America's Women

by Gail Collins

  In the seventeenth century, even wealthy colonial women worked like demons. In the frontier towns, the wives of the leading citizens were responsible for sheltering the rest of the community when Indians threatened. The visitors were called “garrison crowds,” and they sometimes stayed long past their natural welcome. Elizabeth Saltonstall of Haverill, Massachusetts, entertained sixty guests for months on end during the Indian alerts of 1694. One of her sons, writing to a sister from his college, reported gingerly that their family in Haverill was “all Well in health, but much thronged with Children and Lice; which discourages our taking a Journey thither.”

  “FOR SHE HAS BEEN AND IS A GOOD WIFE TO ME”

  The house was the one place where a colonial housewife could be in charge, the chief executive and artisan of a little factory producing the items the family needed to survive. Elizabeth Buffum Chace said that besides the ordinary housework and the care of fourteen children, her colonial great-grandmother engaged in “candle making, soap making, butter and cheese making, spinning, weaving, dyeing and of course all the knitting and sewing and dressmaking and tailoring and probably the shoe making and the millinery of this large household.” The most time-consuming chore was the making of cloth, and it was also one of the most critical. Early on, fabric was in such short supply in America that there are records of court suits fought over a missing handkerchief or a hole burned in a blanket. The colonists regarded the production of new cloth as crucial to their survival, and in 1656, the New England General Court ordered “all hands not necessarily employed on other occasions, as women, Girles and Boyes” be required to spin three pounds of thread a week for at least thirty weeks a year. This was basically a tax on women, who must have felt the officials had their nerve in presuming they were not “employed.”

  Colonial clothes were made from wool or flax. Turning the flax into linen thread was an excruciating process in which the stalks were dried, combed, softened, cleaned, dried again, then “broken” to separate the fibers, pounded, cleaned, and pounded again. The little mass of fiber that emerged from all this was spun into thread on a small wheel with a hand pedal. The thread then had to be treated with repeated washing, rinsing, bleaching, and beating before it was ready for the loom. With wool, the women used a much larger wheel and stood to do the work. They performed a sort of graceful dance, gliding backward to draw out the newly spun yarn, then coming forward to let it wind onto the spindle. In a full day of spinning, a woman could walk over twenty miles.

  Spinning was one of the jobs housewives most eagerly foisted off on their daughters or servants. Cooking was another duty they found particularly burdensome—it was both repetitive and difficult to do well because the temperature of the fire could not be controlled. (Roasting was occasionally facilitated by “turnspit dogs” who ran on a revolving cylinder that kept the meat turning over the fire, but that novelty appeared mainly at commercial inns.) Women might have found their seasonal duties more interesting. In the autumn, they made apple butter and cider. When the pigs were butchered, they cleaned the intestines for sausage casing and stuffed them with meat scraps and herbs. They collected the fat to mix with lye for soap making—a long and arduous process that probably never ranked high on anyone’s list of favorite chores. The grease and lye were boiled together, outdoors, in a huge pot over an open fire. It took about six bushels of ashes and 24 pounds of grease to make one barrel of soap, which was soft, like clear jelly.

  In the cold weather, the women made candles and brewed beer. In the spring, they planted their kitchen gardens. Martha Ballard, a Maine midwife, grew beans, cabbage, lettuce, parsnips, carrots, turnips, beets, cucumbers, radishes, onions, garlic, peppers, squash, peas, muskmelon, watermelon, pumpkins, and a variety of herbs both for cooking and medicinal purposes. Cheese making started in early summer. The dairywoman slowly heated several gallons of milk with rennet—the dried lining of an animal’s stomach. In an hour or two, the curd formed and she worked in some butter, packed the mixture into a mold, and put it in a wooden press for an hour or so, changing and washing the cheesecloths as the whey dripped out. A housewife who could make good clean butter and cheese was a real boon to her family, creating a product that was not only valuable at home but in the marketplace. To be a good dairywoman was a fine art and hard work. Turning milk into butter required an hour or so at the churn followed by kneading and pressing with the hands or wooden paddles.

