A CENTRAL ISSUE in the interpretation of early American huswifery is compressed in a letter which Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1727 to his younger sister, Jane, who was about to marry.
I have been thinking what would be a suitable present for me to make, and for you to receive, as I hear you are grown a celebrated beauty. I had almost determined on a tea table, but when I considered that the character of a good housewife was far preferable to that of being only a pretty gentlewoman, I concluded to send you a spinning wheel, which I hope you will accept as a small token of my sincere love and affection.1
The stereotypes of “good housewife” and “pretty gentlewoman” were not original with Franklin, of course. Periodical literature of eighteenth-century England and America was filled with similar contrasts.2 Moralists in every century have preferred “productive” to “ornamental” women. The underlying assumption is that the two roles are incompatible, that a woman must give up the homely duties of kitchen and barnyard to acquire the refinements of the parlor. Consider the nursery rhyme:
Curly locks, curly locks, wilt thou be mine?
Thou shalt not wash dishes nor yet feed the swine,
But sit on a cushion and sew a fine seam,
And feed upon strawberries, sugar and cream.
Dainty food, soft cushions, and curled hair typify the decorative frivolity conveyed in the phrase “pretty gentlewoman.”
In northern New England, in the years between 1670 and 1730, table linens multiplied, forks appeared where none had existed before, rooms became crowded with chairs, and the incidence of looking glasses increased tenfold (see Table 3). Had primping and crimping, chatting and tea-drinking replaced the homely duties of kitchen and yard? Had industrious housewives, like “curly locks” in the nursery rhyme, given up their essential work and become ornamental? Not so. For a few women the focus of huswifery shifted, but for almost all women the Rule of Industry prevailed.
Table 3. Selected Items in Essex and York County Probate Inventories1
A close examination of daily work in the diary of one eighteenth-century gentlewoman shows how themes of gentility inter-meshed with industrious housekeeping even for women near the height of polite society in a commercial town. Mary Vial Holyoke was the daughter of a Boston merchant and the wife of a Salem gentleman, Edward Augustus Holyoke, a casual versifier and serious physician who was a member of the town’s economic and intellectual elite.3 The Holyokes enjoyed the barbecues, dances, teas, and “turtles” of the Essex County gentry, yet each of the four major housekeeping roles is clearly apparent in Mary’s diary, as this selection of entries from the 1760s shows:
Service and maintenance: “Washed.” “Ironed.” “Scoured pewter.” “Scowered rooms.” “Scoured furniture Brasses & put up the Chintz bed & hung pictures.” “Burnt 5 Chimnies.” “Opened cask of Biscuit.” “Began a Barrel of flour.” “Began upon 22 lb. of chocolate.” “Dressed a Calves Head turtle fashion.”
Agriculture: “Sowd sweet marjoram.” “Sowed pease.” “Sowed colleflower.” “Sowed 6 w[ee]ks beans.” “Pulled first radishes.” “Set out turnips & stumps.” “Cut 36 asparagus, first cutting here.” “Bought 11 Ducks.” “Hen began to set.” “Bought a pig to keep, weighed 12½ lb.” “Bought of Wm Williams a Doe rabbit … she brought forth 6 young ones 3 of which died.”
Manufacturing: “Killed the pig, weighed 164 lb. Aetatus 11 months.” “Salt Pork, put Bacon in Pickle.” “Put Bacon up chimney.” “Put Beef in Pickle.” “Preserved quinces. Made syrup of cores and parings.” “Made two Barrels of Soap.” “Filled Bed.” “Made mead.” “Bottled wine, 6 doz.” “Preserved Damson, a week too late.” “Made the Dr. six Cravats marked H.” “Quilted 2 [petti] Coats since yesterday 11 oClock A.M.” “Made 5 shirts in a fortnight for ye Doctor, Besides other things.”
