MANY HISTORIANS HAVE ASSUMED, with Page Smith, that “it was not until the end of the colonial era that the idea of a ‘suitable’ or ‘proper’ sphere of feminine activities began to emerge.” For fifty years historians have relied upon the work of Elizabeth A. Dexter, who claimed that there were more “women of affairs” proportionally in eighteenth-century America than in 1900. Colonial newspapers yield evidence of female blacksmiths, silversmiths, tinworkers, shoemakers, shipwrights, tanners, gunsmiths, barbers, printers, and butchers, as well as a great many teachers and shopkeepers. Partly on the basis of such evidence, Richard Morris concluded in his pioneering study of female legal rights that American women in the colonial period attained “a measure of individuality and independence in excess of that of their English sisters.”1
Recently, however, a few historians have begun to question these assumptions. Mary Beth Norton has carefully studied the claims of 468 loyalist women who were refugees in Great Britain after the American Revolution. Only forty-three of these women mentioned earning money on their own or even assisting directly in their husbands’ business. As a group, the loyalist women were unable to describe their family assets, other than household possessions, and they repeatedly described themselves as “helpless” to manage the business thrust upon them. She has concluded that these women were “almost wholly domestic, in the sense that that word would be used in the nineteenth-century United States.”2 In a study of widowhood in eighteenth-century Massachusetts, Alexander Keyssar came to similar conclusions. Economic dependency, first upon husbands, then upon grown sons, characterized the lives of women in the agricultural village of Woburn.3
Both groups of historians are right. The premodern world did allow for greater fluidity of role behavior than in nineteenth-century America, but colonial women were by definition basically domestic. We can account for these apparently contradictory conclusions by focusing more closely upon the economic relationship of husband and wife. There is a revealing little anecdote in a deposition recorded in Essex County in 1672. Jacob Barney of Salem had gone to Phillip Cromwell’s house to negotiate a marriage. Although both Cromwell and his wife were present, Barney had turned to the husband, expecting, as he said, “to have their minds from him.” But because Cromwell had a severe cold which had impaired his hearing, he simply pointed to his wife and said that whatever she agreed upon, “he would make it good.”4 This incident dramatizes three assumptions basic to family government in the traditional world:
1. The husband was supreme in the external affairs of the family. As its titular head, he had both the right and the responsibility to represent it in its dealings with the outside world.
2. A husband’s decisions would, however, incorporate his wife’s opinions and interest. (Barney expected to hear their minds from him.)
3. Should fate or circumstance prevent the husband from fulfilling his role, the wife could appropriately stand in his place. As one seventeenth-century Englishman explained it, a woman “in her husband’s absence, is wife and deputy-husband, which makes her double the files of her diligence. At his return he finds all things so well he wonders to see himself at home when he was abroad.”5
To put it simply, Dexter’s evidence points to what was permissible in colonial society, Norton’s to what was probable. As deputy husbands a few women, like Mistress Cromwell, might emerge from anonymity; most women did not. Yet both sets of evidence must be analyzed apart from modern assumptions about the importance of access to jobs in expanding female opportunity. The significance of the role of deputy husband cannot be determined by counting the number of women who used it to achieve independence. To talk about the independence of colonial wives is not only an anachronism but a contradiction in logic. A woman became a wife by virtue of her dependence, her solemnly vowed commitment to her husband. No matter how colorful the exceptions, land and livelihood in this society were normally transmitted from father to son, as studies like Keyssar’s have shown.
One can be dependent, however, without being either servile or helpless. To use an imperfect but nonetheless suggestive analogy, colonial wives were dependent upon patriarchal families in somewhat the same way seventeenth-century ministers were dependent upon their congregations or twentieth-century engineers are dependent upon their companies. That is, they owned neither their place of employment nor even the tools of their trade. No matter how diligently they worked, they did not expect to inherit the land upon which they lived any more than a minister expected to inherit his meetinghouse or an engineer his factory. Skilled service was their major contribution, secure support their primary compensation. Unlike professionals in either century, they could not resign their position, but then neither could they be fired. Upon the death of a husband they were entitled to maintenance for life—or until they transferred their allegiance (symbolized by their name) from one domestic establishment to another.
