As any traveler knows, Virginia and Massachusetts present sharp contrasts to the senses. New England philosophers and poets have found their austere landscape inspirational, but seventeenth-century farmers were known to curse the rocky soil and long winters of their region. Except for the rich farmlands of the Connecticut River Valley, New England offered little opportunity in the seventeenth century for large-scale farming or profitable cash crop specialization. The men and women who settled in the region accepted the natural environment and its constraints. What they clearly did not accept, however, were the constraints placed on them by two human institutions: England’s church and its government. Both the Pilgrims of Plymouth Plantation and the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Company were dissenters from the established Anglican Church, and both sought refuge and space to create their own spiritual community in the new world. They fled the economic penalties imposed on them by the government they criticized and the threat of imprisonment for their religious views, but they also fled what they judged to be an increasingly immoral society, whose values alienated and isolated them as surely as any edicts of bishop or king. Their departure from England was a rejection of their countrymen’s lasciviousness, idleness, and extravagance and the corrupt public life they saw around them. If refuge from streets filled with drunks, prostitutes, and beggars motivated Chesapeake settlers as well, they did not articulate it as Puritans did; the rejection of English society’s ills and corruptions were conscious and intentional in the immigrant world of Hannah Duston.

  The ideological context for Duston’s life thus contrasted with Cole’s. But the demographic contrast between their two worlds may have been less drastic than historians once thought. Traditionally, scholars have portrayed New England immigration as a migration of nuclear families, which, combined with a low mortality rate, resulted in a balanced sex ratio, long and stable marriages, parental influence or control over marriage age and therefore over the legitimate birthrate, and a smaller gap between the ages of husband and wife than in the South.

  New research has modified this demographic portrait. Families did indeed make up the greater part of the first immigrant waves to New England. Nevertheless, one-third of the passengers aboard Puritan ships were single adult males, young and without kin in the new world. Between 1621 and 1651, there were four single men for each single woman. For unmarried women of New England, as for those in the Chesapeake, this lack of balance between the sexes had measurable but often different consequences.

  In New England, being a servant did not delay but seems to have sped women’s and men’s entrance into marriage. The average marriage age for single adult females was 23.4, but dependent females, that is servants, married soon after their twentieth birthday. The labor female servants performed in New England communities was not the profitable labor of the Chesapeake tobacco fields, and thus a woman’s transition from servant to wife was less contested. Marriage age for daughters born to immigrant New England families, as for those within Chesapeake families, responded to the sex ratio imbalance. Puritan daughters were likely to be wives before they were twenty. And in the 1650s, the average marriage age dropped below seventeen, making Puritan brides no older than the creole brides of Maryland and Virginia. Women born in New England before 1650 thus married young, bore their last child at thirty-seven, and gave birth to an average of seven children. In this way their lives recapitulated the lives of the Southern white women. And like women of the Southern colonies, New England women were no strangers to death arising from childbirth. At least 3 percent, perhaps 10 percent, of the women who became pregnant between 1630 and 1670 died following the birth of a child. The greatest danger came not after the birth of a first child but after the fourth, fifth, or sixth child was delivered.

  In matters of mortality, however, appearances were deceiving. In its early decades, New England society was unusually youthful; two-thirds of the immigrants before 1650 were between the ages of ten and forty. In that same period, almost 8,000 babies were born among the settlers. With only a smattering of elderly colonists, illness and disease took its toll among infants, children, and young adults. Death seemed to come early, but, in fact, those who survived to adulthood enjoyed a lifespan longer than the survivors of the tobacco colonies. A generation of grandparents was being formed as Hannah Dustori grew to womanhood, despite the many small tombstones in every New England graveyard.

  The youthfulness of New England society meant that the Hannah Dustons of the era grew to womanhood surrounded by infants and children. Yet they were surrounded as well by two powerful institutions that enveloped, restricted, and sustained them: the patriarchal family and the Puritan Congregational Church. They also were surrounded by a native population that threatened their safety, and whose own survival was endangered by them. Within these concentric circles of instability and stability, of disorder and order, New England women shaped their lives. A closer look at the family, the church, and race relations reveals the differences in experience between women like Hannah Duston and Mary Cole.

  Seventeenth-century New England society carefully replicated the patriarchal family structure of old England. Braced by religious precepts and enforced by law, the family dominated by the father and composed of a man and his immediate dependents was the primary institution in a female’s life. As she moved from daughter to bride to wife and to mother, a woman negotiated various levels of dependency and authority. For the majority of her life, her place was firmly fixed beneath her husband and above her children and servants. No position she held within the family was ever characterized by autonomy.

