A History of the Wife (23 page)

One factor that probably did play out to the advantage of American women was the large proportion of males to females throughout the seventeenth century in both the North and South. The Pilgrims aboard the Mayflower arriving at Plymouth in 1620 included only 28 women among 102 passengers. The first settlers of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607 had no women at all, but the group arriving in the fall of 1608 included Mistress Forrest, the wife of Thomas Forrest, and her maid, Anne Burras. Although the mistress soon died, the maid quickly found a mate, and their marriage was the first to be performed in Virginia.

There were so few females during the early years that the Virginia Company, which oversaw colonization, took the unusual step of importing shiploads of single women, 140 between 1620 and 1622. A

wife could be “bought” for between 120 and 150 pounds of tobacco as reimbursement for her passage.
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In the Chesapeake (Maryland and Virginia) men outnumbered women 6 to 1 during the early decades, and 3 to 1 as late as the 1680s.
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This imbalance was true, too, of the slave population transported to Virginia from 1619 onward at a ratio of 3 men to every 2 women. Whereas in England there was a
surplus
of women—roughly 9 males to 10 females—in the New World a potential wife was much in demand regardless of her social class or the portion she could bring to a marriage. Indentured servants as well as wealthy widows could all find husbands if they wanted to—and almost all did. The state of Maryland promoted itself as a paradise for female ser- vants in search of a husband: “The Women that go over into this Province as Servants have the best luck here as in any place of the world besides; for they are no sooner on shoar but they are courted into a Copulative matrimony... .”
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Following the successful importation of females to Virginia and Maryland, Carolina publicized its own glowing prospects: “If any Maid or single Woman have a desire to go over, they will think themselves in the Golden Age, when Men paid a Dowry for their Wives; for if they be but civil, and under 50 years of Age, some

honest Man or other, will purchase them for their Wives.”
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The paucity of marriageable women seems to have given them greater choice in selecting a husband, a situation that some women took full advantage of. Mrs. Cecily Jordan, for example, widowed in 1623 in Virginia, became immediately engaged to Rev. Greville Pooley on the condition that he keep the engagement secret for the sake of decency, as behooved her recent widowhood. But Pooley made the engagement known, and so displeased his fiancée that she linked her- self to another suitor, causing Pooley to institute a breach of promise suit. This celebrated case was won by Mrs. Jordan.
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Another Virginia woman with two fiancés, Eleanor Spragg, was pun- ished in 1624 by her congregation for “her offence in contracting her- self to two several men at one time.” While her punishment consisted only of public repentance, the clergy announced that similar offenses would be punished with whippings or fines.

At least one Virginia woman had such a strong sense of her value in the marriage market that she refused the traditional vow of obedience. At her wedding in 1687, Sarah Harrison Blair was asked the usual question: did she promise to obey her husband? “No obey,” she replied.

The minister repeated the question two more times, but she continued to repeat “No obey.” In the end, the ceremony was concluded on her terms, in defiance of standard liturgical practice.
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With such a scarcity of Anglo-American women, one wonders why there were not more intermarriages between either Indian and black women and the male settlers. The French in New France, where there was a similar shortage of women, were known to have contracted numerous intermarriages. In the early Jamestown settlement, John Rolfe did not consider it beneath him to marry Pocahontas, the daugh- ter of the Indian chieftain Powhatan. Whether she was, or was not, his savior according to the legend, the marriage was considered a good thing not only for Rolfe and his Christianized bride, but also for peace- ful relations with Native Americans.