The skilled service of a wife included the specialized housekeeping skills described in the last chapter, but it also embraced the responsibilities of a deputy husband. Since most productive work was based within the family, there were many opportunities for a wife to “double the files of her diligence.” A weaver’s wife, like Beatrice Plummer, might wind quills. A merchant’s wife, like Hannah Grafton, might keep shop. A farmer’s wife, like Magdalen Wear, might plant corn.
Looking backward to the colonial period from the nineteenth century, when “true womanhood” precluded either business enterprise or hard physical labor, historians may miss the significance of such work, which tells us less about economic opportunity (which for most women was limited) than about female responsibility (which was often very broad). Most occupations were indeed gender-linked, yet colonial Englishmen were far less concerned with abstract notions like “femininity” than with concrete roles like “wife” or “neighbor.” Almost any task was suitable for a woman as long as it furthered the good of her family and was acceptable to her husband. This approach was both fluid and fixed. It allowed for varied behavior without really challenging the patriarchal order of society. There was no proscription against female farming, for example, but there were strong prescriptions toward dutiful wifehood and motherhood. Context was everything.
In discussing the ability of colonial women to take on male duties, most historians have assumed a restrictive ideology in Anglo-American society, an essentially negative valuation of female capacity. Some historians have argued that this negative ideology was offset by the realities of colonial life; others have concluded it was not. This chapter reverses the base of the argument, suggesting that even in America ideology was more permissive than reality. Under the right conditions any wife not only could double as a husband, she had the responsibility to do so. In the probate courts, for example, widows who did not have grown sons were routinely granted administration of their husbands’ estates.6 Gender restrictions were structural rather than psychological. Although there was no female line of inheritance, wives were presumed capable of husbanding property which male heirs would eventually inherit.
To explain fully the contradictions in such a system, we must return to the day-to-day behavior of individual husbands and wives, first examining the factors which enhanced the role of deputy husband and then exploring conditions which muted its significance for colonial women.
HISTORIANS CAN READ WILLS, account books, and tax records, documents in which males clearly predominate, but they cannot so easily explore the complex decision-making behind these records. Scattered glimpses of daily interaction suggest that there was as much variation in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century families as there is today. Some wives were servile, some were shrews, others were respected companions who shared the authority of their spouses in the management of family affairs. Important conditions, however, separated the colonial world from our own. The most basic of these was spatial. Earlier we described an imaginary boundary stretching from house to yard, separating the domain of the housewife from the world of her husband. It is important to recognize that in reality no such barrier existed. Male and female space intersected and overlapped. Nor was there the sharp division between home and work that later generations experienced. Because servants and apprentices lived within the household, a family occasion—mealtime or nightly prayer—could become a business occasion as well.
In June of 1661 a young maid named Naomi Hull described a discussion which took place in the parlor of the Samuel Symonds’ home in Ipswich, Massachusetts, early in that year. The case concerned the length of indenture of two Irish servants. According to the maid, all of the family had gathered for prayer when one of the Irishmen asked if a neighbor’s son was coming the next day to plow. Mistress Symonds said she thought so. One of the men asked who would plow with him. Mistress Symonds said, “One of you.” When the two men announced that their indenture was up and that they would work no longer, both the master and the mistress questioned the servants. At one point Mistress Symonds interrupted her husband. “Let them alone,” she said. “Now they are speaking let them speak their own minds.”7 Because the involvement of Mistress Symonds was not at issue, this casual description of her participation is all the more impressive. Such an anecdote shows the way in which boundaries between male and female domains might blur in a common household setting.
