WIVES

IN MARCH 1621, after the English people had been in the area they knew as Plymouth for four months, they finally encountered the Wampanoag people who lived around Cape Cod Bay. First the two groups exchanged messages through various intermediaries, including Tisquantum (or Squanto), two other Native men (one of them Samoset, who had been the first resident to make contact), and Edward Winslow. Then, after arranging a hostage exchange to ensure the safety of the negotiators on both sides, the planters finally hosted the local leader, whom they called Massasoit, along with men who accompanied him.¹ Their party came to the half-constructed English village, where the colonists treated the occasion—the negotiation of a treaty of alliance—with all the pomp they could muster. They laid out a rug and cushions to welcome the king. The governor arrived to the sound of drums and trumpets, escorted by musketeers. After the ceremonies concluded, some of Massasoit’s people desired to spend the night in the village. The Plymouth people declining, the men left the village to sleep nearby. As an anonymous chronicler explained, “the King and all his men lay all night in the woods, not about half an English mile from us, and all their wives and women with them.” The narrative of the opening of diplomatic relations between the two groups included no mention of English women—although they were certainly present in the village where the meeting occurred—but it did note that Massasoit’s nearby encampment housed not only the men involved in the negotiations but also wives and other women.²

English commentators thought it intriguing that women accompanied the negotiators. The English and the Wampanoags concurred that women did not partake in negotiations, but the latter saw no reason that a long-planned diplomatic journey ought to be undertaken by men alone. In contrast, Plymouth wives invariably failed to accompany men who went out to explore or visit other communities. Although the “First Comers” did not think of themselves as invading New England, they were at least aware that they might be received with hostility, making male-only expeditionary forces seem appropriate. The English observers assumed that the presence of women in Massasoit’s company affirmed that he had come to negotiate an alliance rather than to attack. Similarly, the presence of European women on the first ship heralded to the region’s Native peoples that this was no fishing or trading voyage. Upon first arriving, the Mayflower passengers cautiously ventured for a walk on shore after so long at sea. William Bradford remarked specifically that women were among these parties. With the area’s residents surreptitiously watching (and occasionally sighted while doing so), the indigenous inhabitants soon knew that the ship’s passengers included families and not just the men and boys that normally visited their shores.³ The Mayflower women thus helped to set Plymouth on a peaceful path, signaling that this family-based community had intentions other than the merely military or commercial. Their small (and for a time declining) numbers made them seem unthreatening, an idea that the presence of women reinforced. Just as Massasoit’s female companions demonstrated to the settlers that he meant them no harm, the women who arrived in 1620 helped to set the tone for initial encounters in New England.

Sixteen married women joined the first contingent to Plymouth. Every adult woman on board the first ship came as a wife in the company of her husband, with the possible exception of John Carver’s maidservant (whose age is not known). In contrast, unaccompanied adult men were common: thirty-two of the voyagers were men without wives or children. Some of them were unmarried, such as the apprentice John Hooke or the servant John Howland. Others—including Samuel Fuller—left wives behind. Among the couples who journeyed together, all save five brought children with them. Two households included unrelated children: Desire Minter and Humility Cooper came with other families, one or both of their parents having died in Holland. Five husband-and-wife teams sailed without young children, although the adult son (Solomon Prower) of one of these women (Mary Martin) was also on board.

Other wives remained at home with the intention of joining their families later. Hester Cooke, for instance, stayed back while her husband and eldest son crossed in 1620. She and their other four children came on the Anne after a three-year separation. Degory Priest proved unable to send for his wife and children: he died in the first winter. After her remarriage, his widow arrived, also on the Anne, with the two daughters of her first marriage along with her new husband and their young son. A letter from William Hilton to his “loving cousin” survives, asking that his wife and children be sent to join him.⁴ A number of men boarded with only a son. Thomas Rogers came with his eighteen-year-old son but left his wife and three younger children in Leiden. Uncertain about whether the journey and the first years would prove entirely safe, some families chose to undergo what they hoped would be a temporary separation. John Robinson, pastor of the church in Leiden, wrote in June 1621 that though he intended to join those of his former parishioners who had migrated to set up “the church of God, at Plymouth, in New England,” he could not make the journey until all the remaining wives and children in Leiden had been transported to join their husbands and fathers.⁵

