Colonial Dames and Good Wives

Colonial Dames and Good Wives

Colonial Dames and Good Wives* by Alice Morse Earle is a wide-ranging social history of women in colonial America, drawing on court records, diaries, letters, newspaper accounts, and contemporaneous narratives to reconstruct the daily lives, roles, struggles, and achievements of women from the earliest settlements through the Revolutionary era. The work opens by examining the deliberate importation of wives into the Virginia and Louisiana colonies, where male settlers vastly outnumbered women. Earle describes the 1620 arrival of ninety young English women at Jamestown, where planters paid one hundred and twenty pounds of tobacco apiece for a bride, and contrasts this with the less successful French experiment of sending Parisian girls to Louisiana, where the women rebelled against frontier conditions and corn-based diet in what became known as the Petticoat Rebellion. She traces the various classes of women who came to the colonies as bond-servants, including convicts, redemptioners, and kidnapped persons, showing how many eventually married into respectable families despite their circumstances. Earle then surveys the social institution of widowhood, demonstrating that colonial widows occupied a uniquely powerful position in society. They were eagerly sought as wives by ambitious men, including future presidents Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Franklin, and their remarriages often occurred with startling speed. Through detailed examples drawn from Boston, Virginia, and Maryland records, she shows how widows managed estates, conducted business, and served as indispensable economic anchors in communities where mortality rates were high and frontier conditions demanding. A substantial portion of the book is devoted to establishing that capable, independent businesswomen were not a modern invention. Earle documents women merchants, printers, newspaper publishers, shipbuilders, plantation managers, and agricultural experimenters across all the colonies. She traces in particular detail the Goddard family of Rhode Island, whose mother and daughter ran newspapers with professional competence through the Revolutionary period, and the Green, Rind, Timothy, and Zenger widows who similarly assumed editorial and printing responsibilities. She credits Eliza Lucas Pinckney with single-handedly establishing the indigo industry in South Carolina through years of patient experimentation, an achievement she argues had more economic impact on that colony than almost any other enterprise of the era. Earle examines women of unusual political and intellectual force, giving extended treatment to Margaret Brent of Maryland, who in 1648 became the first woman in America to demand the right to vote and to representation in a legislative assembly, and who had already served as the colony's de facto administrator after the governor's death. She discusses Anne Hutchinson, whose theological meetings attracted scores of Boston women and ultimately threatened the political stability of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, resulting in her banishment. She profiles Lady Deborah Moody, Elizabeth Haddon, and other women who established communities or managed substantial affairs independently. The book addresses punishment, slander, witchcraft, and social control, describing the ducking stool, pillory, stocks, cleft stick, gagging, and public shaming used to discipline women deemed scolds, gossips, or social disrupters. Earle treats the witch trials with measured skepticism, noting that in most cases, examination of court records reveals a pattern of social antagonism preceding the accusation, as in the cases of Goody Garlick of Easthampton and Grace Sherwood of Virginia. She discusses the courage of women who defended their homes against Indian raids, including Hannah Dustin, who killed and scalped ten of her captors. Earle also chronicles women of adventure and imposture, including the pretended Louisiana princess of possible Russian royal descent, and Sarah Wilson, a transported English convict who successfully passed herself through the southern colonies as a sister of Queen Charlotte. She devotes a long and affectionate chapter to the journal of Madam Sarah Knight, who in 1704 rode on horseback from Boston to New York and back, recording her experiences with vivacity and wit. The later sections describe domestic amusements, social customs, courtship, weddings, and the gradual emergence of dancing assemblies, sleighing parties, turtle frolics, fishing clubs, and balls as features of colonial social life. Earle notes that despite outward formality, private manners were often surprisingly rough and familiar. She documents the popular taste in novels, the fashion for sentimental correspondence under classical pseudonyms, and the tension between intellectual aspiration and social expectation in women's lives. Throughout, Earle writes with evident admiration for her subjects, correcting what she regards as widespread underestimation of colonial women's capability, courage, and range of activity, while maintaining a tone that is scholarly, anecdotal, occasionally ironic, and consistently readable.

By Alice Morse Earle · First published 1895 · Genre: History, Social History, Biography · 12 chapters · 70,124 words

First lines

In the early days of the colony of Massachusetts Bay, careful lists were sent back to old England by the magistrates, telling what "to provide to send to New England" in order to ensure the successful planting and tender nourishing of the new settlement. The earliest list includes such homely items as "benes and pese," tame turkeys, copper kettles, all kinds of useful apparel and wholesome food; but the list is headed with a most significant, a typically Puritan item, _Ministers_. The list sent to the Emigration Society by the Virginian colonists might equally well have been headed, to show their most crying need, with the word _Wives_.

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colonial america · women's history · social history · domestic life · gender studies · american history · 17th century · 18th century · family history · cultural history · daily life · women's roles

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