IN A SMALL BURYING GROUND in Keene, New Hampshire, there is a stone commemorating the virtues of Madam Ruth Whitney, who died in November of 1788. She had married and survived two Massachusetts ministers, had lived through community conflicts and a revolution, had seen her oldest son exiled as a loyalist, and had finally come to live in a picturesque New Hampshire town centered on a village church, where her son-in-law was growing rich as a trustee of loyalist estates and a “crisp forecloser of mortgages.” None of this turmoil was reflected in her epitaph, which, like hundreds of others, recognized the economy in familiar phrases. “As this stone cannot tell all her virtues,” it said, “suffice it to say, that as a wife she was prudent and faithful, as a mother discreet and tender, as a neighbor friendly and charitable, as a Christian intelligent and exemplary.”1 The memorialist neglected to add a reference to servants. An oversight rather than any commitment to egalitarian housekeeping probably accounts for that; Madam Whitney had undoubtedly been a kind and “aweful” mistress in her time.
Ideals have a staying power seldom reflected in life. Madam Whitney’s world was not Dorothy Dudley’s world. Yet the lives of both women were defined, if not described, in the roles paraded in their epitaphs. As this study has attempted to show, those roles were neither simple nor inconsequential.
As housewives, early American women spun wool and churned butter, as legend has always insisted, but they did much more. From the earliest years, housekeeping involved a variety of responsibilities, including trade. Furthermore, housekeeping was a social as well as an economic role. Even the mythical spinning wheel was tied as firmly to mothering as to manufacturing. Among the gentry, in the course of the eighteenth century, the ceremonial significance of housekeeping increased, perhaps because the roles of deputy husband and of neighbor had begun to fade, but for all classes the Rule of Industry prevailed.
As deputy husbands, wives crossed gender boundaries without challenging the patriarchal order of society. Settling accounts, commanding field hands, negotiating with Indians, or filling orders for planks and staves, New England women demonstrated their ability to perform male work, but in doing so they also proclaimed their loyalty to their husbands. Deputy husbands acted within rather than against traditional definitions of female responsibility, proving that in the premodern world position was always more important than task.
As mistresses (lower case), married women assumed their rightful place at the top of a hierarchy of age, as Mistresses (upper case), they surmounted a hierarchy of class. In either position they were continually threatened by the relatively widespread economic opportunity in the colonies and by cultural norms which made mistresses of servants and housewives of pretty gentlewomen. In New England only a perch among the coastal elite—or a houseful of healthy daughters—assured freedom from worry over the unreliability of help.
As consorts, women balanced the often contradictory demands of chastity and affability, modesty and desirability, spirituality and sexuality. In the ideal realm the role of consort veered from a vision of Eve as a meet help for Adam to an image of a luscious lady in a satin gown. In the world of the village the real tension was between generations and between the sexes, though by 1750 there was as yet only a glimpse of changes which would come later in the century as young folks challenged old folks and unmarried women struggled to assume responsibility for their own sexual property.
As mothers, women were praised for their piety and sometimes mistrusted for their tenderness, but they were not ignored. In names passed on to their children, as well as in literature, New Englanders acknowledged families of sentiment which were not always coextensive with the families of property reflected in wills and deeds. The custom of calling any old woman—even a witch—“Mother” testified not only to the extensive nature of the maternal role but to its close association with biological mysteries of birth and death. Motherhood in the larger sense was perceived as a kind of travail, an unavoidable though potentially rewarding labor ordained by God.
As neighbors, women watched and warded the female community, enforcing the rules of industry, of modesty, and of charity, through gossip and sometimes through direct intervention. The power of neighbors was conservative—a slothful wife or a wayward widow would get little mercy—but it was also supportive. Cemented by networks of trade and especially by the communal rituals of birth, neighbors helped to counterbalance the vertical authority of men over women and rich over poor.