Trade: “Bought salmon.” “Bought tea 1 lb.” “Laid in 77 lbs. of butter for the winter in November.” “Bought 9 lb. Candles.” “Bought sheets.” “Bought Bengali gown, plates and Cruets.” “Bought a Baize Coat.” “First began to take milk at Jno. Felt, 3 pints per Day.” “Bought linnen for the Doctor.”4
The diary shows the persistence of common chores in a sophisticated Salem household of the mid-eighteenth century. If nothing else, it demonstrates that the elaboration of the house might simply mean more work for the housekeeper. Mary Holyoke washed and ironed, but she also polished brasses and hung pictures. Even in this urban setting she was intensely involved in agriculture. In one year she cut 1,836 heads of asparagus from May 10 until June 10! She did not indicate whether she served it, sold it, pickled it, gave it away, or buried it in the cellar in a crock of clarified butter as one ancient cookbook recommended.5 But she was obviously proud of her productivity. Her involvement with barnyard animals is perhaps more surprising. She did not keep a cow, but she found it profitable to raise her own pork as well as poultry and rabbits. Surplus fruit, large quantities of meat, and excess fat determined that she would be a manufacturer as well. Her autumn schedule included many of the tasks common to rural women a hundred years before. Because she lived in a seaport, she could purchase provisions as well as some items of clothing, but this abundance of consumer goods simply created higher standards without really relieving her of responsibility. She purchased gowns and sheets, but she also stitched her husband’s shirts and embroidered his cravats.
Mary Vial Holyoke was a “good housewife.” She undoubtedly had servants, yet the form of entry in her diary demonstrates that she considered scouring, salting, planting, plain sewing, and ironing as her work, whether or not she took every stitch or covered every seed herself. She was also a “pretty gentlewoman.” She did not spin, and she frequently sat at tea with friends. Clearly, the two roles which are set in opposition in Franklin’s letter to his sister Jane were quite compatible in real life. Pretty gentlewomen simply refined the skills which all good housewives shared. To a knowledge of plain sewing and common cookery they added a concern for grace and style. Mary Holyoke was a gentlewoman not just because she had wine and silver on her table but because she was interested enough in the fine points of cooking to “dress” a calf’s head “turtle fashion” rather than simply dropping it into the pot. Her gentility determined that she would spend at least some of her time updating and remodeling her clothing, that she could afford to send a piece of silk to England to be dyed and “water’d with large water,” and that she would know how to monogram as well as construct her husband’s scarves.
Embellishment. Refinement. Polish. These are the key motifs. Ursula Cutt, a New Hampshire widow who died a century before Mary Holyoke, was a gentlewoman not only by virtue of her late husband’s high position in the province, but because of the kinds of things she kept in a chest of drawers in her Portsmouth house. Her probate inventory, taken in August of 1694, allows us to rummage among her belongings, at least in imagination.
In the upper drawer of her chest was a mounted “pin quishing” (cushion) with its own little drawer beneath containing silver thimbles and an English half-crown. Twelve dozen silver and gold breast buttons, a spoon, a pair of “agget pendents,” and remnants of stitching and sewing silk were kept beside it. Perhaps the silk had been used for the “fine wrought Coverings for Cushins not made up” which were listed elsewhere in her house.
Her second drawer also held jewelry (a necklace of “smale Seed perle” and four gold rings) plus some of her best “wearing linen,” cambric aprons, fine sleeves, caps, and neckerchiefs. It may have been a while since she had sorted to the bottom of this drawer—her old “knitt wascot” was clearly “moth eaten,” though still worth ten shillings.
In the third drawer were remnants of old silk and several small swatches of silver lace, perhaps the ends of that which trimmed her blue satin petticoat.
The fourth drawer was stuffed with cloth and clothing of all descriptions, from a length of homespun wool to “One Tufted holland Cloak with silver Clasps.” A red baby blanket and a tiny cloak lined with silk may have been sentimental keepsakes.
Such a woman was distinguished from the common sort by wealth (silver, gold, and pearls), by specialized skills (embroidery silk and fine wrought cushions), and especially by an attitude, an enlarged sense of her own person (fine sleeves, laced petticoats, a tufted cloak). The obvious luxury implied by this assemblage of fabrics and trinkets should not mislead us, however. Mistress Cutt was killed by Indians while haying on her Dover farm.6
“Curly locks, curly locks, wilt thou be mine? Thou shalt not wash dishes nor yet feed the swine.” Our first response to the stereotypes posed in the nursery rhyme must be a simple denial. Gentility and industry were quite compatible. A pretty gentlewoman might “feed upon strawberries” (and “olives” of beef and calf’s-head jelly!) but not without effort.