The presence of wives meant many things: home, permanence, peace; but, above all, wives meant babies. A pair of babies accompanied their parents on the voyage. Damaris Hopkins may have come as a toddler, with parents Stephen and Elizabeth as well as her older siblings. Samuel Eaton, son of Francis and Sarah, sailed as a “suckling child,” meaning he was still young enough to be nursing. Two passengers undertook the crossing while pregnant. Elizabeth Hopkins—who joined the voyage in England, never having lived in Leiden—gave birth to a son. We can only imagine her experience, in labor on a damp, smelly, cramped wooden ship traversing the ocean. Another passenger, Susannah White, delivered a son after the ship had anchored off the coast but before she could disembark. The Mayflower at anchor might have been a preferable location for enduring childbirth, assuming the late autumn weather cooperated enough to allow some passengers and crew to grant her and her female attendants a bit of privacy by going onshore or at least on deck. When a second ship, the Fortune, arrived in November 1621, Martha Ford came ashore and went immediately into labor, delivering a son during her first night in New England.⁶ Hopefully she found conditions in the primitive structures the Mayflower passengers had built in the first year a more welcome environment than shipboard would have been. Martha herself was probably recently widowed when baby John was born, and the infant did not long survive. Although no vital records (of births, marriages, and deaths) exist for the early years, genealogical research makes clear that—despite a high initial death rate of about half of the first arrivals—babies continued to be born in Plymouth to the couples who migrated or to pairs newly formed there.

William Bradford happily reported that after the first difficult winter, the death rate became negligible. Women, of course, continued to face the very real prospect of death in childbirth (which was apparently the fate of Isaac Allerton’s first wife, Mary Norris Allerton, who died in the first winter); but otherwise life in New England proved remarkably healthful compared to Europe, as least for European settlers. Bradford’s record of the descendants of the first migrants, made in about 1650, showed that births rapidly followed from a migration that included women. For instance, John Howland, John Carver’s servant, “married the daughter of John Tillie, Elizabeth, and they are both now living, and have 10. children, now all living; and their eldest daughter hath 4. children. And their 2. daughter, 1. all living; and other of their children marriageable. So 15. are come of them.”⁷ By the time Bradford wrote, newer colonies had completely surpassed Plymouth in size and influence, and he eagerly asserted his little settlement’s role in peopling the region with English residents. Later migration added to the population too, but that fact interested Bradford not at all. He wanted to prove the vast contribution made through the fertility of the first contingent of Plymouth wives. No one explicitly invoked the biblical command to “be fruitful and multiply,” but Plymouth planters seemed to have taken it to heart nonetheless.

Although Bradford noted the booming birth rate that women made possible, the records—his or others—rarely noticed women by name. Well-behaved women, as Laurel Thatcher Ulrich once observed, seldom make history, and this omission was by design: they were not supposed to draw attention to themselves. Although Ulrich’s phrase has been picked up in popular culture and used to urge women to make history by defying expectations for the well-behaved woman, Ulrich had no such intention. She instead described the cultural expectations for seventeenth-century English and New English women, expectations that brought women praise when they quietly went about their assigned tasks.⁸ A well-lived life for a seventeenth-century English woman ideally passed with little notice. No woman wrote any surviving document penned in or about Plymouth in the first decades. In the records men produced, women mostly appear as wives and mothers. They earned mention as the mate of a man—sometimes only as his wife, with no name attached. Bradford listed Edward Fuller on board the first ship with his wife, known only as Mrs. Fuller. John Oldham, who arrived later, came accompanied by a wife, as did the aspiring minister John Lyford. The name of neither woman appeared in the Plymouth records, although we do know that Lyford’s wife was called Sarah because of a record made at the time of her second marriage elsewhere. Women who garnered notice in the records often did so because of some trouble: they got pregnant before they were married, or—like the wife of John Weeks—they followed their husbands into religious error, in the case of the Weeks, to “become very Atheists.”⁹ Similarly, the court cited Samuel Gorton’s wife for joining him in leaving the colony in the company of a widow who was wanted for questioning; their aid allowed Widow Aldrich to flee. Whether pregnant out of marriage or led astray by an erring husband, even much of women’s occasional notoriety involved men.

William Bradford calculated how many individuals were descended from the first group of migrants as of 1650 in an effort to demonstrate that Plymouth was an important source of New England’s growing population. Listing couples and their descendants in “Of Plimoth Plantation,” his record of necessity gave wives a prominent role in the population growth he extolled.

