WOMEN IN THE COLONIES In contrast to New Spain and New France, English America had far more women, which largely explains the difference in population growth rates among the European empires in the Americas. More women did not mean more equality, however. As a New England minister stressed, “The woman is a weak creature not endowed with [the] strength and constancy of mind [ofmen].”Women, as had been true for centuries, were expected to focus on what was called “housewifery” or the “domestic sphere.” They were to obey and serve their husbands, nurture their children, and maintain their households. Governor John Winthrop insisted that a “true wife” would find contentment only “in subjection to her husband’s authority.” The wife’s role, said another Puritan, was “to guide the house etc. and not guide the husband.” A wife should view her spouse with “a noble but generous Fear, which proceeds fromLove.”Not surprisingly, the lopsided power relationship in colonial households at times generated explosive tensions that festered over the years. One long- suffering wife used the occasion of her husband’s death to vent her frustrations by commissioning the following inscription on his tombstone: “Stranger, call this not a place of fear and gloom To me it is a pleasant spot— It is my hus-band’s tomb.” Another woman focused her frustrations on her own tombstone. It read: “She lived with her husband fifty years And died in confident hope of a better life.”
Women in most colonies could not vote, hold office, attend schools or colleges, bring lawsuits, sign contracts, or become ministers. Divorces were allowed only for desertion or “cruel and barbarous treatment,” and no matter who was named the “guilty party,” the father received custody of the children. A Pennsylvania court did see fit to send a man to prison for throwing a loaf of hard bread at his wife, “which occasioned her Death in a short Time.”
“WOMENS WORK” Virtually every member of a household worked, and no one was expected to work harder than women. As John Cotton, a Boston minister, admitted in 1699, “Women are creatures without which there is no Comfortable living for a man.” Women who failed to perform the work expected of them were punished as if they were servants or slaves. In 1643, Margaret Page of Salem, Massachusetts, was jailed “for being a lazy, idle, loitering person.” In Virginia two seamstresses were whipped for fashioning shirts that were too short, and a female indentured servant was forced to work in the tobacco fields even though she was sick. She died in a furrow, with a hoe still in her hands. Such harsh conditions prompted a song popular with women and aimed at those back in England considering coming to Virginia: “The Axe and Hoe have wrought my overthrow. If you do come here, you will be weary, weary, weary.”During the eighteenth century, women’s work typically involved activities in the house, garden, and fields. Many unmarried women moved into other households to help with children or to make clothes. Others took in children or spun thread into yarn to exchange for cloth. Still others hired themselves out as apprentices to learn a skilled trade or craft or operated laundries or bakeries. Technically, any money earned by a married woman was the prop-erty of her husband.Farm women usually rose and prepared breakfast by sunrise and went to bed soon after dark. They were responsible for building the fire and hauling water. They fed and watered the livestock, tended the garden, prepared lunch (the main meal) and dinner, milked the cows, got the children ready for bed, and cleaned the kitchen before retiring. Women also combed, spun, spooled, wove, and bleached wool for clothing; knitted linen and cotton, hemmed sheets, and pieced quilts; made candles and soap; chopped wood, mopped floors, and washed clothes. Female indentured servants in the southern colo-nies commonly worked as field hands.Meals in colonial America differed according to ethnic groups. The English focused their diet on boiled or broiled meats— venison, mutton, beef, and pork. Meals were often cooked in one large cast iron pot, combining “stew meat” with potatoes and vegetables, which were then smothered with butter and seasoned with salt. Puddings made of bread or plums were the favorite dessert, while beer with just a little alcohol content was the most common beverage, even for children and infants. Cooking was usually done over a large open fireplace. The greatest accidental killer of women was kitchen fires that ignited long dresses.
One of the most lucrative trades among colonial women was the oldest: prostitution. Many servants took up prostitution after their indenture was ful-filled, and port cities had thriving brothels. They catered to sailors and sol-diers, but men from all walks of life frequented “bawdy houses,” or, in Puritan Boston, “disorderly houses.” Virginia’s William Byrd, perhaps the wealthiest man in the colony, complained in his diary that he had walked the streets of Williamsburg trying to “pick up a Whore, but could not find one.”Local authorities frowned on such activities. In Massachusetts, convicted prostitutes were stripped to the waist, tied to the back of a cart, and whipped as it moved through the town. In South Carolina, several elected public officials were dismissed because they were caught “lying with wenches.” Some enslaved women whose owners expected sexual favors turned the tables by demanding compensation.
