by Gail Collins
“IF I ONLY KNIT MY BROW SHE WILL CRY”
All sorts of perils lay in wait for colonial children. Samuel Sewall, in his diary, constantly records accidents that befell youngsters in Boston—accidentally shot, dragged to death by a galloping horse, fallen through the ice while skating, scalded to death by boiling homemade beer. The Puritans regarded such incidents as a just God’s punishment for the sins of the parents—Sewall felt that two of his young children died because he participated as a judge in the Salem witch trials. People seemed resigned, to some extent, that their offspring simply had to take their chances. Their greatest fear was infectious disease, which could sweep off entire families. In 1740, a virulent strain of diphtheria claimed as many as half the children in some New England towns.
Mothers didn’t dote. They seemed to feel a generalized concern for the whole tribe of youngsters under their care (many of the servants were children themselves) rather than a concentrated devotion on a few individuals. In a large household community of children, servants, visiting friends, and relatives, the smaller children were often tended by people other than their mothers, and child care doesn’t seem to have ranked as a true domestic duty. Women’s advice books, which said a great deal about cooking and household management, hardly mentioned children. The diaries of colonial housewives, which are mainly lists of chores and duties accomplished, do not generally refer to children except when one is being born or dying. Babies were called “it”—possibly because the parents wanted to make sure an infant had a good chance of survival before they began to bond.
If colonial parents followed the practices of Britain—as they did in most things—they bound their newborns, sometimes wrapping them against a board to straighten their backs. The tight binding tended to slow down the baby’s metabolism, so that it cried less. Fanny Kemble, the British actress who spent a long unhappy period at her husband’s American plantation in the nineteenth century, noted that the slaves had adopted a custom that had only recently been abandoned among white colonists and “pin up the lower part of their infants, bodies, legs, and all, in red flannel as soon as they are born and keep them in the selfsame envelope till it literally falls off.”
New Englanders believed in early discipline. The Puritan minister John Robinson had famously advised that “there is in all children…a stubbornness, and stoutness of mind arising from natural pride, which must, in the first place, be broken and beaten down.” Esther Burr, the wife of the president of Princeton, wrote to her best friend in 1754 that she had “begun to govourn Sally,” her firstborn. “She has been Whip’d once…and she knows the differance between a Smile and a frown as well as I do. When She has done anything that She Suspects is wrong, will look with concern to See what Mamma says, and if I only knit my brow She will cry till I Smile.” Sally was not yet ten months old.
The colonies lacked an orderly progression to maturity, with certain achievements earmarked for certain ages. It was not unknown for ten- and eleven-year-old boys to enter Harvard, or for near infants of two or three years of age to be bound out as indentured servants. A Madam Coleman wrote about her problems with her eight-year-old granddaughter Sally, who was sent from Barbados to live in Boston in 1719. The little girl arrived with her maid and, offended that her grandmother made her drink water with her meals, decamped on her own and moved into a boardinghouse. Her brother wrote demanding that Sally return to her grandmother’s home. But Mrs. Coleman reported that Sally had said that “her Brother has nothing to do with her as long as her father is alive,” and sent word that she needed a new muff.
Girls who were neither wealthy nor indigent were still given what we would regard as extraordinary responsibilities. Susan Blunt recalled that when she was ten she was sent to keep house “for a week” for a man who left her in charge of his twin little girls and an elderly father. Her duties began at 5:00 A.M., when she toted water in from a distant well, then made everyone a breakfast of boiled potatoes, fried pork, and coffee. She tended the old man, baked biscuits and beans for dinner, cleaned and mended. As her reward, she received enough money to buy a new apron.