As Christians, women enlarged the meaning of their own lives without really changing its dimensions. Scriptures and sermons elevated the industry of housewives, the kindness of mistresses, the tenderness of mothers, the charity of neighbors. As promulgated in New England, Christianity idealized marital love and encouraged intellectual activities usually left to males—but it also nurtured submissiveness, softened rebellion, and ratified a social order in which men preached and women listened.
Women who became heroines were separated from ordinary women by circumstances as much as by character. In wartime, deputy husbands could become viragoes and Christians could become saints. Taken together, these two forms of heroism juxtaposed female violence with female piety in a way impossible a century later as Christian virtues and womanly virtues merged in a sentimental religion of outsiders which gradually replaced the state religion of New England’s heroic age. Heroism offered women praise, yet had a darker side forged in the racism of the Indian wars and the brutality of village life.
In the study of early New England, gender is as important a category as race, wealth, age, geography, or religion. If women had indeed lived in a fixed and enchanted circle, sealed off from the disparate, squabbling, and struggling world of neighborhoods and towns, their story would still be important to an understanding of the colonial past. But, as we have seen, the circle of female life spun outward into the web of community and religious life. In homes and in neighborhoods women protected and promoted their own interests, using their influence as consorts and mothers, their authority as housewives and deputy husbands, their power as friendly neighbors, and their stature as experienced Christians. The story of women is important not simply because it affected what we have come to know as the history of early New England but because it was an integral and essential part of that history. It is hardly possible to write about “community” in such a setting while ignoring the distinct interests of women, or to write about “family” while focusing entirely upon fathers and sons—-as in fact a number of important works in colonial history have done. To borrow a metaphor from midwifery, women have for too long been seen as bearers of a history to which men have contributed the “spiritous part.”
Historians cannot be blamed, of course, for failing to see what society as a whole had long ignored. The recovery of women’s history is part of a larger movement to reassess and redefine the position of women in the contemporary world. Good Wives is addressed not just to colonial history but to the larger history of American women. In recent years that history has been moving from an early preoccupation with mid-nineteenth-century reform and has persuasively demonstrated the significance of the ordinary and the domestic. Yet even the best of recent work sees the colonial period (whether defined as pre-nineteenth-century or pre-revolutionary) as a static backdrop to later changes. This study has suggested that many key features of those changes, including the magnification of motherhood, the idealization of conjugal love, and the elevation of female religiosity, were clearly visible in northern New England before 1750. Other themes of the early nineteenth century, such as the organization of charitable or moral reform societies, had antecedents in the informal but crucial interaction of women in colonial neighborhoods.
This is not to deny significant differences between seventeenth- and nineteenth-century women, but it is to argue that a search for a “turning point” in women’s history may be misplaced. The story of female experience in America is not to be found in a linear progression from darkness into light, from constricted to expanding opportunities, from negative to positive valuation (or vice versa), but in a convoluted and sometimes tangled embroidery of loss and gain, accommodation and resistance. There can be no simple explanation of female status because that status is in itself so complex. To enlarge the role of deputy husband might mean to contract the often highly cherished roles of housekeeper and mother. To enhance the domestic might mean to neglect the communal, to control reproduction to lose one’s sexual nature, to abjure violence to abandon the right to resist.
Such changes were neither willfully imposed nor consciously chosen. They were part of much larger changes in the history of the western world, yet they are best understood in the close exploration of the lives of ordinary women and men living in particular places and times.
(Sarah Sevey) is my Name,
England is my Nation,
(Portsmouth) is my dwelling place,
And Christ is my salvation.
From Portsmouth in 1733 to Jay, Maine, in 1810, New England girls worked similar sentiments onto the linen ground of their samplers.2 Their lives were defined not only by gender but by a political structure, a geographic and demographic setting, and a matrix of cultural and religious values. If a fuller understanding of colonial history requires women’s history, then the reverse is also true.
To borrow a metaphor from Puritan sermon literature, good social history, like marriage, requires “mutual supports.”