Ambitious men in early America were often involved in many things at once—farming and running a gristmill, for example, or cutting timber and fishing. Because wives remained close to the house, they were often at the communications center of these diverse operations, given responsibility for conveying directions, pacifying creditors, and perhaps even making some decisions about the disposition of labor. On a day-to-day basis this might be a rather simple matter: remembering to send a servant to repair a breach in the dam after he finished in the field, for example, or knowing when to relinquish an ox to a neighbor.8 But during a prolonged absence of her husband a woman might become involved in more weighty matters.
Sometime in the 1670s Moses Gilman of Exeter, New Hampshire, wrote to his wife from Boston:
Loving wife Elisabeth Gillman these are to desire you to speake to John Gillman & James Perkins and so order the matter thatt Mr. Tho. Woodbridge may have Twelve thousand fott of merchantable boards Rafted by thirsday night or sooner if poseble they Can for I have Absolutly sould them to him & if John Clough sen or any other doe deliver bords to make up the sum Give Receits of whatt you Receive of him or any other man and lett no bote bee prest or other ways disposed of untill I Returne being from Him who is yos till death
Moses Gilman9
If Gilman had doubted his wife’s ability to “order the matter,” he could have written a number of separate letters—to John Gilman, James Perkins, John Clough, and perhaps others. But securing a shipment of twelve thousand feet of merchantable boards entirely by letter would have been complicated and time-consuming. Instead, Gilman relied on the good sense of his wife, who would be respected as his surrogate, and who probably had acquired some expertise in making out receipts for forest products and in conveying instructions to lumbering and shipping crews. A “loving wife” who considered herself his “till Death” was more trustworthy than a hired servant or business associate. As a true consort, she would know that by furthering her husband’s interest she furthered her own.
Thus, a wife with talent for business might become a kind of double for her husband, greatly extending his ability to handle affairs. This is beautifully illustrated in a document filed with the New Hampshire court papers. In February of 1674 Peter Lidget of Boston signed a paper giving Henry Dering of Piscataqua full power of attorney “to collect all debts due to him in that place and thereabout.” On the reverse side of the document Dering wrote: “I Henry Dering have, and do hereby Constitute, ordaine, and appoint my loveing wife, Anne Dering my Lawful Attourney” to collect and sue for Peter Lidget’s debts “by virtue of the Letter of Attourney on the other side.”10 (Anne Dering was the widow of Ralph Benning of Boston. She left her married name—and perhaps some of her business acumen—to her great-grandson, Governor Benning Wentworth of New Hampshire.11)
Court cases involving fishermen give some glimpses of the kinds of responsibility assumed by their wives, who often appear in the foreground as well as the background of the documents. Depositions in an action of 1660 reveal Anne Devorix working alongside her husband, “taking account” as a servant culled fish from a spring voyage. She herself delivered a receipt from the master of the ship to the shop where the final “reckoning” was made. When her husband was at sea, she supervised spring planting on the family corn land as well as protecting the hogsheads, barrels, and flakes at the shore from the incursions of a quarrelsome neighbor.12 Even more visible in the records is Edith Creford of Salem, who frequently acted as an attorney for her husband, at one point signing a promissory note for £33 in “merchantable cod fish at price current.” Like the fishwives of Nantucket whom Crèvecoeur described a hundred years later, these women were “necessarily obliged to transact business, to settle accounts, and in short, to rule and provide for their families.”13
At a different social level the wives of merchant sea captains played a similar role. Sometime in the year 1710 Elizabeth Holmes of Boston sat down with Patience Marston of Salem and settled accounts accumulated during a voyage to Newfoundland. Neither woman had been on the ship. They were simply acting as attorneys for their husbands, Captain Robert Holmes, who had commanded the brigantine, and Mr. Benjamin Marston, who owned it.14 Family letters give a more detailed picture of Mistress Marston’s involvement in her husband’s business.