Girls generally didn’t receive much schooling in the colonial period. “Female education in the best families went no farther than writing and arithmetic and in some few rare instances, music and dancing,” wrote Abigail Adams, the wife of the second president. Few towns permitted girls to be educated past the “dames schools” which were closer to day care centers than actual institutions of learning. (There’s a pathetic story about a little girl in western Massachusetts who sat outside the schoolhouse door every day, trying to learn what she could from listening to the boys recite their lessons.) The women who ran dames schools were the only female teachers in America during the pre-Revolutionary period and their pay reflected the community’s estimate of the value of education imparted by a female. In Woburn, Massachusetts, in 1641, a respected local widow named Mrs. Walker established a school. Her salary for the first year, after deductions, was 1 shilling and 3 pence.
In the North, Puritan and Quaker families wanted their daughters to learn their letters well enough to read the Bible, if not necessarily to write. In the South, most women were totally illiterate in the seventeenth century. In Virginia, only one in three could sign her name, compared to three in five men. Wealthier young women were prepared for a good marriage, and too much learning was regarded as a defect in an attractive woman. Caroline Howard Gilman recalled that when the family tutor proposed teaching her the same lessons as her brother, her father worried that “the girl would consider herself more learned than her father,” and finally reluctantly agreed, saying: “Well, well, only do not spoil her eyes and shoulders.”
“NOT HAVING BEEN WETT ALL OVER
ATT ONCE, FOR 28 YEARS PAST”
Cleanliness was not high on the colonists’ list of priorities. Virtually no one took baths—there were no bathrooms, and whatever bathing was done usually occurred from a basin, in the presence of other people. Most people simply scrubbed their faces with cold water. In 1798, Elizabeth Drinker, a highly respected sixty-five-year-old Quaker matron in Philadelphia, bathed in a shower box that her husband set up in the backyard of their house. “I bore it better than I expected, not having been wett all over att once, for 28 years past,” she wrote in her diary. The baths in Elizabeth’s life seem to have been infrequent enough to be recorded as milestones. The incident twenty-eight years before the momentous shower had taken place on the Delaware River, where she and her husband were spending seven weeks at what was the colonial equivalent of a spa. Elizabeth and some of her friends went to the baths, where she “found the shock much greater than expected.” Although she returned the next day, she “had not courage to go in.”
These baths would have been immersions in mineral water for the sake of health or sociability. The concept of giving oneself a good scrub seemed unknown. The soft soap that women made themselves was used for washing clothes, not people. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, innkeepers were still surprised when European travelers asked for a bar of soap with which to wash. If a woman’s hair was dirty or greasy, she could conceal it under a linen cap, which was worn indoors and out. It was harder to hide the evidence of a lack of toothbrushes. Visitors remarked about the poor condition of colonial teeth. “The women are pitifully tooth-shaken, whether through the coldness of the climate, or by sweet-meats, of which they have a score, I am not able to affirm,” said a visitor.
One of the great mysteries of colonial women’s lives is what they did about menstruation. They didn’t wear underpants, and while later settlers may have used rags, the early colonials probably would have been reluctant to waste precious cloth. Neither their diaries nor the midwives’ manuals say a word about what women used as seventeenth- and eighteenth-century versions of sanitary napkins. Talking about menstruation seems to have been the ultimate taboo—child molestation was written about more freely. In Northampton in the late seventeenth century, Hannah Clark and a friend were sto
pped on the street by one Oliver Warner, who asked them, “When will the moon change?” and hinted that he knew they were having their periods: “I believe you have circles round your Eyes—I believe it runs.” Their minister, the famous Jonathan Edwards, decided this sort of behavior was the result of young men reading midwifery books for titillation and launched a campaign against the practice.
Given how often they were pregnant or nursing, colonial women did not spend nearly as much time in normal menstrual cycles as modern women. When they did have their periods, their scanty diets probably restricted the amount of bleeding. Perhaps poor women allowed the blood to flow and cleaned up as best they could. (Moreau de St. Mèry, a French traveler after the Revolutionary War, said that for servants, the only protection during menstruation “is a skirt of bunting which they wear next to the skin, and which they use until its old age forces them to take another.”) But middle-class and wealthy women certainly used some kind of protection. Those living along the coast may have used sponges, and some colonial women may have emulated the Indians and used moss or grass or leaves. But chances are most created a sort of makeshift diaper out of linen homespun.
