ON TUESDAY MORNING she had risen in good health. But before dinner, seized with what felt like a gas pain in her chest, she had gone to bed. By noon of the next day, when the doctor arrived, she was in agony. Though his cordials eased the pain, she continued to languish. Seven days later, on December 27, 1643, at six o’clock in the morning, Dorothy Dudley died.1
She had been a good wife, obedient to her husband, loving to her children, kind to her neighbors, dutiful to her servants, and, as her daughter Anne Bradstreet expressed it, “religious in all her words and wayes.”2 When Thomas Dudley sat down to write the news of her death to another daughter, Mercy Woodbridge, he confessed himself “melted with sorrow.” Yet he was composed enough to reiterate this same list of qualities in a long passage of advice, reminding Mercy that she could honor her mother best by imitating her virtues.3 Fifty years later Mercy’s own children could comfort themselves at her death by repeating the familiar litany. Acknowledging their mother’s goodness, they promised to “tread in her steps.”4
Twentieth-century readers are likely to approach such pieties with impatience if not with cynicism. When we read on a gravestone that a woman was “Eminent for Holiness, Prayerfulness, Watchfulness, Zeal, Prudence, Sincerity, Humility, Meekness, Patience, Weanedness From ye World, Self-denial, Publick-Spiritedness, Diligence, Faithfulness & Charity,” we smile, wondering what she was really like.5 It is difficult for us to approach a world in which neither innovation nor individuality was celebrated, in which the rich particulars of daily life were willfully reduced to formulaic abstraction. Yet the purpose of an epitaph was not to commemorate, but to transcend, personality. A good wife earned the dignity of anonymity.
“Womans the centre & lines are men,” young Seaborn Cotton wrote in his commonplace book early in the 1650s. The sexual connotations of the metaphor are obvious, yet its meaning has a larger resonance. Because female life has been centered on private duties, women have emerged from their idealized epitaphs less frequently than men. As wives and mothers, they have represented the fixed circle of human history, a presumed counterweight to the moving line which traces the founding of commonwealths or the development of ideas. Cotton’s little book can be seen as an extended commentary on this theme. “Circles draw many lines unto the Centre/but love gives leave to onely one to enter,” he wrote just before his marriage to Dorothy Dudley’s granddaughter Dorothy Bradstreet. In the cramped pages of his book, college ballads abruptly give way to genealogical entries in a record continued for three generations. From Seaborn and Dorothy Cotton’s first child, born November 21, 1655, to the last child of their granddaughter Dorothy Gookin, born August 10, 1734, there are more than two dozen terse entries. Only subtle changes in handwriting mark the transition from one cycle of reproduction—from one woman—to another.6
Yet change permeated the exterior life of northern New England in those years. Between 1650 and 1750 the settlements north of Boston experienced political upheaval, religious conflict, and four devastating wars. The coastal towns grew from frontier outposts to prospering links in an imperial trade network, and by 1750 in the remote “eastern parts” tiny agricultural settlements had begun to sprinkle the interior.
Historians have written of these changes. They have described the struggle between France and England which created havoc for three generations in the settlements in the north; they have discussed conflicting proprietary claims within the English colonies, the boundary disputes between Massachusetts and New Hampshire, and the political and economic conquest of the eastern parts by the Bay Colony; they have begun in recent years to examine in detail the internal conflicts of towns and parishes, to explore commonplace but little-understood aspects of material culture, to quantify the demographic explosion which in part fueled the dynamic changes of the eighteenth century. But as yet they have given little attention to the women who stood at the “centre” of life in these years.
This is understandable, for the chore facing the historian who would write of female experience in colonial America is no less than to reverse the process by which flesh-and-blood women became “good wives”—that is, to somehow rediscover the variegated humanity submerged in the ideal. What specifically did it mean to be a “loving mother,” an “obedient wife,” and a “friendly neighbor”? Women cooked. They spun wool. But what else did they do with their days? What were the concrete realities of their lives in northern New England? How did these differ for men?
On the surface it is obvious that some activities in colonial society carried gender labels and some did not. Men were elected to representative assemblies. Women nursed babies. Both men and women experienced religious conversion and Indian captivity. Few members of either sex wrote poetry. Yet within the larger outlines the patterns are far from clear. The first objective of this study, therefore, has been to recover lost detail, a formidable task since the archives contain no female diaries written in New England before 1750 and few female letters. Among published works there are only the brief “Valedictory and Monitory Writing” of Sarah Goodhue, the captivity narratives of Mary Rowlandson and Elizabeth Hanson, and the poetry of Anne Bradstreet. Yet significant evidence of female life lay buried in sermons, account books, probate inventories, genealogies, church records, court records, paintings, embroideries, gravestones, and the private papers of husbands and sons.
