First generations, p.1
First Generations, page 1
TO HANNAH AND MATTHEW
PREFACE
This BOOK, like those old Hollywood epics, has been over ten years in the making. While it may have been an editor’s nightmare, it has proven to be a scholar’s dream, for the field of early American women’s history has flourished during my decade of work on First Generations. Had this study been speedily completed in 1985, it would have been based on books and articles that could fit into a commodious briefcase—with room left over for a set of freshman exams. Fortunately, life intervened with such diversions as babies, family crises, stints in college administration, and assorted writing projects—delays which allowed me time to observe and to relish a growing literature on colonial women that has added new pieces to the puzzle of our past each day. The long delay certainly made the task of writing this book more difficult, but it made it more interesting as well.
Over the past few years I have asked my students to serve as guinea pigs for this project—assigning them to read Xeroxes of chapters as soon as they came off my printer. Their critiques have been instructive, not the least because in their responses two aspects of the same issue emerged. On one hand, many students were concerned about the tentative voice in which I often speak in this book. They told me that I should not qualify my interpretation with “perhaps” and “it is possible that.” They urged me to speak with authority, if not for my own sake, then for the sake of the discipline whose reputation I put at risk by admitting that we do not know the answers to critical questions, that scholars often disagree, that we have failed to consider important factors, or that we have let subjectivity and presentist concerns influence our reading of the past. On the other hand, an equal number of students expressed concern that the whole did not emerge from its parts, that there was no closure to the topic; in short, that the book was not a synthesis.
These concerns, no matter how delicately phrased by students who were both politic and polite, deserve to be addressed. I will offer here a few observations that may also serve as explanations. First, historians are perhaps the last of the independent artisans. They write about what interests them and employ the methods and theories they know best or that seem most appropriate. They firmly reject collective agendas no matter what group suggests them and no matter what pressing problems those agendas might promise to resolve. While these are perhaps endearing qualities, fierce individualism does have certain consequences. The literature upon which First Generations is based has not produced a body of knowledge that is equitably distributed across time or space. For example, the role of white women in the American Revolution has been the topic of countless books, producing anecdotes and accounts so extensive that it occasionally seems every woman of the era can enjoy that “fifteen minutes of fame” Andy Warhol once promised. Women of the first half of the eighteenth century, however, have failed to capture scholars’ fancies, just as women of the middle colonies are virtual historical orphans when compared to their New England neighbors. Similarly, many studies on the same issue or topic rely on such differing sources that a generalization is often problematic and sometimes downright foolhardy. In scholarship, as in fruit bowls, pears and apples sit side by side: studies of New England marriage patterns based on diaries and letters and studies of Chesapeake marriage patterns drawn from demographic data are equally valid, but they do not allow for a conclusive comparison. Finally, no collective portrait of colonial women can emerge as long as our knowledge of European women in the colonial period remains so much deeper, broader, and more particular than our knowledge of Indian or African-American women. What we know cannot be placed with enough precision upon the grid of race, class, and gender for an appropriately complex picture to emerge. Of course, a sensible scholar trembles when she announces an absence of sources. No matter how diligent she has been, no matter how dogged her investigation of journals and books, she is certain to have overlooked important new works or significant older ones. Indeed, just as I completed this manuscript, word came that Mary Beth Norton had finished what promises to be a monumental work on seventeenth-century women and a publisher forwarded a dissertation to me that makes subtle but important revisions in our knowledge of inheritance laws. The field keeps moving, yet the scholar must produce a freeze frame when she sits down to write. For these reasons, I have retained the tentative voice with which I began this project. And for these reasons, I have not tried to force pattern or order on a field when it does not yet exist.
Women’s history has come a long way since the days when scholars were expected to teach courses that ran, roughly, from “Eve to Gloria Steinem.” Still, we colonial historians continue to be asked to cover almost two hundred years of women’s experience in about fourteen weeks. I kept this in mind as I organized this book. Whenever possible, I ordered the chapters chronologically, and structured the narrative to move across time from contact and colonization, to what scholars call the maturation of colonial society, through protest and revolution, and, finally, to the decades of the early republic.
