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    First Generations: Women in Colonial America
    First Generations: Women in Colonial America
    First Generations: Women in Colonial America
    Ebook302 pages4 hours

    First Generations: Women in Colonial America

    By Carol Berkin

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    About this ebook

    Indian, European, and African women of seventeenth and eighteenth-century America were defenders of their native land, pioneers on the frontier, willing immigrants, and courageous slaves. They were also - as traditional scholarship tends to omit - as important as men in shaping American culture and history. This remarkable work is a gripping portrait that gives early-American women their proper place in history.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateJul 1, 1997
    ISBN9781466806115
    First Generations: Women in Colonial America
    Author

    Carol Berkin

    Carol Berkin is Professor of History at the City University of New York Graduate Center. She is the author of A Brilliant Solution: Inventing the American Constitution, Women's Voices/Women's Lives: Documents in Early American History, and coeditor, with Mary Beth Norton, of Women of America: A History.

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    • 4/5
      Historian Carol Berkin documents the lives of several different women during colonial times. I particularly enjoyed that she incorporated not just stories of white women but African American and Native American women's stories as well. The book is well written and much more interesting than your average history book as it discusses the women's roles, class, and gender through a feminist approach.

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    First Generations - Carol Berkin

    1

    IMMIGRANTS TO PARADISE: WHITE WOMEN IN THE SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY CHESAPEAKE

    MARY COLE, the daughter of Robert and Rebecca Cole, was born in Maryland in January 1653. Her parents had come to the colony in 1652, probably from Middlesex, England, bringing with them Rebecca’s two children from her first marriage and two servants as well. Rebecca may have been pregnant during the long ocean voyage, for Robert Cole, Jr., was born in Maryland before the end of the year. Thus, Mary was part of a large household, and one that would continue to grow. Within the next seven years, William, Edward, and Mary’s baby sister, Elizabeth, were born at Cole’s Farm.

    Mary’s father must have come from a prosperous family, for he was able to rent a 300-acre tobacco farm on St. Clements Bay, agreeably located near the Potomac River. His business accounts show that he was a prudent man and managed his plantation well. While Mary was still quite young, more servants and new acreage were added to the Cole family holdings, and the young Mary could take pride that her father was addressed as Sir.

    Like many of his neighbors, Robert Cole was concerned that his children learn to read the Bible. Each one received instruction at home, and Mary’s brothers had a tutor who visited the farm. The youngest child, Elizabeth, may even have attended a Jesuit school in nearby Newtown. Mary’s father took care to see that his sons learned to read and also to write and do sums; for his daughter Mary it was enough that she could read and sew.

    When Mary was nine years old, the Coles’ comfortable and comforting family setting began to shatter. Rebecca Cole died in 1662; in the fall of 1663, Robert Cole died while visiting England. Like many Marylanders of their era, they had met their death before the age of forty. And like many Maryland children of the seventeenth century, Mary Cole was an orphan before her eleventh birthday.

    Mary Cole was luckier than most orphans. Her father, always a careful man, had set his affairs in the strictest order before departing for England. He had inventoried his possessions, made out his will, and named two of his Maryland neighbors to serve as guardians of his motherless brood. Not content to see these guardians protect the children’s material interest and see to their physical well-being, Robert Cole also charged them to provide spiritual training in the event of his death. If they failed, he warned both men, God would punish them on Judgment Day. Mary would know other orphans, neighbors and perhaps friends, who unlike herself suffered neglect or abuse at the hands of strangers or thoughtless acquaintances.

    When they reached their majority, the Cole children would share many acres of tobacco land, four servants, and personal property assessed at over £200. But Mary and her brothers would not divide these assets equally. Like most of the men of the region, Robert Cole reserved his land for his sons; to his daughters, he gave movable property. At eighteen, Mary Cole received her legacy of eleven cattle, a bed, and kitchenware—all items that could be carried into a new household when she married.

