Colonial America

by Richard Middleton, Anne Lombard

  Other commercial opportunities for white women in urban areas arose as a result of the growing demand for fashionable products and European news and information. The first woman to capitalize on the English fashion for coffee houses was the Widow Roberts in Philadelphia in 1745. Ten years later Mary Ballard more ambitiously advertised her coffee house in Boston, where gentlemen could expect to find all the regular colonial newspapers, together with the best English magazines, which they could peruse while drinking their tea, coffee, and chocolate. A few exceptional widows found niches as printers. Dinah Nuthead inherited her husband's printing press at St. Mary's and was sufficiently successful to be appointed printer to the Maryland assembly. Similarly, Elizabeth Timothy inherited the South Carolina Gazette, Charleston's first newspaper, which her husband had taken over. Although she had six small children and was pregnant with a seventh, she successfully continued the paper until her eldest son was ready to take over.

  Figure 21 Portrait of Mrs James Smith (Elizabeth Murray), 1769, by John Singleton Copley. The artist has paid close attention to the details of Smith's dress, made from imported cloth as befitted a woman from a family in the mercantile elite. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of Joseph W. R. Rogers and Mary C. Rogers. Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

  White women in cities were more likely to live without husbands, in part because wage-earning opportunities were more available in urban than in rural areas. The most successful were widows with their own businesses. Also, a small but growing number of northern urban women now decided to remain unmarried, encouraged in some cases by the example of some Quakers who argued that a single state was spiritually preferable to marriage and offered women opportunities for meaningful lives devoted to religious and literary pursuits. Both widows and single women were femes soles, a legal status that allowed unmarried women to make contracts, buy and sell goods, sue to protect their rights, and testify in court. In a commercial economy, these legal rights had considerable value.17

  Although a slightly higher proportion of white women in British North America chose to remain unwed during the eighteenth century, the desirability of the unmarried state should probably not be exaggerated. By the eighteenth century single white women had considerably more freedom from their parents than earlier generations, including the freedom to conduct their own courtships. Middling white women in the eighteenth century were more likely to expect that romance and love would be a part of courtship, and these expectations probably made them more eager to marry, not less. Moreover, bearing children out of wedlock was still deeply taboo for middling white women, even if it was now acceptable for them to be pregnant at the time of the wedding. Thus despite white women's greater sexual freedom in the eighteenth century, they continued to wed.18

  Also, notwithstanding the examples of a small number of female business owners, economic opportunities for most single women remained seriously limited. Among the most disadvantaged single women were those who were technically married but whose husbands had deserted them, since they could not make contracts or sue to enforce their rights. A few colonies provided partial reforms to alleviate their situation. The Pennsylvania assembly in 1718 gave feme sole trader status to any woman whose husband was away for a long period – a mariner, for example – or had abandoned her. Such a status allowed her to make contracts, keep her profits, sue and be sued in court. The main purpose of the law was not to benefit women but to prevent them from being a burden on the community. Once the husband returned the woman lost her sole trader status. South Carolina's assembly in 1744 allowed all businesswomen the status of sole traders, regardless of whether their husbands could be found, a gesture which paradoxically acknowledged some southern men's sense of entitlement to leave their wives and take up with mistresses with impunity.

  Poor single mothers and women who were separated from their husbands typically lived on the edge, making whatever money they could by offering domestic services, from wet nursing to mending, washing, starching, and ironing clothes. Increased demand for laundering services may have been a by-product of the consumer revolution, as families aspiring to be part of the gentry demanded cleaner clothes as well as more fashionable ones. Such women's wage work paid extremely poorly. Women workers on average earned between one-quarter and one-half of what men earned for their labor, and poor urban women were never more than a few rungs up from the almshouse. The feminization of poverty was an eighteenth-century phenomenon as much as it is a modern one.

  Social commentators were quick to observe – and criticize – the impact of the emerging commercial culture on women in eighteenth-century colonial cities. Moral writers were perhaps most disturbed by the new social fluidity seemingly made possible by an enthusiastic embrace of consumer goods among middling and even lower sorts of people. The consumer revolution blurred social boundaries; a servant girl with an eye for fashion and talent as a seamstress could wear clothes that made her look a great deal like her mistress. For many critics increased access to consumer goods seemed to be conducive to pride; in other words, it encouraged people to forget their station in society. Writers also warned that the new addiction to fashion would corrupt men's daughters, making them self-centered and demanding, and destroying their virtuous modesty. And they warned that the wives of ordinary tradesmen were coming to demand so many expensive new luxuries, from silk for their dresses to chocolate and coffee and china for their tables, that they would ruin their husbands and bankrupt their families. Concerns about women's wasteful and ruinous tastes for fancy clothing were not limited to moral writers either. The diaries of wealthy eighteenth-century colonial men are full of entries about their efforts to control their wives' and daughters' spending on clothes and household goods, suggesting that eastern white women were in the forefront of changing expectations for colonial standards of living. The tone of the complaints, in turn, suggests that male household heads felt anxious about their ability to live up to the new standards.

