TWELVE YEARS AGO, in an essay urging the restoration of “the actual record of women’s contributions” in the American past, Gerda Lerner recommended concentration on the post-revolutionary era, suggesting that “the story of colonial women can be quite fully traced through secondary literature.” (“New Approaches to the Study of Women in American History,” Journal of Social History, III: 1 [Fall 1969], pp. 53–62). In retrospect, her statement seems astonishing, yet, given the dearth of research on American women in any era, it was understandable. For colonial women, there were, after all, a number of notable volumes produced in the later nineteenth or early twentieth century: Alice Morse Earle’s many books, including Colonial Dames and Good Wives (Boston, 1895) and Home Life in Colonial Days (New York, 1898); Elizabeth Anthony Dexter’s Colonial Women of Affairs (Boston, 1924); Mary Summer Benson’s Women in Eighteenth-Century America (New York, 1935); and Julia Cherry Spruill’s Women’s Life and Work in the Southern Colonies (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1938).
These were pioneering works, important but limited, primarily anecdotal rather than analytical, heavily weighted toward the eighteenth century, and of course untuned to the sorts of economic and social distinctions which later historians would find essential. Their insights were not pursued in later works. Eugenie Leonard, Sophie Drinker, and Miriam Holden’s exhaustive but uncritical bibliography, The American Woman in Colonial and Revolutionary Times, 1565–1800 (Philadelphia, 1962), gives the illusion of fullness where none exists. Tracing their entries for the pre-revolutionary period can only confirm the superficial attention which women have received until recently in colonial histories.
As a consequence, in most surveys and in many specialized studies of nineteenth-century women the colonial period was seen as a static, dimly sketched but at the same time essential backdrop to later changes. If the emphasis was on the emergence of feminism, as in Eleanor Flexner’s Century of Struggle (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), the colonial period was seen as an era of suppression and superstition. If the emphasis was on the development of “Victorian” womanhood, as in Page Smith’s Daughters of the Promised Land (Boston and Toronto, 1970), early America became a world of shared work and healthy sensuality.
Although the position of Puritan women was sympathetically considered in Edmund S. Morgan’s The Puritan Family (Boston, 1944), most excursions into family history gave little attention to wives and mothers. Byron Fairchild’s Messrs. William Pepperell (Ithaca, N.Y., 1954) was correctly named: the various Mistresses Pepperell do not appear. Equally narrow in their concept of family were John Waters, whose Otis Family in Provincial and Revolutionary Massachusetts (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1968) ignored even so revolutionary an Otis as Mercy Warren, and Philip J. Greven, Jr., whose Four Generations (Ithaca, N.Y., 1970) might better have been titled “Fathers and Sons.” Family historians less concerned with political and economic than with psychological issues have necessarily given greater attention to women. John Demos, in A Little Commonwealth (New York, 1970), considered the position of wives and mothers as well as husbands, fathers, children, and servants. Curiously, however, a focus on child-rearing has not always produced awareness of gender differences, perhaps because the psychological models upon which such studies are based have seen the psychology of women as the mirror image of the psychology of men. Philip Greven’s The Protestant Temperament (New York, 1977) is almost as single-mindedly male as Four Generations, if only because his few female examples fit his theoretical frame so poorly. Psycho-history has yet to profit from the revisionist approaches of such psychologists as Jean Baker Miller, Toward a New Psychology of Women (Boston, 1976) or Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering (Los Angeles, 1978).
At the same time, a number of historians, bringing narrow questions to largely unexplored materials, have begun to question many assumptions about the position of women in the early American past. Nancy F. Cott explored marital status as seen through divorce records in two articles, “Divorce and the Changing Status of Women in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., XXXII 1976), 586–614, and “Eighteenth-Century Family and Social Life Revealed in Massachusetts Divorce Records,” Journal of Social History, X (1976), 20–43. Mary Beth Norton undermined the assumptions of Elizabeth Anthony Dexter in her survey of the loyalist papers, described in “Eighteenth-Century American Women in Peace and War: The Case of the Loyalists,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., XXXII (1976), 386–409. She has developed this argument using other materials in Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (Boston, 1980). Interpretations of female religious status based upon sermon literature appeared in Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “Vertuous Women Found: New England Ministerial Literature, 1668–1735,” American Quarterly, XXVIII (1976), 20–40; Margaret W. Masson, “The Typology of the Female as a Model for the Regenerate: Puritan Preaching, 1690–1730,” Signs, II (1976), 304–315; and Lonna Malmsheimer, “Daughters of Zion: New England Roots of American Feminism,” New England Quarterly, Sept. 1977, pp. 484–504. Mary Maples Dunn compared two religious traditions in “Saints and Sisters: Congregational and Quaker Women in the Early Colonial Period,” American Quarterly, XXX (1978). Using probate records, Alexander Keyssar challenged earlier notions in his study of “Widowhood in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts: A Problem in the History of the Family,” Perspectives in American History, VIII (1974), 83–119. Daniel Scott Smith and Michael Hindus raised new issues in a study of marriage and birth records, “Premarital Pregnancy in America 1640–1971: An Overview and Interpretation,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, V (Spring 1975), 537–570. Such articles demonstrate the fruitfulness of close examination of specific issues. The study of colonial women, especially as seen in the larger context of early American culture, has barely begun.