In the summer of 1719 Benjamin Marston took command of one of his own ships, taking his twenty-two-year-old son Benjamin with him. Young Benjamin wrote his mother complete details of the first stage of the journey, which ended at Casco Bay in Maine. He included the length of the journey, the state of the family enterprises in Maine, and the price of lumber and staves, adding that he was “Sorry you should sett so long in ye house for no Adv[ance] but perhaps to ye prejudice of your health.” Patience was obviously “keeping shop.” A week later Benjamin wrote again, assuring his mother that he was looking after the business in Maine. “My father w[oul]d have been imposed upon by m—c had I not interposed and stood stiffly to him,” he explained. Was the son acting out some Oedipal fantasy here, or was he perhaps performing as his mother’s surrogate, strengthening the resolve of the presumably more easygoing father? The next day he wrote still another letter, asking for chocolate, complaining boyishly that “ye Musketo’s bitt me so prodigiously as I was writing that I can hardly tell what it was I wrote,” and conveying what must by then have been a common request from the absent husband. Mrs. Marston was to get a witnessed statement regarding a piece of family business and send it by “the first Oppertunity.”15
Because the business activities of wives were under the “wing, protection, and cover” of a husband (to repeat Blackstone’s phrase), they are difficult to measure by standard methods. Patience Marston was a custodian of messages, guardian of errands, preserver of property, and keeper of accounts. Yet without the accidental survival of a few family papers there would be no way of knowing about her involvement in her husband’s business. In Benjamin’s will she received the standard “thirds.” She may have become impatient with her chores or anxious about her husband’s business acumen, but there is no indication of this in the only writings preserved in her hand. She served as “deputy husband” as circumstances demanded, and when her husband perished from smallpox soon after arriving in Ireland, she declared herself grateful for the dear son who returned “as one from the dead” to take over his father’s business.16
The role of deputy husband deserves more careful and systematic study. But two cautions are in order. First, the biases of the twentieth century may tempt historians to give undue significance to what were really rather peripheral enterprises. Acting as attorney to one’s husband is not equivalent to practicing law. To colonial women, it may even have been less desirable than keeping house. This leads to the second point. The value of any activity is determined by its meaning to the participant, not to the observer. In early America position was always more important than task. Colonial women might appear to be independent, even aggressive, by modern standards, yet still have derived their status primarily from their relationship to their husbands.
This is well illustrated in a New Hampshire court record of 1671. A carpenter named John Barsham testified about an argument he had heard between Henry Sherburne and his second wife, Sarah, who was the widow of Walter Abbott. Barsham had come to the house to get some nails he needed for repairing a dwelling he had rented from them. According to Barsham, Sarah became so angry at her husband’s opposition that she “rose off from the seat where she was setting & came up to him with her arms akimbo saying we should have nayles & he had nothing to [do] in it.” As if to add the final authority to her demand, she asked him “why he trode upon Walter Abbotts floor & bid him get out of doors, & said that he had nothing to do there.”17 Sarah Sherburne was an experienced and assertive woman. She had kept tavern “with two husbands and none.” The house in which she and Sherburne lived had been part of her inheritance from her first husband.18 But in the heat of the argument she did not say, “Get out of my house” or “Get out of the house I provided.” She said, “Get out of Walter Abbott’s house.” Her identity was not as property owner, but as wife. To assert her authority over her husband, she invoked the memory of his predecessor.
FOR SOME WOMEN, the realities of daily life in coastal New England enhanced the role of deputy husband. For others, discrepancies in education as well as the on-again-off-again nature of the role made involvement in the family business just another chore. A woman who worked effectively as an assistant, especially with the authority of a living husband behind her, could still be insecure in handling complex business arrangements. Finally (and perhaps the most important point of all), most woman had other things to do. A closer examination of female economic life suggests not only separate education and separate duties but separate lines of trade.
