Women and Gender

Abstract

Early American women's history can be considered an old or a new field. We tend to think of it, like women's history in other times and places, as a relatively recent practice, a product of the women's liberation and civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s. And for the most part it is. But for historians who initiated their studies in the 1970s, at least two earlier bodies of work beckoned, one on European Americans, the other on Native Americans. Because these literatures so profoundly influenced the assumptions, questions, challenges, and theoretical orientations of subsequent scholarship, assessment of the how the field has developed over the past three decades necessarily starts here.Most widely recognized in 1970 were several books written earlier in the twentieth century by feminist writers interested in women who migrated from England (Earle, 1904;Abbot, 1910;Dexter, 1924;Spruill, 1938). Not all of these authors had academic credentials and their approaches and arguments varied, but they shared a passion for reclaiming a place for Anglo-American women in particular in early American history. As a group these scholars fostered the idea that skewed sex ratios, labor shortages, high mortality, and institutional instability worked to these women's advantage, whether as compared to their European counterparts or their nineteenth-century American descendants. Frontier conditions, in conjunction with pre-industrial work patterns and values, the argument went, enhanced women's status and opportunities in the New World; once these circumstances changed, especially with increased social and cultural complexity and the coming of the Industrial Revolution, women's status declined and women were relegated to the marginal positions they would occupy from then on.Eventually each of these constructions -frontier, pre-industrial, women's status, New World, and most recently, women -would be contested, as would much of the larger argument. But in the early 1970s, this interpretation held, in part because it had received considerable support since the 1930s from established male historians. Less interested in women's lives per se than in re-creating early religious, legal, family, and community history, these scholars had stressed the harmony and mutuality of relations between women and men. Puritans in particular, they affirmed, with their emphasis on the centrality of marriage and the equality of souls before God, had accorded colonial women unusual respect and authority. Flexible legal practices and the family's role as a model for New England's social order also added to the rights these women could claim to protection and property. In 1970, writing about Plymouth colony, John Demos