After the introduction of slave workers in the Virginia tobacco fields, there was a time when they, too, sometimes married whites—several documented cases of this have survived.
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It seems that in the early days of colonization, when the status of slaves was uncertain (after all, there were no slaves in England), Africans were treated somewhat like indentured servants, and there was little social distance between white servants and black slaves. But as the institution of slavery evolved and slaves became increasingly dehumanized, a taboo against sexual rela- tions and marriage with blacks, as with Indians, took root. As early as 1630 in Jamestown, a certain Hugh Davis was ordered to “be soundly whipped before an assemblage of Negroes and others for abusing him- self to the dishonor of God and the shame of Christians by defiling his body in lying with a Negro, which fault he is to acknowledge next Sab- bath day.”
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In 1661, Maryland passed the first antimiscegenation law, directed at prohibiting white female and black male marriages.
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In 1691, Virginia declared that a white person could not marry a black or an Indian, and any white who did would be banished from the colony.
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In 1705, Mas- sachusetts passed a law against intermarriage between the races. That same year, an observer of American mores claimed that the example of John Rolfe “might well have been followed by other settlers for the vast improvement of the country,” were it not for fear that the women “shou’d conspire with those of their own Nation, to destroy their hus- bands.” By 1717, Governor Alexander Spotswood of Virginia wrote to a correspondent in London: “I cannot find one Englishman that has an

Indian wife.”
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He could probably have said the same for the union of an English colonist and a black woman, since between 1705 and 1750 Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Delaware, and all the southern colonies passed laws prohibiting interracial marriages.
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In the American colonies, there was no intermediate status assigned to the children of nonwhites and whites, as in other New World settlements—for example, the
metis
in Canada or the
mestizos
of Latin America. However, in Florida and Louisiana where Spanish or French rule prevailed, mulattos were recognized as forming a class of their own, with many of the rights of whites, at least until the nineteenth century, when almost all the United States passed laws prohibiting mar- riages between white persons and blacks or mulattos.
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Without competition from Native Americans and blacks, seventeenth- century white women enjoyed the advantages of scarcity. The facts of life in a frontier society made them indispensable to the survival of their families and communities. As early as July 31, 1619, the gentlemen of the Virginia House of Burgesses acknowledged that “in a newe planta- tion it is not knowen whether man or woman be the most necessary.”
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The Puritan minister John Cotton, “teacher” of the First Church of Boston from 1633 to his death in 1652, expressed what was probably a commonly accepted view: “Women are Creatures without which there is no comfortable Living for man: it is true of them what is wont to be said of governments,
That bad ones are better than none.
”
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Such a back- hand compliment reflected a considerable change from the medieval religious stance that no wife was better than a good one.

As we look back on this period from the vantage of the year 2000, it can be argued that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestants pre- pared the soil for modern marriage. The American historian Edmund Morgan reminds us of the high value placed on mutual love in Puritan marriage: “If husband and wife failed to love each other above all the world, they not only wronged each other they disobeyed God.” But Morgan hastens to add that love did not have the very same meaning in the seventeenth century that it has today. It should not be confused with romantic passion, and was never meant to rival the love of God. Rather, marital love was conceptualized, in the words of one minister, as “the Sugar to sweeten every addition to married life, but not an essential part of it.” It was, at best, affection in harmony with duty and reason.
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Another historian, John Gillis, is convinced that Puritan conjugality “came closest to the modern norm of companionate marriage, even to the extent of proclaiming the equality (albeit limited) of partners.”
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In all probability, the Puritan wife did not ask for so much. She was gener- ally content to fulfill her role as the “heart” of the family, leaving the role of “head” to her husband. She sat in her assigned pew in church, and retired to her closet to pray. But in bed, if Anne Bradstreet is in any way indicative of more general practices, some of them knew a thing or two that might surprise us.

F O U R

Republican Wives in America and France

S
omething new was added to the identity of Western women in the eighteenth century: a political con- sciousness. Forged in the crucible of revolution when both America

and France threw off the rule of monarchy, the political awareness of women on both sides of the Atlantic took on new dimensions. Whether they were patriots or loyalists, women felt they were as implicated in national events as their husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons. While very few made history in the public sense of the word, women were cocreators of the new republican societies that emerged from the Revo- lutionary struggle. In this context, “women” should be understood as wives, since almost all adult females were married in colonial America, as well as the majority of eighteenth-century Frenchwomen.