  Civil authority in the separate New England colonies—Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth Plantation, Connecticut, Rhode Island —underwrote patriarchy in the family, in principle and to varying degrees in practice. Within the Pilgrim and Puritan communities especially, the state upheld and legitimated the power of parents over children and of husbands over wives, for the family was the mainstay of social order in the American “wilderness.” To transgress family rules and norms was to transgress public order. In the language of ministers and magistrates alike, the family was the “little commonwealth” on which the larger commonwealth of the state depended. The state served the patriarchal family through inheritance laws that gave preference to eldest sons over widows and through a criminal code that punished juvenile disobedience and sexual infidelity by both married men and women.

  Very few white women in seventeenth-century New England placed themselves outside the limits of the patriarchal family. Within Puritan culture, as in the Chesapeake, wives were expected to perform productive and reproductive tasks. And as in the Southern colonies, New England women labored beside their husbands in the fields when they were needed. Early Salem court records document wives winnowing corn, branding steers, and tending cattle. Yet the agrarian communities and small towns of the region stressed their performance of traditional English household chores. And their Puritan culture made a more explicit connection than the Anglican Chesapeake culture did between a woman’s role as “helpmeet” to her husband and her reputation within her community. In Boston, Haverhill, and New Haven, earning respect and recognition were tied to the performance of housewifely duties. The Puritan woman who executed her household duties with skill and economy won the accolade “notable housewife.”

  In reconstructing the world of housewifery, as in so many other areas of Puritan life, the record is full although somewhat oblique. No seventeenth-century woman left diaries for us to pry into with scholarly eyes, but their sons and husbands, fathers and brothers recorded much about them in their writing. Ministers eulogized women, citing—and thus preserving for us—examples of their performance as wives, mothers, and household managers. Dutiful children recollected their mothers in moments of mundane domesticity—spinning cloth, tending the garden, sewing and mending. Artifacts of their material world—from butter churns to infant “go-carts” to linens used in childbed—make the reconstruction of women’s daily life possible.

  Every woman had a well-defined domain in the predominantly rural, economically interdependent society of New England. She presided over a productive universe that ran from kitchen, pantries, cellars, brewhouses, milk houses, and butteries to the garden, well, pigpen, henhouse, and orchard. Like Chesapeake housewives, each New England housewife possessed (to greater or lesser degrees, of course) a repertoire of skills for the processing of raw materials into usable goods and for the maintenance of those goods and their management. She was expected to manage resources, time, and the available labor to best advantage, balancing production against maintenance, the needs of daily consumption against long-term supply, and the particular capabilities of servants and children against their assigned chores. These duties inevitably carried a wife out into the community, for families in seventeenth-century New England lived by exchange as much as by self-sufficiency.

  Although the broad outlines of the housewife role were the same for all married New England women, the details varied. Frontier households differed sharply from urban ones. A husband of middling means in a settled farming community could provide his wife with a reasonably convenient working environment: a two-story home with hall and parlor on the ground floor and two rooms above for storage of food and equipment. She would have a separate kitchen, dominated by pots, kettles, and pans, and a cool cellar for foods. Most foods she served her family were the product of housewifery, not simply in their preparation, but in their growing, raising, harvesting, slaughtering, and processing. In the course of the day, the good rural housewife not only prepared meals for immediate consumption but also replenished the supplies of the storerooms. She tended the garden and preserved its crops, raised the animals and slaughtered them, spun cloth and mended clothing. Although the New England woman exchanged some goods with neighbors, or shared work such as cloth making with friends, the rural seventeenth-century housewife and her daughters or servants ran a constant manufactory.

  For women of ordinary means in New England towns, housewifery involved more marketplace exchanges and fewer productive enterprises. Trade, not home manufacture, preceded meal preparation, for these women could purchase grain or flour, even bread from a bakery and meat from a nearby slaughterhouse. Reliance on the market eliminated tasks but it did not free a woman’s time: an urban housewife moved constantly through town, seeking out shops that were often widely dispersed. Knowing what merchant had received a shipment of supplies was as important as knowing who specialized in those goods. Haggling was an art form, and establishing a reputation that permitted credit-buying was an economic necessity. Spending fewer hours in household production, these women increased their concern for cleanliness and neatness. Rural women rarely washed linens or swept rooms clean, but urban households had regular schedules for what we call housekeeping. Washing, which involved boiling water, beating clothes, and hanging them in the sunlight, was followed by ironing with heavy irons that had to be filled and refilled with hot coals.

  On the peripheries of the New England colonies, frontier women coped without marketplaces or adequate workspaces. A family’s accumulated wealth often consisted of little more than land and livestock. A woman struggled to maintain her family in a single-story cottage, whose one room was refuge for men, women, children, and barnyard animals. In addition to cooking, milking, and baking, women on the frontier foraged for food in the forests, marshes, and streams, in order to add fruit and fish to their family’s diet.

  The women of New England towns, farms, and frontiers would be keenly aware of the diverse circumstances of their lives—yet they would recognize the commonalities as well. To be a “notable housewife” was to engage in a ceaseless round of sustaining and enabling activity, using whatever resources were at hand.