We cannot so summarily dismiss the comments of men like Franklin, however. Considered as opposing tendencies rather than as absolute categories, the stereotypes of “good housewife” and “pretty gentlewoman” have considerable validity in northern New England. On one level they suggest important contrasts between Country and Town, differences which became more pronounced in the course of the eighteenth century. On another, they point to crucial psychological issues. The gentry were just close enough to the wilderness to flaunt their civilization, yet many were near enough to middle-class (and often Puritan) origins to be anxious about their own gentility. Both the geographic and the religious inheritances of early New England give deeper meaning to the stereotypes.
ELIZABETH SALTONSTALL of Haverhill was the wife of the most prominent man in her town. Nathaniel Saltonstall was a magistrate and a militia commander; he was also the son of one of the few titled settlers of Massachusetts. Yet in this frontier town in the last decades of the seventeenth century there was little opportunity for genteel pretensions.
Fortunately, Mistress Saltonstall was still relatively young and energetic, and she had been trained by a sober mother to value industry more than gentility. Still, she knew the responsibilities of her class. When her only daughter, sixteen-year-old Elizabeth, had an opportunity to accompany her father to Boston in the spring of 1684, she could not keep her at home. The dairy season was upon them, the garden needed planting, but Elizabeth also needed cultivation. The little boys were still at home, after all, and Betsey Warner was a good maid.
The mother’s plans soon went awry. Within a few days of Elizabeth’s departure Betsey Warner’s mother called her home—the family was sick and needed help. “Were it not that I aime at your good I should not be willing to deny myself as I do,” Mistress Saltonstall wrote her daughter late in May, urging her to improve the time that had cost her mother so dearly.
I have put all the silk I could find in a box and sent it with your other things. Intreat my cozine Clark if she can to procure you some silk. We will willingly satisfy her for it and for her paines in teaching you. It would be a very great trouble to me you should misuse your precious time or any way mispend it. Consider what a precious talent time is and what a strict account you must another day give for it.7
If Elizabeth could not help with the churning in Haverhill, then her mother insisted that she at least sit on a cushion in Boston and learn to embroider.
Within five years, Elizabeth had married a young minister of Ipswich, Patience Denison’s grandson John. In Mistress Saltonstall’s view, her daughter embarked upon housekeeping with more enthusiasm than judgment. The servant problem might be no better in Ipswich. “Your father tells me when he was last att Ipswich you were thinking of hireing cows which I am truly troubled att,” she wrote.
You have those neer you that are better able to advise then I am but you will certainly find great inconvenience to take much businesses upon your hand and forced to hire all your help.… If it be not done allready you may be sencible by your own experience how unsteady servants are therfore little incouragements to keep a great dairy.
In a postscript the mother added, “I have according to your desire sent the flax and hemp seed but almost wish I had not.… you will find it difficult to hire help in season.”8
When John Denison died shortly after the birth of a son, Elizabeth married Rowland Cotton, the minister at Sandwich. Now her mother’s letters from Haverhill would be directed to Cape Cod—but the same themes would persist, and when King William’s War penetrated the northern frontier, the complaints grew more insistent.
In the late summer of 1694 Haverhill was under siege. “Our house is filled Top-full, and but one roome left free for a Stranger,” Nathaniel Saltonstall wrote the Cottons on August 23. Ten days later Elizabeth scratched a hasty note to her daughter. Sixty persons were billeted in the house, she said, as well as “ould Jersey.” By October the family was still in “garison crowds; and more than a little … busie about Cyder, and winter apples.” With all those folks around, there was plenty of help for common chores. As winter settled in, however, farmers’ wives and their children went home, though the soldiers stayed. The family had been preserved from both the French and the Indians, Nathaniel wrote to Rowland Cotton in February, but “yet have the cumber and trouble to my only Maid, i.e. Wife, dayly to be cook and to our great charg to provide billets for 4 men posted with me.”9 Young women who might otherwise have helped in the Saltonstall kitchen were probably at home helping their own mothers feed soldiers—or perhaps just trying to catch up on work neglected during the autumn alarm.
