth of transatlantic communications made wealthy colonists in British North America both more aware of, and in a sense more connected to, the concerns and values of the British middle and upper classes during the eighteenth century. Ships that crossed the Atlantic carried not only goods but also travelers, newspapers, and mail. Visitors and letters provided a means to exchange news and strengthen relationships with friends or family members in Great Britain. Rich colonial planters and merchants began to send their sons to school in England, where they learned how to behave like British gentlemen. When the sons came home to run their fathers' businesses and plantations, they brought their new, more sophisticated manners and tastes along with them. Even the children of merchants and planters who could not afford a metropolitan education for their offspring soon had models close to home to show them what it meant to act and live like members of the British gentry. Among other things, it meant that achieving economic independence as a farmer or a business owner was no longer sufficient for a man who wished to be treated like a gentleman. In addition to independence, he had to become refined.
Refinement was a multifaceted ideal. It required people to master a particular code of behavior that had been popularized among members of the aristocracy during the previous century and was now becoming widely adopted by members of the gentry and upper middle classes in Britain. Refinement was more than simple respectability. Refined people were expected to behave more courteously than ordinary people, adopting the more sophisticated manners, conversational styles, eloquence, and even posture that were becoming recognized as the hallmarks of upper-class status in Britain. Becoming refined also meant developing particular consumer preferences and tastes, in order to demonstrate that one knew how (and could afford) to live like a gentleman or a lady. Proper housing was the first prerequisite for a refined life, and colonial merchants and planters adopted it enthusiastically.
During the first six decades of the eighteenth century, the housing of the colonial elite improved steadily in quality. The fashion favored a colonial Georgian style, featuring columns, friezes, pediments, and other decorative devices popular in ancient Greece and Rome. At the front of the typical house was a large hall, perhaps with a colonnaded entrance, which could be used for entertaining. Windows were much larger and the ceilings higher than the structures of the seventeenth century, giving the houses an airy feeling. Interiors were more finished than in the past, featuring plastered or paneled walls and wallpaper instead of the crude board surfaces of seventeenth-century walls. Second-floor bedrooms were now added to houses in order to separate public spaces from sleeping areas. Kitchens, too, were loca
ted in an adjacent block or in the rear, separate from dining rooms and parlors. Formal gardens surrounded the house to enhance its appearance, emphasizing through symmetry the triumph of civilization over the wilderness.
Figure 20 Thomas Hancock House, Boston. Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston.
Within these elegant settings, gentlemen and ladies were expected to entertain, in ways that gave them opportunities to demonstrate their good tastes through their displays of luxurious consumer goods. Graceful houses provided the appropriate backdrop for refined, genteel behavior. Serving tea required china tea sets, table linens, and upholstered chairs on which one's guests could sit. Formal dinners involved complete sets of silver and china, while for evening social gatherings a household needed card tables, punch bowls, liquor decanters. The trestle tables and stools of seventeenth-century houses were replaced by Queen Anne drop-leaf tables, sideboards, and chairs, all with matching cabriole legs and pad feet. By the end of the colonial period the elaborately carved designs of Thomas Chippendale, often with a Chinese motif, were becoming popular. All of these objects were props in a seemingly endless round of entertaining which allowed members of the new colonial gentry to exhibit their refined tastes and genteel status.14
The new spatial arrangements in elite households were designed not only to display the wealth and sophistication of the owners, but also at least in part to demonstrate that their wives did not work. A man could spend his days haggling with other merchants or supervising his slaves, but having a wife who appeared to be a lady of leisure suggested that he was of the same social status as members of the British gentry. Of course appearance could belie reality. On southern plantations, elite women actually had considerable managerial responsibilities for supervising servants and organizing food preparation and consumption. During one year, for example, the wife of Robert Carter of Nomini Hall had to oversee the consumption of 27,000 pounds of pork, 20 head of cattle, 550 bushels of wheat, 4 hogsheads of rum, and 150 gallons of brandy. But when guests were present, the wives of planters and merchants appeared in beautiful and delicate dresses looking like they had never set foot in a kitchen, while servants and slaves performed the visible labor. Their elegant, fashionable clothing made from imported silk and satin fabrics demonstrated not only that these women had the leisure time to dress like ladies but also that their husbands were sophisticated gentlemen with refined tastes in women. Meanwhile new standards of behavior also emphasized that elite white women were removed from the public world, and it became improper for such women to travel alone or otherwise appear in public places without male protection.15
Particularly in the South, the emergence of a new female gender ideal in the families of the elite changed priorities for the education of upper-class girls. Instead of teaching daughters to become housewives, genteel mothers trained their girls to develop the social polish they would need to be the wives of gentlemen. Necessary skills included French, music, and dancing, in addition to the manners of the tea table, along with reading, basic arithmetic, and beautiful handwriting. Young women's reading habits came to include a wider variety of reading materials than in the past, particularly as imported novels became available. But by and large, elite young women were not given the same level of education as their brothers, and were expected to spend much of their time socializing or engaged in busy work while they waited to be introduced to appropriate suitors. Clothing, dancing skills, or musical accomplishments could provide means of self-expression, but in general there were not many avenues for meaningful work. Elite young women quickly became stereotyped as frivolous and wasteful.
