Founding Mothers

by Cokie Roberts

While much has been written about the men who signed the Declaration of Independence, battled the British, and framed the Constitution, the wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters they left behind have been little noticed by history. Roberts brings us the women who fought the Revolution as valiantly as the men, often defending their very doorsteps. While the men went off to war or to Congress, the women managed their businesses, raised their children, provided them with political advice, and made it possible for the men to do what they did. The behind-the-scenes influence of these women — and their sometimes very public activities — was intelligent and pervasive.

First Generations

by Carol Berkin

Carol Berkin's multicultural history reconstructs the lives of American women in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries-women from European, African, and Native backgrounds-and examines their varied roles as wives, mothers, household managers, laborers, rebels, and, ultimately, critical forces in shaping the new nation's culture and history.

Pocahontas

by Paula Gunn Allen

Pocahontas became an extraordinary ambassador, forming groundbreaking relations between the Indians, the American colonists, and the British. Dr. Gunn Allen convincingly argues that through all of this, Pocahontas fulfilled a crucial and essential role in the birth of a New World. This stunning portrait presents the fascinating, untold story of one of the most romantic and beloved figures in American history, and reveals why so many have revered Pocahontas as the female counterpart to George Washington, the true "Mother of Our Nation."

Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia

by Kathleen M. Brown

Kathleen Brown examines the origins of racism and slavery in British North America from the perspective of gender. Both a basic social relationship and a model for other social hierarchies, gender helped determine the construction of racial categories and the institution of slavery in Virginia. But the rise of racial slavery also transformed gender relations, including ideals of masculinity. In response to the presence of Indians, the shortage of labor, and the insecurity of social rank, Virginia's colonial government tried to reinforce its authority by regulating the labor and sexuality of English servants and by making legal distinctions between English and African women. This practice, along with making slavery hereditary through the mother, contributed to the cultural shift whereby women of African descent assumed from lower-class English women both the burden of fieldwork and the stigma of moral corruption. Brown's analysis extends through Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, an important juncture in consolidating the colony's white male public culture, and into the eighteenth century. She demonstrates that, despite elite planters' dominance, wives, children, free people of color, and enslaved men and women continued to influence the meaning of race and class in colonial Virginia.

Founding Mothers & Fathers : Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society

by Mary Beth Norton

In this pioneering study of the ways in which the first settlers defined the power, prerogatives, and responsibilities of the sexes, one of our most incisive historians opens a window onto the world of Colonial America. Drawing on a wealth of contemporary documents, Mary Beth Norton tells the story of the Pinion clan, whose two-generation record of theft, adultery, and infanticide may have made them our first dysfunctional family. She reopens the case of Mistress Ann Hibbens, whose church excommunicated her for arguing that God had told husbands to listen to their wives. And here is the enigma of Thomas, or Thomasine Hall, who lived comfortably as both a man and a woman in 17th century Virginia.

Anne Orthwood's Bastard: Sex and Law in Early Virginia

by John Ruston Pagan

In 1663, an indentured servant, Anne Orthwood, was impregnated with twins in a tavern in Northampton County, Virginia. Orthwood died soon after giving birth; one of the twins, Jasper, survived. Orthwood's illegitimate pregnancy sparked four related cases that came before the Northampton magistrates — who coincidentally held court in the same tavern — between 1664 and 1686. These interrelated cases and the decisions rendered in them are notable for the ways in which the Virginia colonists modified English common law traditions and began to create their own, as well as what they reveal about cultural and economic values in an Eastern shore community. Through these cases, the very reasons legal systems are created are revealed, namely, the maintenance of social order, the protection of property interests, the protection of personal reputation, and personal liberty. Through Jasper Orthwood's life, the treatment of the poor in small communities is set in sharp relief.

Over the Threshold

edited by Christine Daniels

Over the Threshold is the first in-depth work to explore the topic of intimate violence in the American colonies and the early Republic. The essays examine domestic violence in both urban and frontier environments, between husbands and wives, parents and children, and masters and slaves. This compelling collection puts commonly held notions about intimate violence under strict historical scrutiny, often producing surprising results.

Within Her Power: Propertied Women in Colonial Virginia

by Linda L. Sturtz

This engaging and comprehensive study of property-owning women in the colony of Tidewater, VA during the 16th century. It examines the social restrictions on women's behavior and speech, opportunities and difficulties these women encountered in the legal system, the economic and discretionary authority they enjoyed, the roles they played in the family business, their roles in the later, trans-Atlantic trading framework, and the imperial context within which these colonial women lived, making this a welcome addition to both colonial and women's historians.