  The frequent repetition of several key ideas in this new moral critique of consumerism suggests that male writers believed women's consumer behavior was threatening, not only family order but also men's ability to command deference and respect from women. Young men were warned to beware fashionable young women who would try to entrap them into marriages in which they would insist on being supported in grand style. Fathers were urged to control their daughters' spending habits lest they demand so much that their parents' funds would be depleted. Often, masculinity itself seemed to be threatened. Writers complained that women tempted men to buy things they did not need, like powdered wigs, which turned them from manly men into effeminate fops. A common warning was that the consumer marketplace could unleash uncontrollable desires, which would make men vain and effeminate. None of this evidence shows that gender relationships were really being transformed by the growth of commerce, or that the patriarchal family was really under threat. Rather it suggests that the growth of a consumer economy created tensions within patriarchal families as women's spending was interpreted through the lens of a traditional gender ideology that portrayed women as irrational, vain, and unable to manage money.19

  Changes in consumer behavior, most visible in colonial towns, were less apparent in rural areas, where the majority of white families in the colonies still lived. Housing styles in newer-settled communities, for example, remained fairly primitive, with log cabin construction actually becoming more popular during the eighteenth century than previously (although the houses of prosperous rural families were more likely than in the past to have plastered interior walls and glass windows). Wives, daughters, and servants in these families continued to be responsible for considerable amounts of household production. They still sewed, processed food, and manufactured most household products. Yet even in rural areas eighteenth-century women changed their routines of household production as local economies became more market-oriented, with the ultimate goal of increasing their families' standards of living.20

  Historians kn
ow from the rising number of spinning wheels found in household inventories that eighteenth-century northern colonial white women spent more time spinning than their mothers and grandmothers had. Relative rarities during the seventeenth century because of their expense, spinning wheels were owned by 50 percent of colonial households by the eighteenth century. More butter churns and cheese-making supplies, too, were being acquired by colonial households, suggesting that women were spending more time manufacturing dairy products. Other rural women took up soap manufacture and candle-making. Women in New England became weavers, taking over a craft that in England had been dominated by men since the fifteenth century. All of these occupations were time-consuming and difficult, requiring many extra hours of work each week that could otherwise have been devoted to socializing or relaxing.

  Why did eighteenth-century white women spend so much extra time working to produce yarn, butter, cheese, soap, and cloth, on top of the endless routine of food-processing, cooking, and other household tasks that still had to be done? The most likely explanation is that manufacturing household products enabled rural women to participate in the market. They could take their candles and butter and yarn to the local storekeeper and bargain to buy other household goods, such as imported tea and sugar. Producing more goods at home gave women a way to participate in the consumer revolution without having to depend on cash provided by their husbands and fathers. By selling their own products and buying other commodities, they could raise their household standards of living while demonstrating that they could manage their own money and behave rationally. Alternatively, women could use products that they manufactured at home in order to raise standards of household comfort without having to increase household financial outlays for the purchase of consumer goods. In many New England households, homemade tablecloths and coverlets and blankets provided substitutes for imported cloth, allowing families to increase their material wealth even without participating in the cash economy.21

  Ordinary white women's lives were thus moving in the opposite direction from those of their counterparts in the gentry. Instead of becoming ladies of leisure, the wives and unmarried daughters of rural families worked harder than ever in the eighteenth century, especially in the North. By the nineteenth century, such young women's textile-manufacturing skills, industrious work habits, and need for dowries would make them ideal workers in New England's emerging textile industry. The mill girls of Lowell, Massachusetts and other towns throughout New England would become virtually the first North American factory workers, continuing in the long tradition of rural northern women who defined their lives through their productive work.

  Document 17

  An Act to Enable Femes Coverts to Convey Their Estates, Georgia, 1760, reprinted in W. Keith Kavenagh, Foundations of Colonial America: A Documentary History (New York, 1973), Vol. 3, 2505–6

  The fear of dower rights on some properties inhibited land sales and the ability of owners to develop their estates. Like all southern colonies, Georgia made provision to ensure that the wife was a willing party to such transactions. Question to consider: Would the following legal rule have protected women from husbands who wanted to coerce them to sell their property?

  II. Whereas it is necessary to secure the property of future purchasers of lands and tenements as well to prevent husbands disposing without the consent of the wife what of right did or would belong to them … where a feme couvert has or may have any right in part or the whole of the lands and tenements to be conveyed and the said feme couvert does willingly consent to part with her right by becoming a party with her husband and in the sale of such lands and tenements, in such cases as these the said feme couvert shall become a party with her husband in the said deed of conveyance and sign and seal the same before the chief justice or assistant judges, or one of his Majesty's justices of the peace for the parish where such contracts shall be made, declaring before the said judge or justice that she has joined with her husband in alienation of the said lands and tenements of her own free will and consent without any compulsion or force used by her husband to oblige her so to do. Which declaration shall be made in the following words: “I, A.B., the wife of C.D. do declare that I have freely and without any compulsion signed, sealed and delivered the above instrument of writing passed between E.F. and C.D.; and I do hereby renounce all title or claim of dower that I might claim or be entitled to after the death of C.D., my said husband.”