  Obviously most women weren’t able to do all the housewifely tasks well. Someone who was good at cheese making might trade her wheels of cheese for cloth or meat or candles. A midwife or dressmaker might be paid for her services with a brace of geese or tub of sweet butter. Martha Ballard, who worked as a midwife in the late eighteenth century, was still collecting payment for her services in coffee, candles, unwashed wool, and even shingles. (Mrs. Ballard’s midwife business was no minor sideline. During one three-week period in August, while supervising her large and active household, she recorded four deliveries, one false alarm, sixteen medical calls, and preparing three bodies for burial.) The community of women was both an informal barter economy and a network of mutual assistance. Women dropped in on one another freely, picking up some household duty like shelling peas as they sat and gossiped or consulted with one another about recent events. A Maine author remembered seeing a woman going to visit a neighbor on baking day, carrying her dough along with her. Daughters were regularly “lent out” by their mothers to help a neighbor with the spinning or harvest or nursing. “The women in families took care of their own sick by day and depended on their neighbors for watchers at night,” wrote Elizabeth Buffum Chace. “I began to go out ‘watching’ when I was fourteen years old. We girls often went, two of us together, on such service. We had a good supper spread for us to eat in the night, and very sick patients were often left to our unskilled care.”

  Colonial women reached the height of their powers in middle age, when they were no longer burdened by continual pregnancy and had daughters old enough to help with the domestic enterprises. (The birth of a daughter was not unwelcome in most colonial families. The parents needed sons to help in the fields, but they also wanted girls to assist their mothers inside.) Although a prosperous matron had absolutely no voice in the public arena, she was expected to take a leading part in the parallel universe that was the world of women. Older women were the advisers, counselors, and judges of the younger. Male officials seemed to acknowledge their status. In 1664, Elizabeth Perkins and Agnes Ewens of Topsfield were summoned to court to testify in a case involving a young woman they both knew. The goodwives successfully invoked a kind of professional immunity. They had spoken to the woman, they said, as counselors, and because she had lived properly since their intervention, they preferred not to break her confidence.

  A competent housewife also earned the respect of her husband, who could see firsthand the value of her labors. The farmer who slaughtered a pig needed his wife to make the sausages, process the bacon, and preserve the pork. As he sat by the fireside at night, mending his fishing net or fixing his tools, he could watch her turning the flax he had harvested and the wool he had sheared into the family’s clothes. The candle that lit their way to bed came from her hand, as did the vegetables, eggs, cheese, and chickens they ate and the beer or cider they drank. They were very much partners in the family business, and if the man was at all sensible he understood how critical his wife was to their mutual success. When Ensign Hewlett, a seventeenth-century Ipswich man, needed cash for a new enterprise, he borrowed it from his wife, a successful poultrywoman. A friend wondered why Hewlett didn’t just claim the money as his own, but the husband replied: “I meddle not with the geese nor the turkeys for they are hers. For she has been and is a good wife to me.”

  “WOMEN CHOOSE RATHER TO HAVE

  A THING DONE WELL THAN HAVE IT OFTEN”

  Cotton Mather urged Puritan women to take as their model Herpine, who in her eagerness to serve her ailing husband “bore him on her Back, a thousand and
three Hundred English Miles to Bath.” It’s an interesting image, which endows the wife with a combination of terrific power and terrific deference. But if court records are any indication, New England women were much less submissive to the man of the house than Mather wanted. A third of the accused spouse-beaters were women, and there are plenty of cases in which the goodwife seemed to be getting the best of her husband when their dispute was hauled off to court. Still, in several critical areas, a married woman was virtually powerless. All her property was under her husband’s control, and he had complete legal sway over the children. His character determined how far she could rise in life. A hardworking woman could pull up a less-than-ambitious spouse, but she could not triumph over a dissolute one. Divorce was rarely an option—New England courts sometimes allowed a couple to separate, but they hardly ever dissolved a union. Unhappy southern wives could at least hope for early widowhood, but those in the North were yoked for what would probably be a long life. New Englanders who survived childhood could expect to live to their sixties, and a quarter made it into their eighties. If childbirth didn’t kill you, you could wind up a very old woman, still married to your original husband.