In interpreting this material, the major analytical tool has been “role analysis.” In the sociologist’s jargon, a role is “the sum total of the culture patterns associated with a particular status. It thus includes the attitudes, values and behavior ascribed by the society to any and all persons occupying this status.” Role analysis has both normative and behavioral dimensions. A social scientist studying the role of housewife in twentieth-century America might ask a group of women what tasks they felt wives should perform as well as what jobs they actually did daily, weekly, or monthly. Such a study would focus not just on cultural expectations, the abstract “role,” but also on “role performance,” on how people behaved.7
Role analysis cannot be applied with scientific precision, but as a general concept it is useful in approaching the history of women in the traditional world. It recognizes that informal structures and unwritten codes can be as effective in determining behavior as legal and economic systems. It allows for diversity, and even for contradiction, in acknowledging that a complex role like that of a wife is really composed of many roles. But it is especially congenial in a study of colonial women because it approaches so closely the traditional manner of commemorating personality. Anne Bradstreet did not describe Dorothy Dudley as a unique individual but as the successful occupant of a series of discrete positions. She was a “worthy matron,” an “obedient wife,” “a loving mother,” a “kind” mistress, and “a friendly neighbor.” For seventeenth-century readers these stock phrases were cues that unlocked a whole store of specific images. They had no need for a complete role description. For twentieth-century readers the detail is essential because we have lost so many of the assumptions which governed the traditional world.
IN SOME ENGLISH DIALECTS the words wife and woman are synonyms. In northern New England in the century between 1650 and 1750 they were virtually so. Almost all females who reached the age of maturity married. This was in contrast to Europe, where during the same period an estimated ten percent of the population remained single. American women were probably younger at first marriage than English women, but not so young as folklore has imagined.8 Mercy Dudley was eighteen when she married John Woodbridge, who at twenty-six was still unsettled in his profession, but on the average, women married somewhere between the ages of twenty and twenty-two. Husbands were four or five years older.9
Perhaps the wider the age gap the easier it was for a woman to “reverence, fear, and obey” as society and the scriptures taught. “Know that that God that hath gracyously placed thy good husband here will be here with thee and comfort thee if thou submytt and trust to him,” Thomas Dudley told Mercy.10 The blurring of the pronoun reference was perhaps unintentional, but it is no less instructive. Submission to God and submission to one’s husband were part of the same religious duty. As God told Eve, “Thy desire shall be to thy husband and he shall rule over thee.”
Obedience was not only a religious duty but a legal requirement. The classic statement of the legal subordination of wives is in William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England:
By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law; that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband; under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs everything.11
Although Blackstone’s commentaries were not published until 1765, the principles which he described had been long imbedded in tradition and in language. The most obvious emblem of a woman’s coverture was her loss of a name, a custom made more vivid by the seventeenth-century practice of referring to a married woman not as “Mary Brown” or as “Mrs. John Brown” but as “John Brown his wife.” Unless her husband were willing to sign a special contract prior to marriage, a wife could neither own nor acquire property, nor could she enter into a contract or write a will.
Upon her husband’s death, a wife became a relict. This now archaic synonym for widow evokes that state well: in etymology and in usage the term was identical to the modern relic. The death of a mother did not mean the dissolution of a family; the death of a father did. As one patriarchy dissolved and others formed, there was a shuffling both of people and of things. Household inventories taken by trusted neighbors soon after death are an important source of information for twentieth-century historians, but they are also a reminder that death in early America meant a redistribution of roles as well as resources. By law, a widow usually inherited at least a third of the household goods, and she was entitled to use or to receive income from a third of the real estate until she died or remarried. If she had minor children, she might retain practical control of the entire estate until her sons came of age, but the final disposition of family property would not be determined by her but by court order or her husband’s will. A widow was ensured maintenance at whatever level the estate allowed, but only rarely did she retain full control of her house and yard or even the assembly of pots, beds, and cows which had once been her domain.12
If this were all there were to say, then the history of colonial women would indeed be the recital of disadvantage and subjection which some historians have made it. But the notion of male supremacy must not be wrenched from the larger concept of an organic social order in which rights and responsibilities were reciprocal and in which terms like individuality or self-reliance had little place. It was difficult for men and women of the premodern world to conceive of equality. In the hierarchical structure which sustained the social order, one human being was of necessity almost always subject to another—child to parent, servant to master, subject to ruler. Yet within this larger system of dependencies the relation of wife to husband was different. “Of all the Orders which are unequals,” wrote Samuel Willard, “these do come nearest to an Equality, and in several respects they stand upon even ground. These do make a pair, which infers so far a Parity.”13
William Secker employed a whole series of metaphors to express this notion. A husband and wife, he wrote, were like two instruments making music, two streams in one current, a pair of oars rowing a boat to Heaven (with children and servants as passengers), two “milch kine” coupled to the Ark of God, two cherubim, two tables of stone on which the law was written.14
As both ministers understood, the position of a wife was complementary and at the same time secondary to that of her husband. This was a function not just of ideology, but of the most pervasive realities of ordinary existence. Contradictory possibilities were built into a system which meshed law with sentiment, property with procreation, and gender specialization with communal obligation.