THE COMPLEAT WIFE IN COLONIAL AMERICA

During the eighteenth century, American wifehood was still con- structed around three basic identities. A wife was, first and foremost, her husband’s sexual and emotional partner, albeit a “junior partner.” She became, in most cases, a mother, with parental obligations shared with her husband. And in all cases, she was a housekeeper, with daily duties that consumed most of her energy.

Almost all women allotted time to religious activities, such as prayer, Bible reading, church attendance, and discussion of the sermon in all-

women groups. Most women in cities and towns visited with each other, not only to socialize but also to lend a hand when a neighbor was sick or lying in after childbirth. Women with means enjoyed elaborate entertainment with their peers—dinners and parties and trips that might last several days or weeks. They set aside time for letter writing and the arts, most notably the harpsichord or pianoforte, needlework, and poetry. As in all periods of history, economic advantages made some women’s days considerably easier than others, but so did geo- graphical differences; for example, city dwellers had less arduous lives than their country cousins, and residents of the North had educational opportunities for their daughters that were not yet available in the South.

A wife’s status was determined by her husband’s occupation. She was known publicly as the blacksmith’s wife, the governor’s wife, the minis- ter’s wife, the merchant’s wife, and not by any rank of her own—except in a few unusual cases where a married woman acquired renown as an exceptional midwife or an inspired religious leader.

Once married, a woman became, in the eyes of the common law inherited from England, a
feme covert,
one whose legal person was sub- sumed or “covered” by that of her husband. Only he could sue or be sued, draft wills, make contracts, and buy or sell property, including property that had originally belonged to his wife. With virtually no legal rights and with divorce very difficult to obtain, brides put them- selves under the protection, or at the mercy, of their husbands.

English, French, and American treatises from this period echoed the same tune: that woman was the “weaker vessel,” the “softer” sex, infe- rior in reason to man, created to serve a husband and nurture children. When, in the eighteenth century, Enlightenment thinking began to rival strictly religious interpretations of human history, Nature was invoked rather than God as the final authority, but with no less certainty of woman’s subordinate destiny. In the words of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose book on education,
Émile,
was influential on both sides of the Atlantic: “The man should be strong and active; the woman should be weak and passive.... What is most wanted in a woman is gentle- ness . . . she should early learn to submit to injustice and suffer the wrongs inflicted on her by her husband without complaint.”
1

Popular British and American writers rearticulated age-old argu- ments supporting the inequality of husband and wife. Whether one

attributed women’s inferior status to a defect in reason or to God’s decree, the result was the same: colonial women and men were expected to believe that wives were weaker than their husbands and were destined to be dependent on them. Clergymen, physicians, and moralists agreed, “Providence designed women for a state of depend- ence, and consequently of submission.”
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Some advice books, like John Gregory’s
A Father’s Legacy to his Daughter
(1774), nuanced their vocab- ulary so as to recommend that wives strive to “please” their husbands rather than “serve” them, without changing the essential message: female deference was necessary to gain male protection and support.

If a wife did not show proper deference or was frankly disobedient, there were ways for a husband to enforce his authority, namely “moder- ate physical correction” as allowed in Anglo-English law. This could take the form of wife beating or locking a wife in her room, but was not supposed to entail permanent injury or loss of life. Violent husbands were looked upon with disfavor by the law, and some were even brought to court by their wives, with the aid of concerned family mem- bers and neighbors. In this way, a few mistreated women managed to escape abusive relationships. Most of them probably suffered in silence. The common assertions about women’s “natural” inferiority and need for male dominance, and the laws that enforced such assertions, must have influenced the way women saw themselves. Historian Mary Beth Norton’s assessment of numerous women’s diaries and letters led her to believe that most women did indeed think of themselves as infe- rior to men and had what we would today call low self-esteem. Norton’s documentation of women’s statements to that effect is impressive... and appalling. Terms such as “poor helpless woman,” “vacant brain,” “imbecility,” “small talent,” “poor judgment,” “insipid,” “stupid,” “strange,” “inconsistent,” “disconsolate,” “distressed,” “dull,” and “liable to errors” represent a minuscule fraction of the language women con- sistently used to deprecate themselves and other members of their