Selectman’s indentures from mid-eighteenth-century Newbury show the contrasting training offered boys and girls at the lowest end of the social spectrum in a commercial town. Between 1743 and 1760 the selectman indentured sixty children of the town poor. Forty-nine of these were boys, who were apprenticed to blacksmiths, shipwrights, cordwainers, coopers, weavers, tanners, tailors, joiners, blockmakers, riggers, mastmakers, and even a perriwig-maker in the town. The eleven girls, on the other hand, were promised instruction in the generalized skills of “housewifery” or “women’s work,” though occasionally spinning, carding, sewing, and knitting were also specified. Often the phrase “Art, Trade, or Mystery” on these printed forms was crossed out in the girls’ indentures. All of the children were assured instruction in reading, but only the boys were to learn “to write a Ledgable hand & cypher as far as the Gouldin Rule” or “to write & Cypher as far as ye Rule of three or so far as to keep a Tradesmans Book.”19
That more than four times as many boys as girls were apprenticed suggests that the support of poor girls was usually handled in some other way. Either they remained with their families or were placed as day workers or maids on a less formal basis among the housewives of the town. The crossed-out passages in the indentures highlight the anomalous position of these female apprentices. Clearly, the training of artisans and the training of their wives were two separate processes belonging to two separate systems. A female might learn the mysteries of blacksmithing or tanning—but only informally, by working as a helper to the men in her family. Predictably, in the region as a whole, women lagged far behind men in their ability to write, a discrepancy which actually increased over the eighteenth century.20
What this meant in the daily lives of ordinary women is suggested by extant account books from the period. Although many such books survive, in the entire century between 1650 and 1750 there is not a single one known to have been kept by a woman. Purchasing an account book was a significant step for a farmer or village craftsman. A Topsfield weaver recognized this when he wrote in the inside of his new book, “John Gould his Book of accounts I say my Book my owne book and I gave one shillin and four pence for it so much and no more.”21 Books like Gould’s fall somewhere between the systematic, literate, merchant-oriented economy which came to dominate the external trade of New England and the local, personal, largely oral trade networks which were central to village life. As deputy husbands a few women might participate in the former, but for most wives economic life was centered in the latter.
Something of the range of bookkeeping methods employed in colonial America is preserved in an anonymous account book from Portsmouth, New Hampshire. One segment of this record was kept in the unformed scrawl typical of ordinary craftsmen and farmers; another was neatly posted in the hand of a professional clerk. But evidence of a third and quite different method is preserved in entries for a laborer named Richard Trip, who traded work in the “gundalow” (a Piscataqua sailing vessel) for “75 meals of victualls” and “75 nights of lodging brot from the acco[un]t kept in chaulk on the wall.”22 The wife of the unknown shopkeeper may have been responsible for the chalk account as well as for providing the “diet,” “washing,” and “mittins” recorded in Trip’s debits. For this sort of bookkeeping she had no need for “cyphering.”
Judging only from the account books, one might conclude that most married women were seldom involved in trade even on the village level. Yet account books represent but one strand of the village economy. Other sources point to an extensive, less systematic, and largely oral trade network in which women predominated. A court case of 1682 provides an interesting example. When a woman named Grace Stout appeared to answer several charges of theft, the witnesses against her included thirty-four persons, among them twenty-one housewives who were able to give precise accounts of the value of work performed or goods received. These were petty transactions—kneading bread for one woman, purchasing stockings knitted by another—not the sort of thing to turn up in a colonial trade balance but nevertheless an essential part of the fabric of economic life.23