An occasional woman like Eliza Lucas Pinckney provided an exception. She was the daughter of a British army officer and South Carolina planter, George Lucas, who gave her an unusually thorough education that included more reading in law, science, and literature than an average upper-class girl would have received in addition to training in the social skills expected of a gentleman's wife. Lucas entrusted her with the management of his plantations while absent on military service. Both father and daughter were interested in developing imported plants, especially from the West Indies, including indigo, ginger, cotton, and cassava. The most successful was indigo, though it was not easy to grow since both the soil and the processing of the leaves required careful preparation. The first crop was harvested in the early 1740s, and in 1744 Eliza Pinckney produced only seeds so that her neighbors might also begin to cultivate the plant. Indigo exports were sufficiently promising by 1748 for Parliament to offer a bounty of sixpence a pound to encourage production.
The new standards of refinement not only shaped ideas about class and gender; they also impacted economic behavior. Eighteenth-century gentlemen in North America became eager consumers of imported manufactured goods, including calicoes from India, silks from China, fustians from England. They bought glassware, porcelain, and beaver hats from British manufacturers, and specialty food items such as tea, chocolate, coffee, sugar, and wine from producers elsewhere in the empire. Some luxury items could be manufactured in the colonies, and local craftsmen developed the capacity to meet the growing demand for Queen Anne tables and fine silverware. However, most goods had to be imported. The cost of maintaining such consumption levels was high, but an upper-class family could hardly do without. After all, the consumption of certain kinds of goods was a crucial component of refinement, and without refinement the colonial gentry could not claim to be genteel. Unfortunately, as we have seen, the cost of maintaining a genteel lifestyle was often higher than even the most successful tobacco exporters could pay for, and the great planters of Virginia and Maryland had become chronically indebted to their British factors by the middle of the eighteenth century.
4 Gender in a Commercializing Culture: Middling and Working White Women
Though most white women in North America during the eighteenth century were not members of the genteel elite, the commercialization of eighteenth-century colonial culture impacted middling white women's lives as well. The availability of imported consumer goods encouraged many people outside the colonial elite to aspire to higher standards of living. Economic independence, or competence, remained a powerful ideal for middling men and women. Yet the ideal was increasingly becoming broader. No longer was it enough to provide food, shelter, and the resources necessary for the next generation to become self-supporting. Increasingly something like comfort was expected as well, at least in long-settled areas of the colonies.
One clear marker of changes in the standards of living of middling people during the eighteenth century was the improvement in housing in older villages and towns. Middle-ranking farmers or self-employed craftsmen often now lived in rectangular houses, consisting of two main rooms on the first floor and two bedrooms between the eaves, with a lean-to kitchen at the rear. The typical construction was clapboard over a timber frame, with brick becoming more common in city dwellings. Houses now had glass windows, though with smaller panes and overall dimensions than in the houses of the gentry.
Manufactured consumer goods, too, became more readily available for purchase by ordinary white households after about 1730, especially in urban areas. Shops in Boston, Newport, New York, Philadelphia, and Charlestown carried an array of goods: imported cloth, ribbons, hats, pins and needles, glassware, paint, books, wine, tea, chocolate, sugar, tobacco, iron hardware and tools, locally manufactured candles and soap. Since women were the members of a family who made most decisions about how to feed and clothe a family, it was largely women who made purchases from these shops. During the eighteenth century, middling households became more likely to own products like teapots, china cups, glassware, napkins, and silver or pewter cutlery, not the luxuries of the elite but nevertheless objects that made their daily lives more comfortable. Semblances of refinement, too, crept into middling white women's daily lives as they adopted the rituals of drinking tea with other women, or served their families breakfast on china tableware instead of the wooden trenchers or
plain ceramic bowls their mothers and grandmothers would have used. Women's clothing became more fashionable and more colorful, representing a new means of self-expression, especially for young women.16
Life in colonial towns and cities in the eighteenth century not only provided more access to consumer goods; it also gave some urban women more autonomy than their counterparts who lived in rural areas. Urban wives were more likely to earn wages or to work in shops alongside their husbands, where they could develop sidelines marketing to female customers. Wives of haberdashers and dry goods merchants, for example, developed profitable businesses as milliners and dressmakers, often acquiring sufficient business skills to continue if their husbands died. One of the more notable milliners was Elizabeth Murray Smith (Inman) of Boston, who in 1749 established a small dry goods shop before her marriage to a Boston merchant. After his death she returned to the millinery business before deciding to remarry. This time she protected her right to trade by insisting on a prenuptial agreement, and when her second husband died, Murray became one of the wealthiest individuals in town. For a white British North American woman, Murray was exceptional in her dedication to a career, and in her constant encouragement of other young women to follow her example by developing entrepreneurial skills. However, other women followed suit in less visible types of businesses. It was not uncommon for urban women, usually widows, to keep grocery shops and drugstores, or to sell alcohol at inns and taverns.