Elizabeth Saltonstall not only had difficulty playing the role of “pretty gentlewoman,” she also had trouble doing the ordinary cooking, sewing, washing, and churning expected of a “good housewife.” She had few of the privileges, yet most of the responsibilities, of gentility. Because her husband was militia commander, she was responsible for billeting soldiers. Because her house was one of the largest in the coastal town, she had to open it to strangers. Because her daughter was destined to be a gentlewoman and her sons to graduate from Harvard, she had to part with them when they might have been of most help. At least one of her sons was glad to be away from home. Writing from Cambridge to his sister in Sandwich, Richard Saltonstall said, “Last week we heard from Haverhil, all Well and in health, but much thronged with Children and Lice; which discourages our taking a Journey thither.”10
Mistress Saltonstall complained, but she apparently never questioned her duty, though late in autumn, after the Indian alarms were over and the lice and children removed, she balked at carrying on alone as mistress of the manor while her husband took a journey south. Nathaniel wrote to the Cottons that he was sorry he wouldn’t be able to visit them at Cape Cod. A Thanksgiving had been appointed, he explained, “and, if I had withdrawn, my wife would not have provided any entertainment, which I was very loth should be omitted; because I have more than … one friend in Haverhill.”11 Because her husband was a convivial man as well as a magistrate, Elizabeth Saltonstall could not neglect normal hospitality even after an autumn of abnormal exertion.
In comparing the life of Elizabeth Saltonstall with the life of Mary Holyoke, the crucial variable is not economic productivity but social complexity. Elizabeth Saltonstall was enmeshed in communal obligations which both increased her burdens and diminished her opportunities. In contrast, Mary Holyoke’s life seems simple. She wrote about friends in her diary—but not about neighbors—and she never mentioned her servants. The difference is chronological as well as geographic. When compared with Hannah Grafton or Patience Marston, Salem gentlewomen who lived fifty years before, Mary Holyoke’s life still seems narrow. There is no evidence, for example, that she was ever involved in her husband’s work, though that is partly explained by the fact that for Edward Augustus Holyoke a profession—medicine—had replaced the collection of public and private enterprises which usually engaged a gentleman. The role of housewife dominates the Holyoke diary because the roles of deputy husband, of mistress, and of neighbor are missing.
All of which suggests that the first specialized “good housewives” in New England were “pretty gentlewomen” of mid-eighteenth-century towns. Such a conclusion must be tentative, since historians as yet know very little about the development of domesticity in America. Although several scholars have begun work on probate records, promising to give us a clearer understanding of changes in material culture in this period, no one has given much attention to social issues, including one of Elizabeth Saltonstall’s most pressing problems—the disappearance of maids, a theme which appears over and over again in documents from rural New England. Mary Holyoke’s silence on that subject indicates that in her circle servants had either become steadier (an unlikely conclusion) or were more easily replaced (a better possibility). In pre-revolutionary Salem, slaves and an increasing supply of poor men’s daughters seem to have given new authority and decreased visibility to the title of mistress. Stretching for position, the coastal gentry had pulled away from the tradition of village interdependence which had placed Sarah Roper in the kitchen of Patience Denison, which had filled Elizabeth Saltonstall’s beds with strangers, and which to the end of the century continued to define the lives of women in country towns.
For women like Mary Holyoke, this narrowing of roles was accompanied by a heightening of the ceremonial meaning of housekeeping, a phenomenon which historians can glimpse in increased attention to the rituals of the table and the garden, but especially in needlework. When Curly Locks found a minute to sit down on a cushion and sew a fine seam, she turned to pastoral motifs, demonstrating gentility by idealizing huswifery, embellishing her fancy furniture with country milkmaids or spinners at their work.12 Like Franklin’s wheel, these pretty pictures paid homage to the interdependent world of the Country as they demonstrated the new opportunities of the Town.
Sometime before 1782 Ruth Belknap, the wife of the minister at Dover, New Hampshire, responded to such fantasies with a little poem entitled “The Pleasures of a Country Life … written when I had a true taste of them by having no maid.” Because it so vividly portrays the continuity of female life in rural New England, it is worth quoting at length.