  Husbands’ obligations to their wives included being affectionate, a good provider, and a good example. (The male colonists tended to regard women as frail creatures who were likely to stray from the path of godliness unless wiser, stronger males continually herded them in the right direction.) The Puritans disapproved of wife beating, and in early New England towns, families lived so close to each other that the howls of an abused spouse would bring a delegation of concerned church members to the door. But a man who was indifferent to his neighbors’ bad opinion could discipline his wife as harshly as he liked without risking serious punishment. Daniel Ela, who defended himself in a wife-beating case by arguing that she was “his servant and his slave,” was not prosecuted further. One man who had beaten his wife, kicked her, hit her on the head, and threatened to slit her throat and burn her was sentenced to be lashed but was granted a reprieve when he promised to reform.

  In New England, it was against the law for a couple to have sex before they were married. (Cynics might argue it was against the law to do practically anything.) If a first child arrived before a marriage was nine months old, the couple could be hauled into court and charged with fornication and punished with nine lashes “upon the Naked back” or a steep fine. But as time went on, fewer and fewer women saved themselves for their wedding night. In Bristol, Rhode Island, none of the couples that married at the end of the seventeenth century had a child less than nine months after the ceremony. But between 1720 and 1740, 10 percent had babies whose early arrival gave evidence of premarital intercourse, and by 1760 to 1780, it was 44 percent. In other parts of the country, premarital sex was taken for granted. A visitor to New York in 1695 reported that “commonly, enjoyment precedes the marriage, to which they seldom come till a great belly puts it so forward, that they must either submit to that, or to shame and disgrace.”

  Adultery was a more serious matter. The Puritans defined adultery as sex between a married woman and any man other than her husband. (A married man who strayed was only guilty of fornication.) Adultery was theoretically a capital offense, although like most of the early colonists’ capital offenses, it generally carried a less drastic punishment. Still, at least three married women in New England were hanged for sleeping around. The most notorious, Mary Latham of Boston, had married an older man and then took a dislike to him, “setting a knife to his breast and threatening to kill him, calling him old rogue and cuckold.” She admitted committing adultery with twelve different men.

  Women were expected to enjoy sex—indeed, the colonists felt it was critical. Most people believed conception could occur only if a woman reached orgasm. New Haven justices dismissed a young woman’s claim that she had been impregnated while in “a fit of swooning” by arguing that “no woman can be gotten with child without some knowledge, consent & delight in the acting thereof.” Men who read books about sex, like the popular Aristotle’s Master Piece, got tips on how to arouse their sexual partners. (“Women choose rather to have a thing done well than have it often.”) Colonial women were seen as flawed, but not particularly fragile creatures. One of their great failings, in fact, was believed to be their lustiness.

  Many couples believed that when they made love, the man and the woman each emitted a “seed” and that conception occurred when the two seeds mixed. Others thought that a woman’s womb contained seven sacs, three on each side and one in the center. The ones on the right produced boys, the ones on the left girls, and the one in the center, hermaphrodites. After sex, a woman was advised to lie on her right or left side, depending on which sex baby she hoped to bear. The colonists were more romantic than history gives them credit for, but having sex too often, they believed, “gluts the Womb and renders it unfit for its office.”

  “THIS MIGHT POSSIBLY BE

  THE LAST TRIAL OF THIS SORT”

  Childbearing dominated the lives of early female settlers. The average woman in New England married before her twentieth birthday and gave birth to about seven children. She nursed each baby for twelve to eighteen months. Nursing, which suppresses ovulation, served as a rough form of birth control. Elizabeth Drinker, a Philadelphia Quaker whose thirty-eight-year-old daughter had just given birth, wrote expressing her hope that “this might possibly be the last trial of this sort, if she could suckle her baby for 2 years to come.”