Some of the disabilities of colonial women can be attributed to sexism, others simply to sex. The colonial world, like our own, struggled to reconcile the ways in which women and men are different with the ways in which they are the same. Yet one thing which surely separated the premodern past from the nineteenth century was a tolerance for contradiction. Female life was defined in a series of discrete duties rather than by a self-consistent and all-embracing “sphere.” For this reason, unitary definitions of status are especially misleading in any description of the lives of colonial women. Much better to follow the lead of Anne Bradstreet, searching for that forgotten web of social relations which gave form to the life of a “worthy matron.” A married woman in early New England was simultaneously a housewife, a deputy husband, a consort, a mother, a mistress, a neighbor, and a Christian. On the war-torn frontier she might also become a heroine.
A housewife polished female specialties. Her role was defined by a space (a house and its surrounding yards), a set of tasks (cooking, washing, sewing, milking, spinning, cleaning, gardening), and a limited area of authority (the internal economy of a family).
A deputy husband shouldered male duties. These might be of the most menial sort—for a weaver’s wife, winding quills for the loom; for a farmer’s wife, planting corn—but they could also expand to include some responsibility for the external affairs of the family. A deputy was not just a helper but at least potentially a surrogate.
A consort tuned her life to her mate’s. For the blessed, marriage harmonized spirituality and sexuality, two concepts frequently at odds in the western world. For the unblessed, it brought clacking and clanging and sometimes an appearance in the county court.
A mother spent herself to perpetuate the race. As a biological rule, motherhood bound women to alternating cycles of pregnancy and lactation. As a social rule, it elevated selflessness and love, finding in women a capacity for affection which counterbalanced the presumably more authoritarian government of fathers.
A mistress served those who served her. She trained, supervised, and often fed and clothed a succession of neighbors’ daughters who rewarded her efforts by leaving her to marry, becoming mistresses themselves.
A neighbor sustained the community of women, gossiping, trading, assisting in childbirth, sharing tools and lore, watching and warding in cases of abuse. Relations between neighbors could be vertical or horizontal, embracing the obligations of charity and deference as well as ordinary helpfulness and sociability.
A Christian seized spiritual equality and remained silent in church. Among the congregationalist majority in New England, women could sign the covenant, enlarge the scriptures, write and even publish, but only among the Quakers could they hold office or preach in mixed assemblies. Sharing a common bench in church, female Christians nudged the edges of a contradictory religious identity.
A heroine burst the bonds of female anonymity, projecting private virtues into the public sphere. Visibility, more than anything else, separated her from an ordinary wife. Indian captivity amplified the trials of motherhood and tested Christian faith; garrison life magnified neighborliness; while the continuous threat of attack called forth the “manly resolution” already expected of deputy husbands.
None of these roles existed in isolation. Each must be studied not only in relation to the others but within the detailed context of ordinary life in a particular place and time. Good Wives is a study in role definition. It is also a description of neglected aspects of daily life in the province of New Hampshire and in the two Massachusetts counties which bordered it, Essex County to the south and York County (now Maine) to the north and east. The text is organized around three role clusters, each epitomized by a Biblical prototype frequently employed in New England. “Bathsheba” focuses upon economic life, “Eve” upon sex and reproduction, “Jael” upon the intersection of religion and aggression.
WHEN THOMAS DUDLEY WROTE to his daughter Mercy Woodbridge, telling her of her mother’s death, he not only praised his wife’s godliness, but, recognizing the void left in Mercy’s life, he attempted to take up some of the specific duties Dorothy laid down that Tuesday morning when she was seized with a pain in her breast. He offered to pay for a midwife to attend Mercy on her coming confinement. He promised to send her through her Uncle Parker a “souce in a bagge.” Finally, he begged her to “lett mee have now thy letters as thy mother had and I will answeare them.”15 As a loving parent, he understood the value of fine abstractions. But he also knew the worth of sausage. To enter the world of Dorothy Dudley and her contemporaries requires an appreciation for both.