The colonists were not as sensitive to smells and the sight of dirt as modern Americans. The farmers’ homes and yards were filled with offal, debris, and garbage. People were less likely to use an outhouse than to take to the bushes. Clothes were washed infrequently—many women did the laundry only once a month, and on the frontier, never. Washing clothes was an arduous process that began very early in the morning, when water was carried in from the well, then heated to a boil over those troublesome fireplaces. The laundress scrubbed and pounded the clothes in the tubs, working up to her elbows in hot water, sometimes for hours on end. When she was done, she spread the clothes out to dry on bushes—clotheslines didn’t seem to come along until later. A truly dedicated housewife might then iron her husband’s shirts and her aprons. The irons had their own heaters, which had to be filled with coals from the fire. The laundress always used two, so clothes didn’t dry out while she was reheating her iron.
Given the amount of effort laundering required, it’s unlikely that many women actually washed their babies’ diapers. Most simply left the wet napkin by the fire to dry, then put it back on. It was a practice Dr. William Dewees, an early-nineteenth-century expert on obstetric issues, was still thundering against. “It is much better that it be without a diaper from time to time than have those returned to it stiffened with salts and reeking with offensive odor,” he wrote. The entire issue of colonial diapering practices doesn’t bear close examination by those with delicate sensibilities. Some women actually regarded wet diapers as a wholesome device for hardening the baby’s constitution—another “monstrous error” Dr. Dewees was still decrying in the 1800s. In some households, the family dog was encouraged to lick the baby clean. And many women solved the diaper issue by toilet training their babies very early—sometimes beginning within a few weeks of birth. To train an infant to have its bowel movements at regular times, the mother used the equivalent of a suppository, made of a quill covered with lubricated cloth.
People who lived in towns maintained a higher level of cleanliness than those in the country, but by modern standards they would have seemed pretty gamy. The fireplace, dirt roads, and summer flies brought far more filth into the house than housewives could possibly drive away. When a room seemed to need freshening, they simply sprinkled around a little vinegar. Animals were everywhere—dogs and cats walked freely through houses, churches, taverns, even courthouses. There was no system of garbage disposal, and housewives generally threw things they were through with out the window. Chamber pots were often just dumped onto the street. (Lewis Miller, writing about York, Pennsylvania, in 1801, reported the unfortunate story of a woman on her way to a wedding whose silk dress was ruined when a man poured his chamber pot from an upper window.) Some of the historians who’ve studied the diaries of Mary Cooper, that Long Island farm wife who kept complaining about how exhausted she was, theorized that she was so fatigued because she was one of the few women of her era who actually attempted to keep things clean.
“STRANGERS ARE SOUGHT AFTER
WITH GREEDINESS”
Unlike the women in the North, the white women of the South had little opportunity to create a community of their own. Things were too spread out—a whole county might contain only a couple thousand people. Southern hospitality was to a great extent the creation of a desperately lonely people. George Washington used to post a slave at the crossroads near his plantation to invite any passerby to dinner. “Strangers are sought after with Greediness,” wrote an observer. A circuit judge in North Carolina in the Revolutionary War era stopped at the home of some well-to-do newlyweds who were living on the husband’s farm, eighteen miles from the nearest neighbor. He wrote that when a male visitor told the young bride he would bring his own wife to visit her, she wept with gratitude. But a good hostess had no control over when the blessing of company would arrive, or for how long. Friends, family, and unknown passersby felt free to drop in by the wagonful without notice, and they expected to be fed and lodged when they arrived. Neighbors who came together for balls, weddings, or even dancing lessons often stayed on for several days.