ELIZABETH LUCAS PINCKEY On occasion, circumstances forced women to exercise leadership outside the domestic sphere. Such was the case with South Carolinian Elizabeth Lucas Pinckney (1722–1793). Born in the West Indies, raised on the island of Antigua, and educated in England, “Eliza” moved to Charleston, South Carolina, at age fifteen, when her father, George Lucas, inherited three plantations. The follow-ing year, however, Lucas, a British army officer and colonial administrator, was called back to Antigua, leaving Eliza to care for her ailing mother and younger sister— and to manage three plantations worked by slaves. She wrote a friend, “Ihave the business of three plantations to transact, which requires much writing and more business and fatigue...[but] by ris-ing early I find I can go through much business.”
Eliza loved the “vegetable world” and experimented with several crops before focusing on indigo, a West Indian plant that produced a coveted blue dye for coloring fabric, espe-cially military uniforms. Indigo made Eliza’s family a fortune, as it did for many other plantation owners. In 1744, she married Charles Pinckney, a wealthy wid-ower twice her age, who was speaker of the South Carolina Assembly. She made him promise that she could continue to manage her plantations.
As Eliza began raising children, she “resolved to make a good wife to my dear husband...a good mother to my children...a good mistress to my servants [making] their lives as comfortable as I can.” She also pledged “not to be luxurious or extravagant in the management of my table [family budget] and family on the one hand, nor niggardly and covetous, or too anxiously con-cerned about it on the other.”In 1758, Charles Pinckney died of malaria. Now a thirty- six- year- old widow, Eliza refused to succumb to grief and self- pity. Instead, she redoubled her already extraordinary work ethic. She added her husband’s large planta-tions to her already substantial managerial responsibilities, in part because her demanding duties took her mind off the loss of her “dear husband.”
Self- confident, self- aware, and fearless, Eliza Pinckney signaled the possibility of women breaking out of the confining tradition of housewifery and assum-ing roles of social prominence and economic leadership.
WOMEN AND RELIGION During the colonial era, no denomination allowed women to be ordained as ministers. Only the Quakers let women hold church offices and preach (exhort) in public. Puritans cited biblical passages claiming that God required “virtuous” women to submit to male authority and remain “silent” in congregational matters. Governor John Winthrop demanded that women “not meddle in such things as are proper for men” tomanage.Women who challenged ministerial authority were usually prosecuted and punished. Yet by the eighteenth century, as is true today, women made up the overwhelming majority of church members. Their disproportionate attendance at services and revivals worried many ministers, since a feminized church was presumed to be a church in decline.In 1692, the influential Boston minister Cotton Mather observed that there “are far more Godly Women in the world than there are Godly Men.” In explaining this phenomenon, Mather argued that the pain associated with childbirth, which had long been interpreted as the penalty women paid for Eve’s sinfulness, was in part what drove women “more frequently, & the more fervently” to commit their lives to Christ.
In colonial America, the religious roles of black women were different from those of their white counterparts. In most West African tribes, women frequently served as priests and cult leaders. Although some enslaved Africans had been exposed to Christianity or Islam, most tried to sustain their tradi-tional African religion once they arrived in the colonies. In America, black women (and men) were often excluded from church membership for fear that Christianized slaves might seek to gain their freedom. The acute shortage of women in the early settlement years made them more highly valued in the colonies than they were in Europe; thus over time, wom-en’s status improved slightly. The Puritan emphasis on a well- ordered family life led to laws protecting wives from physical abuse and allowing for divorce. In addition, colonial laws gave wives greater control over the property that they had brought into a marriage or that was left after a husband’s death. But the age- old notion of female subordination and domesticity remained firmly entrenched in colonial America. As a Massachusetts boy maintained in 1662, the superior aspect of life was “masculine and eternal; the feminine inferior and mortal.”
The Great Awakening’s most controversial element was the emergence of women who defied convention by speaking in religious services. Among them was Sarah Haggar Osborne, a Rhode Island schoolteacher who organized prayer meetings that eventually included men and women, black and white. When concerned ministers told her to stop, she refused to “shut my mouth and doors and creep into obscurity.”
Similarly, in western Massachusetts, Bathsheba Kingsley spread the gospel among her rural neighbors because she had received “immediate revelations from heaven.” When her husband tried to intervene, she pummeled him with “hard words and blows,” praying loudly that he “go quick to hell.” Jonathan Edwards denounced Kingsley as a “brawling woman” who should “keep chiefly at home.” For all the turbulence created by the revivals, however, churches, even the more democratic Baptist and Methodist congregations, remained male bastions of political authority.