Although chronology might be said to be the frame for First Generations, the book also reflects a commitment to locate women along the axes of race, region, and social class. Where it seems appropriate and useful, therefore, I have written a chapter along the lines of one of these categories. Thus, seventeenth-century white women’s experiences are divided by region in several chapters and the lives of Native American and African-American women are explored in separate chapters. Within each chapter on European women, I have tried to refract women’s lives through the prism of class, and I have attended to life-cycle issues as well.
The resulting volume is divided into seven chapters and an epilogue. In Chapter 1, “Immigrants to Paradise: White Women in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake,” I portray immigrant and creole white women in Virginia and Maryland, and describe the adaptations their society made in family structures and inheritance patterns in response to two unusual conditions: the demographic disasters of the seventeenth century and the skewed sex ratio produced by an overwhelmingly male labor force. I also analyze the extent to which married women and widows enjoyed greater authority within the family and greater control of its economic resources than the women in the more stable patriarchal white families of New England.
Chapter 2, “Goodwives and Bad: New England Women in the Seventeenth Century,” explores the daily life of New England women as wives, mothers, and household producers in a colonial setting. Here, I examine the multiple roles married women played as “notable housewives,” and the separate and overlapping spheres of women and men. This chapter looks closely at women’s role within the church, in the Salem witch-hunts, and in struggles between white colonists and Indians for control of New England.
In Chapter 3, “The Sisters of Pocahontas: Native American Women in the Centuries of Colonization,” I examine women’s economic and political roles in East Coast Indian societies. I look at the variations in Indian women’s childhood, rites of passage, marital relationships, and mothering practices. This portrait draws on anthropological studies and accounts by European observers.
In Chapter 4, “In a ‘Babel of Confusion’: Women in the Middle Colonies,” my focus returns to European-American women, including the women of the Dutch, German, and English Quaker communities of New York and Pennsylvania. I compare Dutch marital relationships and inheritance patterns with English ones, and look at family strategies to sustain and increase wealth. I also examine the active role women took within the Quaker community and its institutions. Finally, I demonstrate that social class is a critical factor in shaping the experiences of these middle-colony women.
Chapter 5, “The Rhythms of Labor: African-American Women in Colonial Society,” explores the changes in the lives of black women and their families in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century colonial society as slavery became institutionalized. I focus on the central role women played in the creation of creole slave communities in the South. The chapter also looks at women’s work and at their marriage and childbirth patterns in both Northern colonies and Southern ones, and discusses women’s active role in slave resistance and revolt.
In Chapter 6, “The Rise of Gentility: Class and Regional Differences in the Eighteenth Century,” my focus returns to white society and moves into the eighteenth century. Here I focus upon the increasing significance of social class in shaping women’s lives throughout the colonies and on the growing distinctions in behavior and assumptions of femininity among the merchant, shipping, professional, and planter families that constituted the provincial elite.
Chapter 7, “‘Beat of Drum and Ringing of Bell’: Women in the American Revolution,” narrates the critical roles women played in the decade of protest that preceded the Revolution and the multiple ways in which their activism was channeled during the war. As this chapter shows, women demonstrated independent political commitment as boycott organizers, propagandists, fundraisers, and as protestors before independence; during the war they ran family farms and businesses, served as nurses and cooks in the army camps, saw battle both as soldiers and as surrogates for wounded husbands, and crossed enemy lines as spies, saboteurs, and couriers. I look at the experiences of loyalists and African Americans as well as patriot white women.
In the epilogue I analyze the ideological impact of revolution and independence in the lives of the women of the new nation. I also analyze the debates over the definition of citizenship for white women and trace the sources, both theoretical and material, for the controversial gender ideal, “republican womanhood.”