The account books themselves give negative evidence of a separate female network. Although most ledgers include a few female names, the great majority of written accounts are with men, with credits reflecting the dominant commodities in each community. Ipswich farmers traded grain, farm labor, and animal products for shoes, weaving, rum, tobacco, skillets, and cotton wool. Householders from Marblehead paid for the same items in cash and fish, while those from Exeter usually offered pine, oak, and hemlock boards as well as labor.24 Entries for the products of female craft are infrequent; most sustained accounts for butter, cheese, sewing, or spinning are listed under the names of widows. This pattern is especially striking in the few accounts which shift from the name of a husband to the name of his widow. Thomas Bartlett, a Newbury shoemaker, listed twenty-one entries under the name of Ephraim Blesdel from March 13, 1725, until October 16, 1730. Until the middle of July 1728 the credits included hides, cider, onions, codfish, veal, and cash. But on that date Bartlett reckoned with “the widow Debrath Blesdel.” Nine of the twelve credits which follow are for spinning.25 There is pathos in a second series recorded in Bartlett’s book. From November 1729 until September 1733 he listed twenty-seven debits under John Wood’s name, all for making and mending shoes. The credits already included some spinning as well as cash and skins when, on June 8, 1732, he noted in a taciturn entry: “husbands shoes sent back.” From that point on, the account was with “Widow Anne Wood,” who now attempted to pay for her shoes in dried sage from her garden and in additional spinning.26
Anne Wood was probably trading small amounts of sage long before her husband’s death. The accumulation of minor transactions which composed female trade could become substantial without ever appearing in written accounts. Suggestive evidence of this appears in the account book of Thomas Chute, a tailor from Marblehead, Massachusetts, who became one of the first settlers of New Marblehead in frontier Maine. In May of 1737 Chute reckoned with Joseph Griffin of Marblehead, matching his own charges for tailoring against £8 debited in Griffin’s book, finally balancing the whole with £4 pending, “By you [r] wives accoumpt with mine.” A similar entry appears forty years later, in 1766, when he added to a £25 total accumulated by John Farrow of New Marblehead the sum of £3 “by yr wifes & mine acoumpts.”27 For the most part, the trade of Thomas Chute and the trade of his wife were harmoniously separate.
Informal, oral, local, petty—female enterprise appears as the merest flicker on the surface of male documents. That it existed seems clear enough. The problem is in determining its value to the participants.
Potentially at least, managing a female specialty might be even more attractive than simply helping in a husband’s work. An Ipswich woman known in the records only as Mistress Hewlett became so successful in the poultry business that she was able to loan money to her husband. When a friend expressed surprise at this arrangement, arguing that the wife’s income really belonged to him if he needed it, Ensign Hewlett 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.”28 To the neighbor, loaning money to one’s spouse was contradictory, an assertion of individual rather than communal values. But to Hewlett, no such threat was implied. His wife had “been a good wife.” As long as independent female trade remained a minor theme within a larger communal ethic, it did not threaten either male supremacy or the economic unity of the family.
Yet consider the case of Mary Hunt of Portsmouth. Her encounter with Samuel Clark suggests both the opportunities and the limitations of female trade. When she found a cheese missing from her house after the fast day in October of 1675, she suspected Clark, who was a near neighbor. Storming into his house, she opened a drawer. There between two pieces of biscuit was the evidence she needed, an uneaten morsel notched, as she later testified, “with the very same marke which I put upon my best cheeses.” Mary Hunt’s accusation was brash, for Clark had once served on a jury which convicted her of stealing from the prominent Cutt family when she lived with them as a maidservant.29 Her new status as a housewife and as a cheese dealer had obviously given her a sense of power as well as an opportunity for revenge.
The story does not end there, however. A marked cheese does not have the durability of a marked tankard or clock. Unfortunately, Mary Hunt’s cheese did not make it to court in November, much less into the stream of physical artifacts from which we derive our understanding of a culture. Clark’s servant apparently swallowed the evidence. Though Hunt won her case in the fall, Clark successfully appealed in June, standing on his dignity as a man never before suspected of “any crime much less so base a crime as theft and for so sorry a matter as cheese.” Part of his long—and professionally inscribed—defense was a counter-accusation: it was well known in the neighborhood, he said, that Goody Hunt sold her products to “one and another” and was apt to do so without her husband’s knowledge, crying theft if called to reckon.30
Clearly, the informal nature of female trade might work to the advantage of a woman who wanted a little extra income independent of her husband, yet ultimately the economic power of any woman was inseparable from her larger responsibility as wife. The role of housewife and the role of deputy husband were two sides of the same coin. Whether trading cheese or shipping barrel staves, a good wife sustained and supported the family economy and demonstrated her loyalty to her husband.
