1: Reading and Overview
Reading Assignment
Inventing the American Woman, Volume 1
Introduction: Gender Expectations Across Cultures, pp. ix - xii
Chapter 1, Women in Colonial America to 1763, pp. 1 - 48
Overview
Contemporary Engraving of Pocahontas
European settlers who sailed across the Atlantic Ocean during the early seventeenth century did not encounter an empty land. Instead, they joined the Native American peoples who had lived there for thousands of years and the Spanish-speaking arrivals who had come to the Southeast and Southwest at the end of the sixteenth century. As a result, the early part of the reading assignment is devoted to establishing what women did as members of varied and diverse cultures. The important point to grasp is that the place of women in different Native American tribes and in Hispanic American cultures did not conform to the the male-female patterns, or gender roles, that characterized the English- speaking groups in Virginia and Massachusetts. You should be aware of these differing cultural and social arrangements and how they interacted during the colonial period of United States history.
By the early 1600s, contact between English settlers and Native Americans occurred. The large part of the chapter in the Riley text deals with ways in which Europeans adapted their previous assumptions about women to challenges of their new situation in North America. How did the status of unmarried women in the colonies differ from that of married women? What restrictions existed on the rights of married women? Were there circumstances in which the actual status of women was more open and tolerant than the law prescribed? Other sections of the textbook chapter deal with the role of women in the colonial workforce. Notice the range and complexity of what women did. In addition to extensive domestic work, some women worked as midwives, physicians, artists, and artisans. Many women worked as indentured servants or they worked for wages. In their personal lives, women found themselves in contrasting situations where some marriages reflected a reasonable amount of mutual respect and sexual intimacy between the partners. In other domestic unions, women played a more subordinate role. What opportunities, if any, existed for women to take part in charitable work, pursue an education, or influence colonial politics? What restraints limited their participation? The author talks about the incidence of divorce during these years. The changing attitudes toward divorce will be a continuing theme of the discussion of women’s status in American marriages.
The textbook identifies significant aspects of colonial life in which women did not conform to the gender-based assumptions of male society. In what ways did women try to avoid the limits that society placed upon them? How do the experiences of Anne Bradstreet and Anne Hutchinson support Riley’s argument about the reluctance of some women to accept gender expectations? How do the witchcraft trials of the 1690s in Massachusetts fit into this historical analysis?
Finally, the text considers the condition of African women as both slaves and females. Throughout most of the colonial period, the race of these women defined their lives as much as their gender did. The text points out the various ways in which law undermined family relationships for slave women and left them vulnerable to the power of whites. As the text notes, the esteem in which Europeans held the family did not extend to arrivals from Africa. They were primarily valued in terms of their labor. As the slave population increased during the eighteenth century and fears of black resistance grew, constraints on African American women intensified. Here, as later in the course, it will be necessary to sort out the relative importance of gender and race in American society. How did the condition of white and black women reflect this difference in attitude? By the onset of the American Revolution during the 1760s, basic patterns of how women would be seen and treated in the United States had emerged, patterns that would continue to affect American life for more than two centuries.