This book owes any of its wisdom to the many talented scholars who have researched and recovered for us the diverse and complex experiences of colonial women. Appropriately, therefore, the final section is a Bibliographical Essay that acknowledges their scholarship.
First Generations approaches the subject of colonial women and their experiences from a feminist perspective. Feminism, of course, admits to multiple meanings. But in all its forms it nurtures a sensitivity to the social construction of gender and compels us to acknowledge the historical dimensions of what each of us may feel is natural and eternal in women. I have tried consistently to bring this sensitivity to bear on the subjects of this book. I do not believe that this approach contradicts one of the fundamental points of departure for this study: no colonial woman I encountered was ever simply a woman. It was her multiple and sometimes conflicting identities that gave her life dimension and complexity.
A long list of debts trails behind a project that has taken as long as this one. First and foremost, my thanks to Arthur Wang and Eric Foner; their patience made Job look like an amateur. They never refused to assist me with intelligent and constructive criticism, and they never failed to lace their letters reminding me of missed deadlines with wit and humor. My thanks to them also for providing me with the best of editors, Tamara Straus, who helped make murky sentences clear and rambling ones concise—much to the benefit of the reader. I have also had the assistance of several young scholars in gathering, analyzing, and organizing the scholarship upon which the book is based. Their critiques of these resources and of my own work have always been thoughtful. And their willingness to play basketball in the foyer with my son while I searched for some citation was truly remarkable. They will be fine historians, regardless of their mediocre jump shots. To these students and former students—Penny Von Eschen, Kerry Candaele, Leslie Horowitz, Dewar MacLeod, Simon Middleton, Miriamne DeMarrais, Ariel Rosenblum, and Cindy Lobel—my thanks. My thanks also, this time as so many other times, to Mary Beth Norton, Barbara Winslow, and Philip Greven, colleagues who agreed to read the drafts of chapters that I thrust into their hands in college hallways, that I mailed to them in recycled manila envelopes, that I slipped into their briefcases as we ordered in restaurants, and that I forced on them in elevators at professional meetings. I would be much amiss if I did not also thank the former Dean of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Baruch College, Norman Fainstein, and the members of his Research and Travel Committee, who repeatedly and with steadfast confidence in me granted reductions in my teaching schedule so that I could complete this project.
Lastly, as every scholar can testify, research and writing are often painfully solitary activities. It is good to know, therefore, that there are friends “out there,” beyond the study’s four walls, whom we can call upon again and again. Thanks to Veronica Greenwald, who helped me learn to move from solitude to the chaos of everyday life a bit more smoothly. Also, to Andrea Balis, who swapped tales of victory and defeat in the archives with me as we drove to Jersey to grocery-shop. And to my best chum, Sally Motyka, who never failed to cheer me up with a riotous card or letter, mementos that will remain forever Scotch-taped to the refrigerator door. My friends and colleagues’ suggestions greatly improved this book; my failure to heed their warnings surely accounts for many of its flaws.
Finally, I want to commend my two children, Hannah and Matthew, for their willingness to live most of their lives eating at a dining-room table covered with Xeroxes, notecards, and books, falling asleep to the irritating sound of clicking computer keys and muffled curses, participating in frantic searches for lost pages and misplaced eyeglasses, accepting abbreviated bedtime stories, forgiving missed soccer games, and surviving the occasional mood of gloom and doom in their home as their mother worked on “that book.” That book is finally finished and it is dedicated to them —they have certainly earned it.