In the absence of a husband, the same skills might prove inadequate to independence. An anonymous document in the Essex Institute at Salem, Massachusetts, reveals the chasm which might develop between “female trade” and “male business.” The unknown author of this little treatise had been accused of fraudulently securing a deed from an aged widow. In his defense he methodically itemized the charges against him, then answered each in turn. Two are of particular interest here—first, that the woman knew but little of the “common commerce of life,” and, second, that she was unable to form a “just idea” of what belonged to her or its value. The man answered the first charge with a flat denial:
I nor no other Person In this Neaborrhood I donte believe Ever heard of her not knowing how for to Trade.
But he at least partly acknowledged the second:
How could she or any other Person forme any just Idia of what they are worth when it is Eveadent that Part of it was In Another Persons hands … and She Not Knowing how for to Right so as for to keep my Acc [ount] nor she could not Read Righting nor she could not Chipher so as for to Cast up my Acc[ount].31
These two statements summarize much of what we have said here. A talent for trade was one thing; the ability to handle complex business affairs was another. Although northern New England produced many Elizabeth Gilmans and Edith Crefords, women who successfully handled business in the absence of their husbands, it probably produced even more women like this anonymous widow of Salem. In her years as a housewife she had acquired considerable skill in the “common commerce of life” but little that would prepare her to deal with a sophisticated and aggressive assault on her property, especially when legal documents were involved. No longer able to rely upon a spouse or a son, she had truly become a “relict.”
IN FEBRUARY OF 1757 Mary Russell of Concord, Massachusetts, wrote a letter to her brother-in-law Samuel Curwen of Salem in which she joked, “I should have answered Your letter long before this had I known when we were to come to Boston but you know I am a Femme Covert and cannot act for my self.”32 Her wit betrays a deeper feeling—if not yet a feminist sense of injustice, certainly a quite consciously feminine annoyance at the officious pedantry of the law, at least as it was discussed in her own parlor. Mary Russell knew that the restrictions of the common law had little relationship to the ordinary decisions of her daily life. Within her own domain she acted confidently and independently.
Yet the predicament which she described in jest became a reality for at least some women in the course of the eighteenth century as both business and law became increasingly sophisticated. The loyalist widows whom Mary Beth Norton described were in this position. Without their husbands or the familiar surroundings of home, they were forced to deal with the complexities of an English court. Little wonder that they declared themselves “helpless.”
Norton’s more recent work has shown, however, that the American Revolution affected many patriot women in a strikingly different way. At first reluctantly and then with increasing confidence and skill, these wives took up the management of farms and businesses while their husbands were away at war. Norton believes that the war had dissolved traditional boundaries, altering a “line between male and female behavior, once apparently so impenetrable.”33 Our evidence from early New England suggests a quite different conclusion. If there was an “impenetrable” gender barrier in mid-eighteenth-century America, it was a new one. The avowed helplessness of the loyalist women may be a measure of increasing specialization in economic life just before the revolution. The competence of the patriot women is even clearer evidence of the persistence of the old role of deputy husband. That patriot women failed to establish permanent changes in female roles is hardly surprising, since they acted within rather than against traditional gender definitions.
The economic roles of married women were based upon two potentially conflicting values—gender specialization and identity of interest. A wife was expected to become expert in the management of a household and the care of children, but she was also asked to assist in the economic affairs of her husband, becoming his representative and even his surrogate if circumstances demanded it. These two roles were compatible in the premodern world because the home was the communication center of family enterprise if not always the actual place of work. As long as business transactions remained personal and a woman had the support of a familiar environment, she could move rather easily from the role of housewife to the role of deputy husband, though few women were prepared either by education or by experience to become “independent women of affairs.”
The role of deputy husband reinforced a certain elasticity in premodern notions of gender. No mystique of feminine behavior prevented a woman from driving a hard bargain or chasing a pig from the field, and under ideal conditions day-to-day experience in assisting with a husband’s work might prepare her to function competently in a male world—should she lose her husband, should she find herself without a grown son, should she choose not to remarry or find it impossible to do so. But in the immediate world such activities could have a far different meaning. The chores assigned might be menial, even onerous, and, whatever their nature, they competed for attention with the specialized housekeeping responsibilities which every woman shared.