Some of these women experienced hardship because of the men to whom they were attached. Certainly, such was the case with Sarah Lyford. She feared God would punish her family for her husband’s many sins. Sarah, buffeted from one location to another until Lyford’s death allowed her to rest, remarried and remained in Hingham, Massachusetts.¹⁰ John Oldham’s wife was allowed to stay for one more winter in Plymouth when he was banished.¹¹ The wife of Ralph Smith moved with him from England to Salem, from Salem to Nantasket, where they lived among “some straggling people,” until finally landing in Plymouth. The church there called him as its minister and the couple settled while Smith preached. Bradford never named Mrs. Smith, who wandered about with her husband before Plymouth first gave them a place to stay—referred to as “house room” in the records—and then employed him; nor do we know if she shared the religious scruples that made her husband unwilling to remain in either England or Salem.¹² Other men similarly subjected their families to serial displacement, trying to find a suitable home. Roger Williams dragged his wife Mary from England to Boston to Plymouth to Salem before striking out for the area that would become Providence, Rhode Island. To add insult to injury, at least to hear his critics tell it, he later became so unwilling to enter into religious communion with anyone who might be tainted that for a time he refused to pray even with his own wife and children.¹³

In a most interesting turn of events, one woman headed an isolated household outside of any colonial boundaries to the north of Plymouth. Between Plymouth’s founding and the advent of Massachusetts, the area became dotted with tiny enclaves in which single households tried to make their way alone. Many of the men who established these outposts, known later as “Old Planters,” came to New England with the intention of participating in one trade or fishing endeavor or another. When a collective enterprise fell through, most participants departed, but a few men independently chose to stay. In a few rare cases wives accompanied or joined them, enduring these trying conditions along with their husbands. When one such man, David Thompson, died on the island in Boston Bay that bears his name, he left behind a wife, child, and servants. It would be another two years before Boston was settled. Meanwhile his widow managed this small and isolated household.¹⁴

Most wives, however, conformed to the ideal that proper women avoided the gaze of history: they were either absent from the record or they can be only vaguely glimpsed in passing references. Two years into Plymouth’s history, clergyman John Robinson wrote to Bradford from Leiden, and among other news conveyed the greetings of his unnamed wife. The next day, writing to Plymouth church elder William Brewster, he mentioned that the arrival of her two daughters must have comforted Brewster’s nameless wife, who was then ill.¹⁵ When Edward Winslow wrote to John Winthrop he noted that his letter would be carried “by my wives sonne.” The letter carrier may have been Peregrine, then seventeen, or his older brother Resolved, twenty-two, as his wife had at that time two living children from her first marriage.¹⁶ Wives, the essential companions to Plymouth men, remained in the background when all went well.

Wives were indeed essential. When a wife died, a man rapidly remarried for practical reasons among others: no seventeenth-century household ran without the skills a woman provided. In the absence of a servant with similar skills, a household without a wife barely functioned. Yet William Bradford waited almost three years from the drowning death of his first wife, Dorothy, shortly after their arrival at Cape Cod before taking as his second wife the widow Alice Southworth, who came on board the Anne in 1623. Bradford presumably figured out another way to manage his household, relying on his neighbors or servants for the women’s work Dorothy no longer performed. Other second marriages occurred more rapidly: Edward Winslow lived a widower for just two months between the death of Elizabeth in March 1621 and his marriage to Susannah (mother of Peregrine) in May. Rarely did an adult woman remain long unmarried.

With a dearth of women, unmarried men eagerly sought out women who could become their wives. When Mary Moorecock was bound to serve Richard Sparrow and his wife Pandora for nine years, her contract had an escape clause in the event she wanted to marry; her master and mistress would not prevent her from doing so, but her new husband would have to pay them for the remainder of her time at a rate set by two impartial men brought in to determine a fair fee.¹⁷ In this case, Pandora had to be named in the record—which was otherwise unusual—because another escape clause gave Mary immediate release from service if both Sparrows should die. In other words, her contract would not be sold to a new master if the couple with whom she was to live could no longer house her.

Many new settlements experienced a dearth of women. This imbalance made it hard for men to live within a traditional family structure, much less to start families of their own. Even in Plymouth, acquiring a wife was not a foregone conclusion. The search for a wife in fact prompted one of the only examples of levity in the official records of early Plymouth. In 1632, the government of Massachusetts wrote to express concern that servants and others with obligations in the more northern colony would leave their responsibilities to make a new life in Plymouth. In responding, the governor and assistants of Plymouth addressed each case the Bay colony had raised. Of John Pickworth, they noted he “came but as a sojourner to work for a few weeks, in which time he got a wife, and so is long since returned double, and hath no cause to complain,” unless, of course, “he hath got a bad wife.”¹⁸ Jokes about the quality of wives aside, that Pickworth came to Plymouth and found one suggests the demographic success of that colony, with at least some unattached but marriageable women after only a dozen years in existence.