Up in the morning I must rise
Before I’ve time to rub my eyes.
With half-pin’d gown, unbuckled shoe,
I haste to milk my lowing cow.
But, Oh! it makes my heart to ake,
I have no bread till I can bake,
And then, alas! it makes me sputter,
For I must churn or have no butter.
The hogs with swill too I must serve;
For hogs must eat or men will starve.
Besides, my spouse can get no cloaths
Unless I much offend my nose.
For all that try it know it’s true
There is no smell like colouring blue.
Then round the parish I must ride
And make enquiry far and wide
To find some girl that is a spinner,
Then hurry home to get my dinner.…
All summer long I toil & sweat,
Blister my hands, and scold & fret.
And when the summer’s work is o’er,
New toils arise from Autumn’s store.
Corn must be husk’d, and pork be kill’d,
The house with all confusion fill’d.
O could you see the grand display
Upon our annual butchering day,—
See me look like ten thousand sluts,
My kitchen spread with grease & guts,—
You’d lift your hands surpris’d, & swear
That Mother Trisket’s self were there.
Ye starch’d up folks that live in town,
That lounge upon your beds till noon,
That never tire yourselves with work,
Unless with handling knife & fork,
Come, see the sweets of country life,
Display’d in Parson B[elknap’s] wife.13
The parson’s wife was exaggerating, of course, poking fun at pastoral conventions. That she had time to rhyme her frustration suggests that her problems were neither as serious nor as prolonged as those of Elizabeth Saltonstall, yet the two women would have recognized each other.
IN A REGION settled by evangelical Protestants and eventually shattered by revolution, sharp contrasts between “good housewives” and “pretty gentlewomen” cannot be entirely explained in terms of geography or economics. In an analysis of the journal of Esther Burr—a daughter of Jonathan Edwards, the famous theologian and preacher of western Massachusetts—Laurie Crumpacker has described the ambivalence of one New England woman toward housework. “I must submit,” Burr wrote, complaining of her domestic duties. “My time is not my own but Gods.” Her burdens were genuine, yet Crumpacker suggests that some of her problems, including her inability to keep a maid, may have derived in part from impossible standards and from her own need to spend herself in service. She patterned herself after the industrious housewife of Proverbs whose candle burned far into the night and who nevertheless rose before dawn.14
Think for a moment of Elizabeth Saltonstall confined with her Jersey cow and lice-infested neighbors in a garrison in Haverhill, dutifully mixing bread and scouring pots, all the while complaining about the unreliability of servants and thanking God for her preservation from the enemy. Mistress Saltonstall would have understood the central message of the dozens of Indian-captivity narratives published in these years: the Lord gives no trial to the faithful that will not in the end prove a blessing. If the world was a wilderness and life a pilgrimage, then huswifery was a laborious but essential calling. In various modes, this psychology of the “good housewife” survived the colonial period in New England, though it was continually threatened and sometimes infused with the rival psychology of the “pretty gentlewoman” who saw the earth as at least potentially a garden, life as art, and huswifery as a means to more gracious and comfortable living.
Philip Greven has recently attempted a major analysis of cultural conflict in revolutionary America in terms of temperament, stressing the continuity of “evangelical,” “moderate,” and “genteel” personality types from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries.15 One need not accept Greven’s precise formulations to recognize the utility of his approach even in a study of housekeeping. Two sets of documents dating from the middle of the eighteenth century show strikingly different attitudes toward the most ordinary of a housewife’s tasks—providing suitable clothing for her children. Mary Holyoke of Cambridge, the future mother-in-law of the Mary we have met, was obviously a “moderate” in Greven’s terms. Mary Gilman of Exeter was an “evangelical.”