In the colonial period, of course, it is seldom possible to locate and identify “female” materials. The record of women’s lives is there, but it is largely uncatalogued and undefined. The footnotes to individual chapters form a more complete essay on sources than can possibly be written here. A full list of all the materials used would be more misleading than helpful, since few references yielded more than a scrap or two of information on female life. Five major classes of documents can be more fully described, however.
1. Court Records were the single most important source for female attitudes and especially for female speech. Fortunately, northern New England has two magnificent collections of printed court records. Harriet Tapley’s transcription of seventeenth-century Essex County records includes eight volumes published in the early twentieth century and a ninth volume added more recently: Records and Files of the Quarterly Courts of Essex County (Salem, Mass.: Essex Institute, 1911–1975). Additional Essex court papers have been printed in The Salem Witchcraft Papers, ed. Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, 3 vols. (New York, 1977). Manuscript court papers from seventeenth-century New Hampshire have been mounted in eleven volumes kept at the New Hampshire State Archives, Concord. For eighteenth-century New Hampshire and for Essex County, later court papers are filed by individual case, making it almost impossible to use them for the sort of information gathered here. The Maine Province and Court Records, on the other hand, continue into the eighteenth century in an ongoing project of the Maine Historical Society at Portland.
2. Probate Records, including inventories, have been published for early Essex County and Maine but not for New Hampshire. (The Maine inventories are in the first volume of the Maine Province and Court Records. The Essex inventories are in The Probate Records of Essex County, 3 vols. [Salem, Mass., 1916–1920].) Published records barely hint at the abundance of manuscript probate records in state and county archives. New Hampshire probate records are in manuscript at the state archives and on microfilm at the New Hampshire Historical Society. Maine inventories are in the York County Court House, Alfred, Maine. Essex County inventories are at the Essex County Registry of Probate in Salem, where a lone historian may compete for attention with droves of twentieth-century lawyers. For a helpful introduction to the use of probate records, see Gloria L. Main, “Probate Records as a Source for Early American History,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., XXXII (1975), 89–99, and in the same issue, Daniel Scott Smith, “Underregistration and Bias in Probate Records: An Analysis of Data from Eighteenth Century Hingham, Massachusetts,” 100–112.
3. Family Papers for the period before 1750 often consist of deeds, wills, and business accounts, though a few collections offer series of letters. The richest source of family papers for northern New England is the Essex Institute. The most useful collections for this project were the Holyoke Family Collection, including thirteen boxes spanning three centuries; the Curwen Family Manuscripts, mounted in three volumes; and the Barton Family Papers, including the Marston family correspondence in volume one. The published Saltonstall Papers, 1607–1815, Robert E. Moody, ed. (Boston, 1972), have an almost unique set of letters from a mother to a daughter. The Massachusetts Historical Society has published both the William Pepperrell Papers and the Jonathan Belcher Papers. Both have occasional references to their wives, though no female correspondence has survived. The unpublished Belcher letters are useful and have been conveniently indexed at the end of the published volume (Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, VI).
4. Diaries for the region have been catalogued in William Matthews, American Diaries: An Annotated Bibliography (Berkeley, Calif., 1945) and in American Diaries in Manuscript 1580–1954 (Athens, Ga., 1974). Unfortunately, there are no female diaries before 1750. The most detailed male diaries are those of Matthew Patten, Joseph Green, Zaccheus Collins, and Nicholas Gilman, described in Chapter Seven. Mary Holyoke’s diary is part of a larger Holyoke collection, including almanac diaries in the Holyoke Family Collection at the Essex Institute and those family diaries published as The Holyoke Diaries 1709–1856 (Salem, Mass., 1911). The Mary Cleaveland “Diary” at the Essex Institute is a mere fragment. Male account books, on the other hand, exist in great abundance. They occasionally give glimpses of daily life, though they require industrious mining for every jewel uncovered. Account books are catalogued separately at the New Hampshire Historical Society and at the Essex Institute.
5. Church Records can be found in archives, in trunks in church basements, or in the custody of church clerks who spend the winter in Florida. For clues to whereabouts of congregational-church records, see Harold F. Worthley, An Inventory of the Records of the Particular Churches of Massachusetts Gathered 1620–1805 (Cambridge, Mass., 1970). There is much more to be learned about the activities of women in churches from a close examination of membership patterns and of disciplinary action. For a brilliant example of what can be done with local church records, see Mary P. Ryan, “A Woman’s Awakening: Evangelical Religion and the Families of Utica, New York, 1800–1840,” American Quarterly, XXX (1978), 602–623.
Lyle Koehler’s A Search for Power: The Weaker Sex in Seventeenth Century New England (Urbana: U. of Illinois Press, 1980) appeared after this book was complete. The research is impressive and the bibliography and source notes are an excellent guide to the kinds of materials available for other parts of New England. Unfortunately, the book itself is marred by a curiously polemical style and by what sometimes appears as deliberate distortion of evidence.