American Women Writers to 1800

by Sharon M. Harris

This anthology advances the ongoing process of filling documentary and intellectual gaps in our knowledge of early American culture. Including the writings of more than ninety women (many of whom have never before been published), the anthology captures cultural and individual diversity in early America. The collection both complements and extends earlier studies of colonial and revolutionary America with works that observe the natural resources of the "New World", the proliferation of religious movements, racial relations between Native Americans, African-Americans, and European settlers, and patriotic and loyalist sympathies during the Revolutionary years. Other issues raised include themes such as women's education, girlhood, childbirth, sexuality, the legal status of women, domestic economy, and the rise of feminist philosophies at the end of the 18th century. This anthology offers rich ground for a radical rethinking of early American women's lives and writings, and challenges our assumptions about early America itself.

The Captors' Narrative: Catholic Women and Their Puritan Men on the Early American Frontier

by William Henry Foster

Between 1690 and 1760, close to two thousand New Englanders were taken captive by French Canadians and their Native American allies during five intercolonial wars. Puritan propagandists reacted by evoking the vulnerability of New England's homes and Protestant faith with images of captive women in sexual peril, a titillating vision only amplified in popular Victorian and modern portrayals of female captives as stock literary figures.

In The Captors' Narrative, William Henry Foster demonstrates that the majority of Anglo-American captives taken along the New England frontier were, in fact, men. Free French Canadian women (both secular and monastic) routinely became the men's captors and benefited from their labor when they were brought to New France. In testimonials written by returning male captives, Foster finds fascinating instances of protest and resistance against the female authority that Protestant New England deemed "illegitimate."

In the tales of Catholic women captors, Foster uncovers evidence that the control of male captive domestic labor expanded the public roles of the women in charge. The author painstakingly reconstructs the lived experience of both captors and captives to show that captivity was always intertwined with gender struggles. The Captors' Narrative provides a novel perspective on the struggles over female authority pervasive in the early modern Atlantic world.

The Healer's Calling: Women and Medicine in Early New England

Rebecca J. Tannenbaum

This book, the first to describe women medical practitioners other than midwives in the colonial period, emphasizes that medical care was part of every woman's work. The Healer's Calling uses memorable anecdotes, engaging characters, and medical oddities to tell the fascinating story of the practice of household medicine in early America.

Rebecca J. Tannenbaum points out that housewives provided much of the medical care available in the seventeenth century. Elite women cared for the indigent in their towns and used medical practice to make influential connections with powerful men; 'doctresses' or 'doctor women' supported themselves with their practices and competed directly with male physicians; and midwives were crucial 'expert witnesses' in cases of fornication, murder, and witchcraft. Yet there were limits to the authority of women's healing communities, with consequences for those who overstepped the bounds.

Brabbling Women: Disorderly Speech and the Law in Early Virginia

Terri L. Snyder

Brabbling Women takes its title from a 1662 law enacted by Virginia's burgesses, which was intended to offer relief to the "poore husbands" forced into defamation suits because their "brabling" wives had slandered or scandalized their neighbors. To quell such episodes of female misrule, lawmakers decreed that husbands could choose either to pay damages or to have their wives publicly ducked.

But there was more at stake here. By examining women's use of language, Terri L. Snyder demonstrates how women resisted and challenged oppressive political, legal, and cultural practices in colonial Virginia. Contending that women's voices are heard most clearly during episodes of crisis, Snyder focuses on disorderly speech to illustrate women's complex relationships to law and authority in the seventeenth century.

Indian Women and French Men

by Susan Sleeper-Smith

A center of the lucrative fur trade throughout the colonial period, the Great Lakes region was an important site of cultural as well as economic exchange between native and European peoples. In this well- researched study, Susan Sleeper-Smith focuses on an often overlooked aspect of these interactions-the role played by Indian women who married French traders.

Drawing on a broad range of primary and secondary sources, she shows how these women used a variety of means to negotiate a middle ground between two disparate cultures. Many were converts to Catholicism who constructed elaborate mixed-blood kinship networks that paralleled those of native society, thus facilitating the integration of Indian and French values. By the mid- eighteenth century, native women had extended these kin linkages to fur trade communities throughout the Great Lakes, not only enhancing access to the region's highly prized pelts but also ensuring safe transport for other goods.

In the Affairs of the World: Women, Patriarchy, and Power in Colonial South Carolina

by Cara Anzilotti

This book examines how, quite by accident and under very unfortunate circumstances, Britain's colony of South Carolina afforded women an unprecedented opportunity for economic autonomy. Though the colony prospered financially, throughout the colonial period the death rate remained alarmingly high, keeping the white population small. This demographic disruption allowed white women a degree of independence unknown to their peers in most of England's other mainland colonies, for, as heirs of their male relatives, an unusually large proportion of women controlled substantial amounts of real estate. Their economic independence went unchallenged by their male peers because these women never envisioned themselves as anything more than deputies for their husbands, fathers, brothers, and friends.