On May 1, 1755, Mary Holyoke’s husband, Edward, wrote to their “dear Child” Edward Augustus Holyoke of Salem. Augustus, who was then in his late twenties, was about to be married, a circumstance which had sent his mother back and forth to Boston almost daily, hastening from tailor to dry-goods shop and then to her married daughter for consultation. Engaged in the important business of dressing her son, Mrs. Holyoke was too busy to write. Her husband, who was then president of Harvard College, was not. “Your Mother desires me to write you what she hath already done in your Affairs,” he began, carefully detailing each item his wife had purchased and her reasons for doing so. She had found cloth and trimming for a coat, but had been unable to secure any blue satin. Perhaps this was just as well, for “Mr Loughton where she bo’t the Cloth saies that he reckoned a white Sattin wou’d suit the Colour of the coat better & be much more genteel.” She had purchased four pair of cotton stockings, though “as to silk stockings, she cannot light of any, but what very ordinary, besides your Sister Mascarene saies you had better not have any, for that they are not fashionable, & People in the highest dress wear no other than Cotton.”16
For Mary Holyoke of Cambridge, gentility was an easy expectation. For Mary Gilman of Exeter, New Hampshire, it represented a spiritual threat. On January 7, 1753, Joseph Gilman, a young clerk in the countinghouse of a Boston merchant, wrote to his mother asking for stockings, shirts, and “britches.” At fifteen, Joseph was discovering for himself the cultural chasm between Country and Town. His own anxieties were focused upon clothes. In August he had written for shirts—one a week simply wouldn’t do—and had even suggested having a broadcloth jacket made by a tailor and if possible a “handsome” pair of black breeches. “I do not desire you to send my homespun Cloth coulerd Jacket if you do I shall not wear it,” he had fussed. In September he again requested shirts, perhaps with little result, for in November’s letter he moderated his demand for “seven good Shirts bag Holland sleeves.” “I do not care whether my Shirts are bag Holland or no if they will wash white, nor do I care how few Shirts I have so I can have a clean one when I want it,” he told his mother. Since she had been “blamed by some for giving me too good Cloaths,” he assured her that he shared her values, that he only desired to “dress neat and Clean but not fine.” But by January his frustration was obvious. What was suitable for Exeter simply would not do in Boston, a fact his mother seemed not to understand.
If it would be of any service I would send home one of my Shirts that I have wore a week and tried to Keep clean as far as it Lay in my power; Pride is not the occasion of my writing thus for I seriously declare I never took Less pains to dress than I now do, I am forced to go with holes In my Stockings very often.
He would be grateful for half a dozen good worsted stockings. As for shirts, if his mother couldn’t afford Holland, then checked would have to do.17
Joseph’s struggles to achieve dignity continued. By summer he seems to have settled on checked shirts, but he vowed never again to wear shoes made in Exeter. “I scarce Ever saw a Worse pair … than the Last you sent me,” he wrote. Lest she imagine that pride was at the root of his continual demands for stockings, he couched June’s request in terms good housekeeping could hardly deny: “my feet Sweat so that when I have Wore a Pair of Stockings three or four days they are Stiff that I can Scarce Weare them.”18
There were obvious economic differences between the two pairs of mothers and sons. Joseph Gilman was descended from two of Exeter’s most prominent merchant families, but he was still a young apprentice and his mother a widow.19 Augustus Holyoke, on the other hand, was already established in a profession. The difference in world view, however, is even more apparent. The elder Holyoke was a genial minister whose personal diary includes notes on candle-making but nothing on the spiritual state of his youthful flock. Nicholas Gilman, Joseph’s father, had been a troubled evangelical whose search for salvation had triggered one of the most ardent “awakenings” in New England. Edward Holyoke lined up his children annually to record their weight; Nicholas Gilman continually tested his sons’ growth toward conversion.20 Little wonder that Joseph defended himself against the charge of “pride.”