  If these portraits of notable housewives locate women in the domestic space of home, kitchen, and surrounding garden and barnyard, that space was primary rather than exclusive. As helpmeet, or companion and aide to her husband, a wife could cross from her terrain to his without staking claim to it. As his deputy, or surrogate in his absence, she exercised ad hoc power. The same concept of surrogacy operated in the Chesapeake, as widows managed estates for their husband’s heirs. But in New England surrogacy was largely short-lived. In the Chesapeake the authority widows enjoyed might take on an independent life, but in New England the longevity of marriage and the stability of patriarchy probably operated against a woman’s internalization of her deputized power.

  It is important to remember how proximate and overlapping male and female spaces were in the small universe of the New England family. Men assigned daily work to servants, hired help, and did business with their peers in the parlor. Wives, daughters, even female servants were present when debts were contracted, commitments to provide goods or services made, and land sales transacted. Women thus acquired empirical knowledge of family affairs. They acquired influence as well. Salem court records show a wife not only present during her husband’s negotiation on the’ sale of land and a house but “furthering the sale.” Creditors suing their debtors called on their wives, who were “present at the bargain making,” to corroborate their testimony. Women served as historians of their husbands’ economic affairs, recalling under oath former ownership of property and its location as well as details of their neighbors’ and kinsmen’s finances. Not all New England men listened to their wives’ advice—and it was always their option to heed or ignore—but in the early decades when, as one historian of court cases put it, men and women worked, socialized, and misbehaved together, it is not surprising that many did.

  Personal relationships between Puritan husbands and wives have concerned historians as deeply as they concerned seventeenth-century ministers and magistrates. Puritan ideology tried to integrate seemingly contradictory commitments to hierarchy and mutuality in gender relationships much as they did in the relationships between ministers and congregations or political leaders and citizens. Men and women were exhorted to live in harmony built on love and affection. Husbands were to be obeyed, but mutual respect was the context in which their authority was to be exercised. Clearly, this affection and love had different trajectories for men and for women; men were expected to reach downward and overlook women’s spiritual, physical, and social inferiority, while women were supposed to reach upward and acknowledge without resentment men’s superiority and power. That some couples sought and sustained loving marriages cannot be doubted. But that others did not is equally unsurprising.

  The records of marital strife reveal much about gender differences between New England husbands and wives. For example, when Daniel Ela was found beating his wife, he defended his actions to his neighbors by appealing to the fundamental power relationships of patriarchy. His wife, he argued, “was his servant and his slave.” This interpretation of household hierarchy placed Ela at the margin of his community, yet his argument was not entirely beyond his neighbors’ understanding. Ela’s abuse of his power was extreme, but it was not alien to seventeenth-century New England culture. Likewise, when John Tillison chained his wife by the leg to a plow in order to keep her from leaving the house, or when a Maine husband kicked his wife and hit her with a club because she refused to feed his pig, they were considered to be exercising their right to discipline subordinates disrespectful of legitimate authority.

  Marital violence was not limited to men, however. Court records show that women, too, were brought to trial for physical abuse of their mates. Mary Davis, who was married in the 1640s to a man far older than she, gave vent to her resentment against her husband by taking a knife to his chest and threatening to kill him, “calling him old rogue and cuckold.” The latter part of the accusation was apparently true, for Mary confessed to adultery with twelve different men. Yet Mary Davis made no effort to legitimize her behavior, Puritan ideology offered her no refuge. Her contempt was naked and, in the eyes of others, illegitimate.

  Historians have attempted to take the pulse of Puritan marital relations for decades, some finding the harmony ministers advocated in the daily lives of their congregants, others pointing to the resentment and discontent wives felt, which manifested itself in such symptomatic behavior as depression, adultery, and even witchcraft, or in their husband’s infidelity or desertion. What is clear is this: the centrality of marriage and family to New England society, the careful and conscious elaboration of gender roles within those families, the reinforcement of gender ideals such as “helpmeet” and “notable housewife” by religious and civil authorities, and the simple reality that women had few if any acceptable alternatives to life except as wife and mother, meant that a woman’s self-satisfaction and her sense of accomplishment and maturity were heavily invested in her marriage. Dissatisfaction, a sense of failure or inadequacy, resentment, frustration, and despair may well have been the risks of such a narrowly defined identity.

  A New England woman did not, of course, live entirely within the confines—ideological, psychological, or experiential—of the marital household. The overlapping of male and female worlds within the family had its important parallel in the relationship of the individual and the community. New Englanders lived near each other, they depended on each other for services and skills, for protection and consolation, and the institutions they established and supported demanded not simply contact but interdependence. Community, then, was the countervailing force to family, and this had importance to women as well as men. Daniel Ela, after all, did not enjoy the privilege of beating his wife in privacy; he defended his decision to his neighbors, but they did not feel the need to defend their intervention in his family affairs.

 

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