IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY NEW ENGLAND, women of ordinary status were called Goodwife, usually shortened to Goody, as in Goody Prince or Goody Quilter or Goody Lee. The title of this book deliberately puns on that term. To write about good wives is to write about ideals; to write about goodwives is to write about ordinary women living in a particular place and time. I have tried to mediate between the two concerns, to explore values and at the same time to describe and to celebrate lives. The title consciously echoes Alice Morse Earle’s Colonial Dames and Good Wives (Boston, 1895), honoring an early generation of women’s historians who skillfully practiced what later scholars dismissed as “pots-and-pans history.”
My emphasis on good wives betrays a propensity to search for normative elements in a history which from the time of Hawthorne has been dominated by outcasts and witches. Readers will find little about Anne Hutchinson or the Devil in this book. They will find much about housekeeping, childbearing, and ordinary churchgoing, about small conflicts experienced by forgotten women, and about little triumphs that history has not recorded.
Good Wives is a study in role definition, an extended description constructed from a series of vignettes. In organization and intent it is a little like those elongated samplers worked by young women in seventeenth-century England and America. Unlike eighteenth- and nineteenth-century samplers, which were made to be framed and hung on a wall, these first samplers were true patterns, one band of embroidery added to another, each incomplete in itself but capable of transfer and elaboration on a larger ground. In the best of samplers, and I hope in this book, the appeal of the whole lies in the aggregate texture of the associated parts.
I have written about northern New England because that is where I live and the tedious sifting of sources necessary for such a project was therefore possible, but I make no special claim for the region’s uniqueness or cohesiveness. I suspect that much of what I have discovered can be found elsewhere. Good Wives describes a diverse and changing world, but its major objective is neither to elaborate nor to explain change but to delineate certain broad patterns within which change occurred. I offer it as a collection of “ensamples,” a parade of exemplary lives, which, if not constructed in quite the medieval sense, have something of the same intent—to entertain and to instruct the reader.
I owe a special debt to Charles E. Clark, whose seminar on the historical writing of early America, which I took when a graduate student in English, reinforced my growing interest in history, and who first suggested what seemed at the time an awesome change in direction. I am pleased in having had him as my mentor. I am also fortunate in having had the guidance of Darrett Rutman, also of the University of New Hampshire. He has been a rigorous critic and an equally generous friend. For moral support and good ideas I am indebted to other colleagues at U.N.H., Karen Andrésen, Robert Mennel, Judith Silver, Steve Cox, Ray Wilbur, Ron Lettieri, Chuck Wetherell, and Stuart Wallace, all of whom have read and commented on portions of the manuscript. Mary Ryan offered helpful criticism of an article from which several chapters grew; Mary Maples Dunn generously read and responded to a late version of the manuscript; Claudia Bushman has continuously shared her appreciation of the ordinary. I thank all of these friends and critics without blaming any.
I would like to thank the directors of the Essex Institute in Salem and the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston for permission to quote from unpublished manuscripts in their collections. I am also grateful to Irene Norton of the Essex Institute; Elizabeth Newton and Mary Conley of the Ipswich Historical Society; Elizabeth Barker and Margaret Kimball of the Warner House in Portsmouth, New Hampshire; Susan DeVito of the Lady Pepperrell House at Kittery Point, Maine; Mrs. Everett Billings of Kittery Point; and the Reverend Mr. James Christensen of South Berwick, Maine, for special assistance in locating materials.
The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and the Frost Fund, University of New Hampshire, provided more than kind words, for which I am grateful. My children offered equally tangible support. Karl cooked, Melinda cleaned, Nathan typed, Thatcher washed dishes, and Amy kept quiet when it really mattered. My husband Gail did all of the above, and then bolstered my self-confidence by staying awake when he read the final revision.
Neither of my parents has read the manuscript, though both have contributed to it in specific ways. Dad was probably startled when I called him long distance one afternoon to chat about cows. Hearing him talk about the relationship between butterfat and pasture and describe how his mother helped with the milking made the agricultural past seem less remote. It is a great sorrow to know he will not see the finished book. Mother’s contribution is only partly acknowledged in the dedication. Certainly I resisted her early lessons in housekeeping, but I have never forgotten the history lessons she didn’t know she was giving—the stories that came with the pickles and the currant jelly, the rides up to Teton past the sugar factory, and especially the visit to “Grandma” Harrison and the other elderly women in our town. “The salt of the earth,” she called them, and I have not forgotten it.
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
Durham, N.H., and Idaho Falls, Idaho
April 1981