Significantly, Joseph Gilman’s conflicts with his mother centered on clothing. From the days of the Puritan “round heads,” differences in apparel and hair-styling had symbolized deeper commitments. New England was periodically rocked by conflict over changes in fashion. As late as 1752 church members in Newbury met together to discipline a brother named Richard Bartlett who refused communion with the church “for no other reason but because the Pastor wears a wigg.”21
Women’s clothing aroused even stronger feelings. One of the first attacks on female fashions in New England was written in 1647 by Elizabeth Saltonstall’s grandfather Nathaniel Ward, whose Simple Cobler of Aggawam insisted that Zion’s daughters had already been disfigured by French fashion, which “transclouts them into gantbargeese, ill-shapen-shotten shell fish, Egyptian Hyroglyphicks, or at the best into French flurts of the pastery.”22
If we could somehow walk into an eighteenth-century meetinghouse and see all of the inhabitants of a town dressed in their best and seated by rank, we would probably learn more about cultural and social divisions than by months of shuffling town records. Even after a century of supposed “levelling” and long after the sumptuary laws were abandoned, clothing carried subtle clues to values and status. These have been only partly transmitted in written records. We know, for example, that in 1772, before her marriage to William Pepperrell, Mary Hurst shocked her country cousins by appearing in York in “fashionable clothing,”23 but what was the exact nature of her offense? Was her gown cut too low? Was the fabric too sumptuous? Or—scandalous thought—had she succumbed to the vanity of a “hoop-petticoat,” a novelty singled out for attack in the Boston press that very year? “Is not Pride of Apparel an Evidence of a proud Heart?” the anonymous author had thundered.24 The opposite of Franklin’s “good housewife” was not just “gentlewoman” but a “pretty gentlewoman.” Clothes distinguished the better sort from the commonalty, but they also distinguished the proud from the virtuous.
In the next fifty years that ancient sin of pride would acquire political connotations. When the “Daughters of Liberty” brought down their spinning wheels from their attics, they were responding to a moral imperative as well as to a practical need.25 Abandoning their “top knots of pride,” they renounced the luxury of a corrupt England, demonstrating that the descendants of the saints had not forgotten the lesson of Bathsheba, “She looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness.”
One antidote to the sin of pride was industrious labor—what could be more chaste, modest, and productive than homely spinning, the necessary occupation of the poor and the young? An alternate remedy was exemplary piety, which in Puritan tradition meant serious reading and writing as well as prayer. In New England the chief exponent of this view was Cotton Mather.
The text for his Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion, first published in 1691, was verse 30 of Proverbs chapter 31: “Favour is Deceitful, and Beauty is Vain: but A woman that feareth the Lord, she ’tis, that shall be praised.” Mather upheld the expected social roles described in the myth of Bathsheba. But he also found room in his text to enlarge the intellectual and spiritual potential of women, insisting that though women might not speak in the church, “yet our God has Employ’d many Women to write for the church, and Inspir’d some of them for the Writing of the scriptures.” Among those scriptures, of course, was Proverbs 31, which Puritans attributed to Solomon’s mother, the godly Bathsheba.26
From the earliest years, godly women had been enjoined to read, to meditate, and to write. With the appropriate education, a very few women polished their piety in publishable prose or verse.27 The most notable example, of course, is Anne Bradstreet, whose first book was published in 1650. Bradstreet recognized that she was doing something unusual when she wrote in the preface, “I am obnoxious to each carping tongue/Who says my hand a needle better fits.” Those “carping tongues” did not belong to the Puritan intelligentsia of northern New England, however. Bradstreet’s poems were presented to the world by a Newbury minister, her brother-in-law John Woodbridge, and prefaced by commendatory verses from half a dozen other males, including Nathaniel Ward, Bradstreet’s former neighbor in Ipswich, who seems to have been relieved that she had not joined those “French flurts of the pastery” he so deplored.28 That few female writers matched her achievement is hardly surprising. As John Woodbridge reminded readers, The Tenth Muse was the work of a woman esteemed for the “discreet managing of her Family occasions … these Poems are the fruit but of some few houres, curtailed from her sleep and other refreshments.”29 Even as an antidote to pride, serious writing might compete with industrious housekeeping.
The relationship between moral values and material culture is subtle, and it deserves further study. It is important to remember, however, that “pretty gentlewomen” might be every bit as religious as “good housewives,” though their piety would turn on different issues. The Rule of Modesty sustained Mary Gilman’s zealous thrift and encouraged Anne Bradstreet’s spirituality; but the Rule of Charity allowed women like Mary Belcher, the wife of the Massachusetts governor, or Mary Pepperrell, the wife of Sir William, the hero of Louisburg, to enjoy their splendor in good conscience as they turned their beauty and their bounty toward uplifting the ministry. Genteel allegiance bolstered the ministry; ministerial approbation ratified gentility.