Native society placed a similarly high premium on women. The economic calculus differed, but only in detail. Native women grew corn, the region’s main crop, a fact that prompted Winslow to comment that runaway wives would always be sheltered wherever they went because those who received them would benefit from the wealth their labor brought. While he may not have grasped the dynamic of indigenous marriage practices, he did appreciate the essential economic role of women. Winslow also remarked on what he understood of Native marital customs. He observed that Native political leaders sought wives who were equal to them in nobility, although these men also had relations with concubines and lesser women, who obeyed the principal wife.¹⁹ William Morrell, a clergyman, also described a practice of taking multiple wives, explaining that the attractions included getting more children and “A second profit which by many wives They have, is Corn, the staff of all their lives.”²⁰ Children and corn represented the contribution of Native wives, at least as Morrell understood it.

Morrell’s and Winslow’s interest in understanding marital practices was shared on the other side of the cultural divide as well. Captain Christopher Levett recounted a conversation he claimed to have had with some Native men on the subject of wives. Supposedly they asked him why he did not beat his wife, who wanted him to come home; her desire indicated to them (at least according to his account) that Mistress Levett did not know her proper place. He reportedly replied that beating wives “was not the English fashion, and besides, she was a good wife and I had children by her, and I loved her well.”²¹ He did not note whether this answer satisfied his companions. Certainly, his understanding that Native men lorded it over their wives, beating them if they did not obey, represented his own interpretation of Native culture. In reality, indigenous women often exercised considerable power, including the right to divorce at will. Nonetheless he may have had a version of this conversation, however dimly he understood the status of Native wives and the extent of their authority.

In another attempt at cross-cultural communication, some early Plymouth men reported an exchange with Massasoit in which they described to him their king, James. Learning that after the death of his queen, Anne of Denmark, in 1619, James had not remarried, Massasoit’s response was “marveling that he would live without a wife.”²² Assuming Winslow’s description of Wampanoag elite marital practices is correct, Massasoit would have had multiple wives. Not only did wives bring wealth, for a major leader (like Powhatan, whom the English encountered in Virginia) multiple marriages cemented alliances across numerous subordinate communities. Whether Native or English, the men living in the Plymouth region in the first half of the seventeenth century agreed on the necessity of a wife.

English men in North America occasionally entered into relationships with Native women, and Plymouth offers a few known examples. When discussing allegations against Thomas Morton, who led a nearby trading outpost, Plymouth leaders cited sexual abuse of Native women to prove that Morton was immoral and profligate. If their claims about the outpost can be taken at face value, he and his men were guilty of “abusing the Indian women most filthily, as it is notorious.”²³ So many of the allegations against Morton were exaggerated that it is difficult to determine whether this claim was accurate. William Baker, who began as a servant in Plymouth but eventually worked as a trader with Native communities, was alleged to have had sexual relations with numerous Indian women. Community leaders saw his relationships as wrong because they occurred outside of marriage. Unlike John Rolfe in Virginia, no early settler in Plymouth proposed to marry an indigenous woman, as far as the surviving records suggest. As a general rule, Native wives in New England’s first years had Native husbands while English men took English wives. Whether planters migrated as families or formed them in Plymouth, the Plymouth experience was rooted in the family life that wives made possible.

Plymouth Plantation was conceived as a family affair. Unlike Virginia, originally a military and trading outpost, Plymouth included men, women, and their children from the first. In contrast to the previous ships that had visited the shores of southern New England, the Mayflower came not merely to fish, trade, or explore but to stay. Women’s presence among the passengers signaled a different intent to Native observers. The presence of women promised families and households. If the military danger posed by this group appeared lessened by the women among them, women also contained an implicit threat. Women and the children they bore would inexorably expand the English presence. A rising population, augmented by later arrivals heartened by Plymouth’s seeming ability to live peacefully with their Native neighbors, endangered indigenous lifeways. The rapid demographic growth (after the first sickly winter) of the first Plymouth families—so gleefully touted by Bradford—eventually created pressures on Native lands and resources. Wives made New England more English, both in the settlement’s initial population and also, over time, in the population explosion that followed. Commemorations of Plymouth since the eighteenth century have exalted the “Forefathers,” but it was in fact the women, as wives and mothers, who made the plantation a lasting presence in southern New England.