  In the malaria-ridden early South, a multitude of pregnancies produced a tragically small number of adults—half the children born in the Chesapeake area died before reaching adulthood. In New England, however, the fatality rate was much lower and people had very large families. Ten or more children were not at all uncommon. Benjamin Franklin was one of seventeen children. Sir William Phipps was said to be one of twenty-six, all from the same mother. In the eighteenth century, when colonists had learned how to survive the climate, the size of southern families boomed—a visitor to Charlestown reported that most of the households there had ten or twelve children. Southern women became obsessed with having babies, to the point where some announced their pregnancies in the newspaper. They also frequently took advantage of a happy superstition that held mothers-to-be would miscarry if they were denied anything they yearned for.

  Childbirth was a communal affair, the great moment for the gathering of neighborhood women while their men waited on the other side of the door, passive outsiders. The early stages of labor were partylike, as was the celebration at the end of a successful delivery. Samuel Sewall of Boston recorded that after his wife gave birth to their twelfth child, he found the women who had helped her dining on “rost Beef and minc’d Pyes, good Cheese and Tarts.” When she began to deliver, the mother-to-be might squat over a low open-seated stool or sit in another woman’s lap. If there was a lactating woman in the group—and there almost always was—she nursed the baby first because a new mother’s milk was believed to be impure. During very difficult childbirths, the woman in labor was urged to drink another woman’s milk. When the crisis was over, there were generally bawdy jokes about the umbilical cord. (A long one for a boy meant he would grow a sizable member. A girl’s was supposed to be cut short or she would become immodest.) Eventually, the husband was allowed to reenter the room, and the world of women gave way to the patriarchal family.

  Midwives were a critical resource in colonial communities—the normally apolitical matrons of Boston went on a virtual strike when their favorite midwife came under attack by the church elders. Several New England towns provided a rent-free house for their midwife and in New Amsterdam, midwives were actually public servants who received rather large salaries. The support of the midwife and female neighbors during delivery was the emotional center of women’s community, but it was also a matter of life and death. About a fifth of the pregnant women in New England died giving birth, and the figures were much higher in the South. Cotton Mather, ever one to
look on the bright side, advised pregnant women that “PREPARATION FOR DEATH is that most Reasonable and Seasonable thing, to which you must now apply yourself.” Wealthy women had special sets of childbed linens, which they put on their beds after delivery was completed. If tragedy occurred, the linens became the woman’s shroud. In an era in which masculine bravery was celebrated, it was the women who actually dared to stare down death on a regular basis.

  Since they were almost always either pregnant or nursing an infant, colonial women spent their lives in a continual balancing act, in which the dangers of overexertion had to be weighed against the simple necessity of getting through the day. The 40-pound pots had to be lifted on and off the fire, no matter what the mother’s condition. Colonial-era Americans harbored many theories about the delicacy of expectant mothers, and the danger to the fetus if she should be surprised or confronted with an unpleasant object. (A woman who saw a deformed beggar in the street, they believed, might give birth to a deformed baby.) However, these were yet another series of rules that could be suspended whenever necessary. If a wife’s services were needed in an area that was replete with alarming surprises—say, working in the fields of a frontier farm while under threat of Indian attack—she was expected to do her job, pregnancy or no.

  Women traveled while they were pregnant, but once a baby was born, they tended to stay close to home while nursing. Some women took “weaning trips” when the baby was in its first year to make the withdrawal of the maternal breast easier—on the mother, at least. In a crisis, a friend might provide “courtesy nursing” to a mother in need of help. Sometimes her own mother could do the favor. In a culture in which women began to have children very young, and continued until rather late in life, it wasn’t at all unusual for mother and daughter to be pregnant at the same time. Given the amount of suckling that went on, there was obviously a lot of concern about how to treat sore breasts. One popular physician recommended a poultice: “take new Milk and grate white bread into it, then take Mallows and Red Rose Leaves, 1 handful of each then chop them small and boyl them together till it be thick, then put some honey and turpentine mix them, then spread it on a cloth and apply it.”