Carol Berkin
New York City, 1996
Table of Contents
Title Page
PREFACE
1 - IMMIGRANTS TO PARADISE: WHITE WOMEN IN THE SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY CHESAPEAKE
2 - GOODWIVES AND BAD: NEW ENGLAND WOMEN IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
3 - THE SISTERS OF POCAHONTAS: NATIVE AMERICAN WOMEN IN THE CENTURIES OF COLONIZATION
4 - IN A “BABEL OF CONFUSION” WOMEN IN THE MIDDLE COLONIES
5 - THE RHYTHMS OF LABOR: AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMEN IN COLONIAL SOCIETY
6 - THE RISE OF GENTILITY: CLASS AND REGIONAL DIFFERENCES IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
7 - “BEAT OF DRUM AND RINGING OF BELL”: WOMEN IN THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
EPILOGUE - FAIR DAUGHTERS OF COLUMBIA: WHITE WOMEN IN THE NEW REPUBLIC
ALSOBY CAROL BERKIN
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
INDEX
Notes
Copyright Page
1
IMMIGRANTS TO PARADISE: WHITE WOMEN IN THE SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY CHESAPEAKE
MARY COLE, the daughter of Robert and Rebecca Cole, was born in Maryland in January 1653. Her parents had come to the colony in 1652, probably from Middlesex, England, bringing with them Rebecca’s two children from her first marriage and two servants as well. Rebecca may have been pregnant during the long ocean voyage, for Robert Cole, Jr., was born in Maryland before the end of the year. Thus, Mary was part of a large household, and one that would continue to grow. Within the next seven years, William, Edward, and Mary’s baby sister, Elizabeth, were born at Cole’s Farm.
Mary’s father must have come from a prosperous family, for he was able to rent a 300-acre tobacco farm on St. Clements Bay, agreeably located near the Potomac River. His business accounts show that he was a prudent man and managed his plantation well. While Mary was still quite young, more servants and new acreage were added to the Cole family holdings, and the young Mary could take pride that her father was addressed as “Sir.”
Like many of his neighbors, Robert Cole was concerned that his children learn to read the Bible. Each one received instruction at home, and Mary’s brothers had a tutor who visited the farm. The youngest child, Elizabeth, may even have attended a Jesuit school in nearby Newtown. Mary’s father took care to see that his sons learned to read and also to write and do sums; for his daughter Mary it was enough that she could read and sew.
When Mary was nine years old, the Coles’ comfortable and comforting family setting began to shatter. Rebecca Cole died in 1662; in the fall of 1663, Robert Cole died while visiting England. Like many Marylanders of their era, they had met their death before the age of forty. And like many Maryland children of the seventeenth century, Mary Cole was an orphan before her eleventh birthday.
Mary Cole was luckier than most orphans. Her father, always a careful man, had set his affairs in the strictest order before departing for England. He had inventoried his possessions, made out his will, and named two of his Maryland neighbors to serve as guardians of his motherless brood. Not content to see these guardians protect the children’s material interest and see to their physical well-being, Robert Cole also charged them to provide spiritual training in the event of his death. If they failed, he warned both men, God would punish them on Judgment Day. Mary would know other orphans, neighbors and perhaps friends, who unlike herself suffered neglect or abuse at the hands of strangers or thoughtless acquaintances.
When they reached their majority, the Cole children would share many acres of tobacco land, four servants, and personal property assessed at over £200. But Mary and her brothers would not divide these assets equally. Like most of the men of the region, Robert Cole reserved his land for his sons; to his daughters, he gave movable property. At eighteen, Mary Cole received her legacy of eleven cattle, a bed, and kitchenware—all items that could be carried into a new household when she married.
Mary Cole did soon marry. Before she was twenty she had chosen a husband from the colonies’ many eligible planters. Ignatius Warren was a native Marylander who owned property across St. Clements Bay in Newtown Hundred. Warren’s family history was more typical of the region than Mary’s, for his father, like many Chesapeake colonists, had come to the region as an indentured servant. John Warren had contracted to work for another man for several years in exchange for passage to America or the promise of land when his contract expired. At the end of his term, Warren had indeed become a property owner, and even a county justice of the peace. Thus, Ignatius and Mary Cole Warren began life with the complementary assets most Chesapeake newlyweds desired: Ignatius brought land, which secured an income, and Mary brought cattle and domestic supplies, which helped establish a household.
