What defines a woman's
identity?
What forces shape the
terms of her life?
What are the economic,
social, political, intellectual
and personal conditions which affect women most directly?
colonial era "golden
age" for women?
race, ethnicity, class,
wealth, family position, geographic location, and individual circumstance.
pregnancy, childbirth
& childrearing.
women died roughly one
out of every thirty deliveries.
New England better than
South or England.
25% babies who survived
birth, died during first years.
Colonization -- economic
and population pressure in Europe; discover & exploit natural resources,
convert "heathen savages", add to greatness of home country, religion.
Jamestown military or
trading posts -- four or more single men for every unmarried woman.
European patriarchal
social order -- women, servants, slaves, men without property denied right to
vote & hold public office
Iroquois world created
by woman; descendants "three sisters" -- corn, beans & squash.
Women central to sacred
ritual.
Iroquois matrilineal
(inheriting thru female line) & matrilocal (live in wife's house).
Iroquois clan matrons
had some group political power -- not allowed in Council of Elders.
European stereotype:
dark = ugly, promiscuous;
liaisons between
European men & Native American women
- but European women forbidden by law Virginia from marrying Native
American or African men, "tainting" purity.
1720s, 1730s, as many as
one out of two or three brides in Mass. pregnant at wedding;
Law important form of
control, both reflecting & enforcing community values.
English common law.
Principle of "coverture"
-- married women represented in civil matters by husband.
Married woman
technically "feme covert" (covered woman), exchanging rights for protection of
husband -- legal incompetent, equivalent to children, criminals or idiots.
Justified as natural
order --subject's obedience to a king; family as divinely sanctioned social
order, basis of stability -- at least in theory.
Widows legally "feme
sole" (single woman).
Family as economic unit,
women essential skills -- resource management, use of time.
Poem New Hampshire woman
1782:
Up in the morning I
must rise
Before I've time to
rub my eyes.
With half-pin'd gown,
unbuckled shoe,
I haste to milk my
lowing cow.
But, Oh! It makes my
heart to ache,
I have no bread til I
can bake.
And then, alas! It
makes me sputter,
For I must churn or
have no butter.
The hogs with swill
too I must serve,
For hogs must eat or
men will starve.
division of labor not
straightforward --
men made cider, women
beer;
men chop wood, women
make soap;
some jobs gender-neutral
- weaving, milking cows, carrying water
picked up husbands'
craft, then took over business if widowed;
Elizabeth Holt
publication New York Journal, state's official printer during
Revolution.
Anne Franklin and
daughters ran printing business for Rhode Island;
1733 widows' letter protesting
exclusion from male-only business gatherings: "We are House keepers, Pay our
Taxes, Carry on Trade, and most of us are she Merchants, and as we in some
measure contribute to the Support of Government, we ought to be Intitled to
some of the Sweets of it."
Nantucket whaling;
Run boarding houses, taverns,
stores; midwives, nurses;
Indentured servants;
Salem witch trials:
Europe: Malleus
Maleficarum ("the Witches' Hammer") Dominican monks 1484: women's
inferior minds made them "more credulous, and since the chief aim of the
devil is to corrupt faith, therefore he attacks them. Women are naturally more impressionable, and more ready to
receive the influence of a disembodied spirit."
1500s & 1600s
"the great witch craze";
(hundred thousand at
least; some historians say millions)
Pope's special officials
in Germany, executing two witches per day average.
1595 Spanish government
warrant making elderly women prime suspects in cases of sorcery.
Last known execution
1722 in Scotland;
Puritan minister Cotton
Mather denounced descendants of Eve for human downfall.
1692, Salem:
accusations start
against three women - Tituba, West Indian slave, outsider;
within months, 19 people
(16 women) executed; more than 100 more in jail
accused wife of governor
& wife of one of respected minister.
Cotton Mather urged
women follow "daughters of Zion," be like Bathsheba -- subordinate helpmates,
"virtuous women" preserve home & values.
Puritanism --religious
reform 16th C England -- arrived New England 1630. Rigid hierarchy --
husband over wife, parent over child, master over servant, whites over Indian
heathens.
Anne Bradstreet
(1612-1672) -- daughter & wife of Puritan leaders. Religiously prescribed role of goodwife - yet quiet defiance
& individuality through poetry.
Puritan education of
girls, reading (not writing);
Bradstreet tribute to
Queen Elizabeth I:
Now say, have women
worth? Or have they none?
Or had they some, but
with our Queen is it gone?
Nay, masculines, you
have thus taxed us long,
Let such as say our
sex is void of reason,
Know Ôtis slander now
but once was treason.
poems published
anonymously England 1650,
Bradstreet defended her
right to write:
I am obnoxious to
each carping tongue
Who says my hand a
needle better fits,
For such despite they
cast on female wits.
St Paul, "let your women
keep silent in the churches; for it is not permitted unto them to speak."
radical nonconformist
Protestant sects,
Anne Hutchinson,
(1591-1643)
1636 called before
alarmed ministers -- accused of "a thing not tolerable or comely in the sight of
God nor fitting for your sexÉ you have stepped out of your place, you have
rather been a husband than a wife, and a preacher rather than a hearer, and a
magistrate rather than a subject."
Heresy, claiming God
spoke directly to her -- excommunicated & banished;
strong assertive woman,
alternative model to quiet goodwife Anne Bradstreet.
Mather worried women's intellectual independence &
spiritual freedom might lead to sexual liberation -- labeled Hutchinson "sexual
deviant," an unnatural woman. Hutchinson's followers in trouble.