This symbiotic bond is hinted at, though seldom elaborated, in the dozens of funeral sermons preached for affluent women by grateful pastors. In acknowledging Mary Belcher’s charitable activities, Thomas Prince said that her heart was “soft and tender” toward the “afflicted and needy”—including ministers in distress.30 A drunken shoemaker from Portsmouth put it more bluntly. The Reverend Mr. Moody had two special friends in the town, he said, Mr. Fryer’s wife, who “supplied him with Ribbin or trimings for his cloaths,” and William Seavy’s wife, who “supplied him with coks and hens for to feed ungodly gutts.”31 Mary Pepperrell’s devotion to the Kittery Point church and its pastor, John Newmarch, was well known. After Sir William’s death in 1759, she built an imposing mansion directly across the road from the meetinghouse, in that one act reinforcing both the gentility which separated her from her neighbors and the piety which joined them. In the blaze of revolution the Pepperrell holdings were confiscated as Tory property. Visible godliness as well as age may explain why Mary was allowed to remain in her house though her grandson, the second Sir William, was forced to flee.32
AS WE HAVE SEEN, the myth of Bathsheba encompassed the productive roles of housewives and deputy husbands, the social roles of mistresses and neighbors, and the intellectual and spiritual roles of committed Christians. Little wonder that the thirty-first chapter of Proverbs became a favorite text for expanding upon the virtues of the ideal wife. Scriptural models can mean quite different things to different people, however, as we are reminded by a letter which Governor Belcher of Massachusetts wrote in August of 1732 to his son Jonathan, who was then studying law at the Middle Temple in London.
Having heard that Jonathan wanted to marry, the Governor hastened to show his displeasure, closing his letter with a little essay on the nature of a good wife, whose qualities, he reminded Jonathan, were “elegantly described in the 31. chap. of Proverbs, which you wrote out in short hand in your infant day. Pray, read it often, when you have a mind to be marry’d.”33
The Governor did not leave his son’s interpretation of scripture to chance. Not only did he urge Jonathan to make out a detailed list of expenses required in the first year of marriage, but he went on to list for his son the five qualities he considered absolutely essential in a wife. A suitable wife, he wrote, must possess “Strict Vertue” and “Good Nature.” She must be “Agreeable (no matter whether beautifull)” and have “Passable good sense (no matter whether over-quick & sharp).” She must also bring “a Plentifull fortune.” Lest Jonathan overlook the importance of the last-named quality, his father elaborated and defended it. “A man will soon find himself miserable that makes money his first & principal choice,” he wrote. “Yet the other four characters won’t do without it.… if God please to spare your life, save your vertue, & bless your studies, I hope you will in due time lay ’em in the opposite scale to a lady of 10,000 sterling pounds, with all the other qualifications I have mention’d.” Having made his message transparent, the Governor returned to religion in a postscript:
Lest you shou’d not take the pains to read the 31 chap. of Prov. my clerk had transcrib’d from the 10 ver. & it’s inclosed.
He apparently found nothing ironic in the opening passage of that scripture: “Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies.”
There is more at issue here than one man’s ambivalence—or hypocrisy. The Governor’s peculiar mixture of materialism and religion was symptomatic of a larger conflict in New England. Entering a transatlantic scramble for profit and patronage, Belcher still clung to old securities, to New England cider and turnips on the table, to thrift and Bible-reading, and to filial obedience and feminine piety.34 For him, the “31 chap. of Prov.” had none of the specific connotations that we have elaborated. He was not concerned about the religious convictions of Jonathan’s future wife, even less so about her housekeeping skills—in his mind “passable good sense” was sufficient. What he really feared was the disruptive power of sex. Youth, distance, and an attractive young woman might undermine both his fatherly authority and his fond hopes for Jonathan.
The Governor’s letter shows the way in which idealized notions of marriage might become entangled in the strictures of a property relation. Beneath that, it reflects a quite human tension between youth and age, between the mystery of physical attraction and the demands of social order. As Belcher (and King Solomon) knew, Bathsheba was an Eve transformed.