  The growth of a commercial economy in the eighteenth century expanded white women's spheres of action in diverse ways. Their ability to make decisions not only as consumers but often as producers of goods no doubt gave them a sense of satisfaction, and may in the long run have increased their expectations for autonomy and self-determination. More important to the larger story of colonial North America, their economic decisions helped to transform the British North American economy. Women's aspirations to improve family standards of living helped stimulate demand for imports of consumer goods, which rose on a per capita basis by about 50 per cent between 1720 and 1770. Women's increasing productivity in household manufacturing contributed significantly to local economies, helping to generate the growth that paid for increases in consumption. In the long run, the vitality of these colonial economies and their growing importance as markets for British consumer goods would capture the attention of British government advisors, even changing the strategic priorities of the British empire during the 1750s.

  Nevertheless it would be some time still before the expectations created by a commercial culture would begin to change women's legal status so as to give them control over their property and their economic decisions. If anything, white middle-class women's economic activity became increasingly invisible during the nineteenth century, as Anglo-American gender ideology changed to imagine white men as competitive, economically productive citizens and white women as virtuous and delicate ladies who did no visible work. Whatever the rationale, they still lacked most of the rights of men.

  1. Historians once thought that white women's economic importance in colonial British America, along with their relative scarcity during the early colonial period, gave them an unusually high status, so that they enjoyed a kind of “golden age” during the colonial period compared to the nineteenth century. See Elizabeth A. Dexter, Colonial Women of Affairs: Women in Business and the Professions in America Before 1776 (Boston, 1931); Julia Cherry Spruill, Women's Life and Work in the Southern Colonies (Chapel Hill, 1938); and Richard B. Morris, Studies in the History of American Law, with Special Reference to the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1930; 2nd edn, Philadelphia, 1959). Later works to endorse the thesis include John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York, 1970); and Roger Thompson, Women in Stuart England and America: A Comparative Study (Boston, 1974). Today, the “golden age” thesis is no longer seriously defended. A partial list of challenges includes: Mary Beth Norton, Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (Boston, 1980); Marylynn Salmon, Women and the Law of Property in Early America (Chapel Hill, 1986); Cornelia Hughes Dayton, Women Before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1639–1789 (Chapel Hill, 1995); Kathleen Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill, 1996); Elaine Forman Crane, Ebb Tide in New England: Women, Seaports, and Social Change, 1630–1800 (Boston, 1998); Cynthia A. Kierner, Beyond the Household: Women's Place in the Early South, 1700–1835 (Ithaca, 1998); Terri Snyder, Brabbling Women: Disorderly Speech and the Law in Early Virginia (Ithaca, 2003). Indeed, some historians argue that women's legal status was more constricted in the colonies than in Great Britain.

  2. In the early years of colonization, these legal rules applied more or less equally to women of all races. As time went on the legal rules surrounding marriage became applicable mostly to white women, since increasingly they would be the only women allowed to marry, as will be explained in section 2 of this chapter. The additional c
onstraints imposed on enslaved African women are discussed in Chapter 14.

  3. Paragraphs on white women's economic roles in household production are based on Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650–1750 (New York, 1982), and Linda Sturtz, Within Her Power: Propertied Women in Colonial Virginia (New York, 2002).

  4. A fuller analysis of these regional variations may be found in Carol Berkin, First Generations: Women in Colonial America (New York, 1996).

  5. For the ubiquity of sexual assaults against servants and the difficulty of prosecuting them, see Sharon Block, Rape and Sexual Power in Early America (Chapel Hill, 2006). For the story of Orthwood and of her son's subsequent efforts to be emancipated from his indenture, see John Ruston Pagan, Anne Orthwood's Bastard: Sex and Law in Early Virginia (New York, 2003).

  6. Information on abortion is extremely difficult for historians to find, since procedures were done in secret so as to avoid the scandal associated with premarital pregnancy. The harrowing story of a botched abortion in eighteenth-century Connecticut is recounted in Cornelia Hughes Dayton, “Taking the Trade: Abortion and Gender Relations in an Eighteenth-Century New England Village,” William and Mary Quarterly, 48 (1991), 19–49. In this case, the male participants were prosecuted because the woman died, but had the abortion been successful it would have been legal.

  7. Property held by a widow on behalf of her children typically did not become the property of her new husband if she remarried, though it could be invested in ways that benefited him. The lives of white women in the Chesapeake are covered in Lorena Walsh and Lois G. Carr, “The Planter's Wife: The Experience of White Women in Seventeenth-Century Maryland,” William and Mary Quarterly, 34 (1977), 542–71, and Mary Beth Norton, “The Evolution of White Women's Experience in Early America,” American Historical Review, 89 (1984), 593–619.