    Mary Cole did soon marry. Before she was twenty she had chosen a husband from the colonies’ many eligible planters. Ignatius Warren was a native Marylander who owned property across St. Clements Bay in Newtown Hundred. Warren’s family history was more typical of the region than Mary’s, for his father, like many Chesapeake colonists, had come to the region as an indentured servant. John Warren had contracted to work for another man for several years in exchange for passage to America or the promise of land when his contract expired. At the end of his term, Warren had indeed become a property owner, and even a county justice of the peace. Thus, Ignatius and Mary Cole Warren began life with the complementary assets most Chesapeake newlyweds desired: Ignatius brought land, which secured an income, and Mary brought cattle and domestic supplies, which helped establish a household.

    Whether the Warrens had a satisfying marriage or a troubled one we do not know. But their marriage was unusual among Chesapeake colonists in one respect: it was the only one Mary Cole or Ignatius Warren ever had. Unlike her brothers Edward and Robert, who were twice married, Mary Cole never found herself at the center of the complex family of stepparents and half brothers and sisters typical of the Chesapeake. Actually, we have no record that Mary Cole Warren had any children at all.

    Ignatius Warren lived a long life for a Chesapeake native, dying at the age of fifty-eight. He earned his living planting tobacco, running an inn, and dabbling in commerce, while Mary was known simply as a planter’s wife. Poor judgment or bad luck brought about Ignatius’s financial ruin later in life, and although the date of Mary’s death is unknown, we do know that she did not live to see her husband’s downfall.

    In the end, what we know about Mary Cole Warren does not make for a compelling biography. Our knowledge is largely a matter of genealogy, with Mary a modest branch on a family tree. Like most women of the early colonial Chesapeake, she speaks to us only briefly and with too distant a voice to make her story clear. The collective voice of Chesapeake women is, however, more powerful and more rich. From wills, court testimony, ship’s logs, and plantation records, from baptismal certificates and tombstones, from household inventories and archaeological remains, from careful attention to community ceremonies and rituals, we can reproduce the female world in which Mary Cole Warren moved.

    We can also reconstruct in some detail the larger society that the Mary Cole Warrens of the seventeenth century inhabited. We know that this early Chesapeake culture deviated from traditional English norms and also that, by English standards, many of the region’s critical social institutions were unstable. As a result, women like Mary Cole Warren often found gender roles more ambiguous and fluid than women in other colonial regions did. Whether this proved to be an advantage or a burden for the women of Maryland and Virginia, historians have not yet been able to agree. But understanding these variations in women’s work roles, family roles, and in their relationship to property and wealth is yet another way to bring Mary Cole Warren and her Chesapeake sisters to life.

    Few seventeenth-century English immigrants failed to be shocked by the alien nature of the Chesapeake. With its intricate mazes of waterways, its vast, unbroken forest, its hot, humid summers, it bore no resemblance to the tilled fields and tamed woodlands of England. There were no towns and no manufacturing centers. The native population was at best exotic and at worst dangerous, and the variety of dialects and accents among the colonists themselves was disquieting to men and women used to the comforting sameness of parish or village life.

    Society itself seemed out of joint. Whole tiers of the English social structure were missing. Immigrants accustomed to locating themselves within an old, established hierarchy could not fail to note the absence of gentry and aristocracy as well as artisans of most trades. But what surely must have struck any Englishwoman orienting herself to this strange Chesapeake society was the simple fact that it was a male world. Men outnumbered women by six to one in the earliest decades and three to one as late as the 1680s.

    The explanation for this skewed sex ratio lay in the region’s obsession with tobacco. Although many free immigrants were young married couples, Chesapeake planters recruited thousands of workers to plant and harvest their tobacco crops. For these planters the ideal farm laborer was young—and male. Thus, between 1630 and 1680, one-half, perhaps three-quarters, of the 75,000 indentured servants transported to the region fit this description.

    The consequences of such a sex ratio were as dramatic as the imbalance itself. Chesapeake men found themselves locked into more than a competition over land, tobacco, and prosperity; they struggled to wed as well. The situation prompted one Maryland planter to remark that his colony was a paradise for women. But was it? Indeed, unmarried women were certain to find husbands, although marriage often was delayed by the terms of indenture. A planter eager to set up his household might buy his bride-to-be’s contract, but most immigrant women were not legally free to become wives until their mid- or late twenties. From that point on, their lives were consumed by childbirth and field and household labor, and certainly followed by an early

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