Church was an important social event for southerners, who didn’t take their religion quite as seriously as the colonists up north. Visitors were scandalized to see southern women joining the men as they smoked after church. Inside during services, it was the general custom for the women and lower classes to take their seats on time, and for the wealthy men to arrive a half hour into the proceedings, the better to display their fine clothes. The less prosperous families in rural areas also came together for communal events like barn raisings and husking frolics that might attract thirty to fifty people. These combinations of neighborly helpfulness and socializing were popular in the rural North, too. Women must have approached them with mixed emotions. They were a chance to see neighbors, but they were often alcohol fueled and violent. As time went on, farmers began to question whether their half-drunk neighbors were really doing a very good job of husking the corn or building the house, and the tradition died out.
Southern women weren’t expected to pursue the finer household crafts, like butter making or even spinning. They were needed in the fields, and back home they spent much of their time grinding corn—a pastime that made spinning look like a picnic. As they gained wealth, the most prosperous families graduated their daughters directly into the world of fine needlepoint and dance lessons. Carving became a major domestic art, and some wealthy young women took training from a special carving master. The hostess was responsible for cutting up the meat and making sure that each honored guest had the appropriate tasty bits. It was a chore so demanding that some women dined before their dinner parties in order to be able to devote complete concentration to the job. There was a different term for cutting up different types of bird—theoretically, at least, one would “break” a goose, “thrust” a chicken, “spoil” a hen, and “pierce” a plover.
The wild and wooly era of early colonial settlement in the South had faded by the end of the seventeenth century. People were no longer dying off so quickly—thanks in part to the new apple orchards that had been planted, providing juice that displaced the brackish water. The male-female sex ratio began to even out, and families were no longer necessarily the collection of offspring from widows’ and widowers’ former marriages. Men had male relatives they could rely on to handle their estates in case they died, as well as lawyers to take care of plantation business in their absence. More men lived to see their children grow up, and they were able to leave their estates directly to their adult sons. Meanwhile, the windows of opportunity for independent women were beginning to close.
4
Toward the Revolutionary War
“TO SPEND…WHAT OTHERS GET”
Sixteen-year-old Hetty Shepard came from the country to visit a friend in Boston in 1676 and was thunde
rstruck by how much stuff was available in the stores. “Through all my life I have never seen such an array of fashion and splendor,” she wrote. “Silken hoods, scarlet petticoats, with silver lace, white…plaited gowns, bone lace and silken scarves. The men with periwigs, ruffles and ribbons.” America was undergoing the first of what would become a long line of consumer revolutions. Soon, even humble families began to acquire something more than the bare necessities—a teapot or a painted dish might brighten up a housewife’s dark cabin. Wealthier colonial families began importing books, pictures, and rich clothing from Europe and installing real glass in their windows. Most homes were still very simple, with no carpets or curtains and minimal lighting. But families were dining off individual plates, drinking from their own cups, and sitting in their own chairs. By 1700, most women were no longer confined to benches and stools—although the backs on the newly available chairs were, unfortunately, very hard and straight.
On the frontier, life was pretty much the same as it had been in the early 1600s. While he was traveling through the Shenandoah Valley in 1748, George Washington spent the night with a family that had not yet acquired the luxury of beds. He “lay down before the fire upon a little hay, straw, fodder or bearskin…with man, wife, and children, like a parcel of dogs and cats.” But the settled parts of the country were becoming more civilized, and in many ways, things were getting easier. Even farm families could acquire bolts of cloth from the nearest store, freeing housewives from the tyranny of the spinning wheel. Everyday necessities like candles and soap, which had to be manufactured at home in the seventeenth century, could be purchased in the eighteenth. American women would have regarded this as a definite improvement, but the change also seems to have contributed to a slippage in their status. The housewife’s contribution to the family started to be described in terms of emotional support, not the kind of economic partnership that had led Ensign Hewlitt to honor his wife’s right to do what she wanted with the profits from her turkeys and geese. Some newspapers started ridiculing housewives as spongers, lazy and trivial. Women, Cotton Mather told his female readers, “have little more Worldly Business, than to spend…what others Get.”