Women in Stuart England and America

A Comparative Study

Roger Thompson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136226724
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Sozialgeschichte

Originally published in 1974, this study offers valuable perspectives on the status and roles of women in Stuart England and in the newly settled colonies of North America, particularly Massachusetts and Virginia. Incorporating both new research on the subject, and the findings of other scholars on demographic and social history, the author examines the effects of sex ratios, economic opportunities, Puritanism and frontier conditions on the emancipation of American women in comparison with their English counterparts. He discusses the effects of these major differences on women's roles in courtship, marriage and the family, educational, legal and civic opportunities. In the final chapter, he compares the moral climate of the two cultures in the latter part of the seventeenth century.

Part I
Introduction

Chapter 1
The Seventeenth-Century Scene

What used to be known by the unliberated as 'the woman question' is as old as Eve. There are plenty of descriptive, biographical and narrative studies on the state of play in seventeenth century England and America.¹ The drama and poetry, sermons and family histories, legal records and diaries have been ransacked by generations of scholars. We shall not reiterate the excellent work that has already been done. Here our focus will be on the less well-worked areas of transatlantic comparison and the analysis of the causes and effects of differences in women's status and roles.

Most historical study and teaching has been rigidly national in scope. This inquiry will therefore begin with a brief sketch of England and the colonies in the Stuart period. The rest of the introduction will present a survey of published popular opinion on women on the two sides of the Atlantic; contrasts in career patterns; and the comments of travellers.

Stuart England

In the eighteenth century, Englishmen rather than Frenchmen or Italians had a European reputation for turbulence and political instability, and small wonder after the upheavals of the preceding century. The profound political and constitutional changes brought about by the Civil War, the Interregnum, and the Revolution of 1688-9 are what usually catch the historical headlines. Underlying these were less spectacular developments which are more crucial for the study of women's position in English society.

The first of these factors is that highly complex movement, the rise of capitalism, continuing from preceding centuries. On the one hand, this gave rise to a new class in English society, a bourgeoisie of commerce, business, industry and bureaucracy, mainly centred on larger towns and cities. These citizens and their wives were an important new element in English social life, something of a countervailing force to that of the entrenched aristocracy. It was a commonplace of social comment that the wives of citizens were freer than any other group of women in England, perhaps in most of Europe. On the other hand, it has been argued that, in such a plutocracy, uselessness, which is the boast or bane of both sexes in an aristocracy, is a characteristic only of women.² Furthermore, some economic historians have deplored the removal of the wife from an economically productive business partnership with her husband, and her relegation to an ornamental role.³

The concept of 'possessive individualism' was intimately connected with the development of capitalism and with intellectual movements like the growth of scepticism and toleration. Assumptions like 'What makes a man human is freedom from dependence on the wills of others' cut right across cosmological theories like the great chain of being, and traditional patriarchalism in the family and the community.⁴ If woman is subsumed in 'man', then accepted ideas about the natural inferiority of woman and her subordinate position in the family or communal team are in jeopardy. Significantly, the overthrow of autocratic monarchy in 1688 gave rise to comparisons with the autocratic paterfamilias, and produced demands—albeit literary ones—for compacts between equal partners in marriage.⁵ There was, however, a less emancipating alternative. If possessiveness, rather than individualism, was stressed, then daughters or wives could be derogated into a species of property, to be bought and sold, or flashed around as a piece of ostentatious display.

The spread of calvinistic and post-calvinistic protestant dogma was linked in subtle ways with capitalism and individualism, and likewise affected the status of men, and contemporary opinion about them. This will be a major theme of succeeding chapters. Suffice it to say here that some strains in protestant and puritan thought worked in woman's favour—emphasis on an educated laity, for instance—while others, like the derivation of social attitudes from Hebrew traditions, may have worked against.

Foreign influences also played a part. The Dutchwoman of the seventeenth century was probably the most emancipated in the world. Those, like Sir Josiah Child, who sought to explain and emulate the economic and cultural 'miracle' of the Netherlands stressed women's role in it.⁶ French influence was a vital factor in English cultural development in the seventeenth century. The example of the Précieuses was widely praised orlampooned, depending on the point of view, in English literature thereafter. Conversely, the oppressive treatment which women still received in such underdeveloped countries as Turkey or Russia may have had some marginal effects on their treatment in England.⁷

There were three periods in the seventeenth century when the 'woman question' emerged from the undergrowth of history: the second decade, the Civil War and Interregnum years, and the last two decades of the century. The first period witnessed a vigorous pamphlet war, fanned by the exposures of the Essex divorce scandal and the pretensions of some court and city women.⁸ The middle years of the century saw profound social as well as political change. In this upheaval women took the stage in religious, political, legal and business affairs. Some commentators have detected in the latter decades the appearance of 'the new woman'.⁹ It is true that protests by women against women's lot were made at this time. It is much less clear whether these represented the emergence of a new breed of Amazons, or total desperation at worsening conditions.

With the possible exception of the middle years of the century, there seems little doubt that the Stuart era was one of the bleaker ones for women, certainly a decline from that golden age of Renaissance flowering under the Tudors.

The Colonies

The expansion of Stuart England to the North American continent had a mixed bag of propellants—religious, economic, demographic, imperialist, missionary, to name a few. The earliest colony was Virginia, settled in 1607 and sponsored by the Virginian Company of London, a joint-stock enterprise. The economic motive was the most important in the founding of the old dominion, and its eventual success depended on the cultivation of the staple crop of tobacco. Economic and geographical conditions were responsible for the spread of the plantation system there, and the absence of large towns. The culture of tobacco was helped by the influx of large numbers of indentured servants and rather smaller numbers of African slaves. In the first century of settlement, land was fairly evenly divided among Virginians, though an aristocracy of large landholders had begun to emerge by the end of the century.

The financial problems of the Virginia Company led to the Crown taking over control of the colony in 1624. Henceforward the governor was appointed by the King. However, representative institutions, in the form of the House of Burgesses, were allowed to continue under royal government; the main unit of local government was the county. The Church of England was the established church of the colony, and power here tended to lie with the self-perpetuating vestries.

Because of royal authority, economic ties and the Anglican church, Virginia tended to be pretty closely related to England during the seventeenth century. Loyalist sentiment was strong there during the Civil War and the Interregnum, as symbolised by the outlook of its greatest Stuart governor, Sir William Berkeley, whose term of office ran from 1642 to 1677. The colony was more affected by prevailing English ideas and fashions than was New England, and its economy was threatened by the Navigation Acts. Politically, it was reasonably stable after the first generation of settlement, the one major exception being Bacon's Rebellion of 1676. The worst source of tension for much of the century was the Indian threat, which had been a leading cause of the uprising under Bacon.

In many ways Virginia was fairly typical of the other southern settlements of the Stuart period, Maryland and Carolina. Both of these developed staple economies reliant on England, though Maryland also served as a haven for persecuted Roman Catholics. Virginia's northern and southern neighbours were both proprietorial colonies, rather than directly governed by the Crown. However, what we shall be saying about Virginia in succeeding chapters will by and large be applicable to Maryland, which was one generation younger, and to Carolina, which was two.¹⁰

Efforts had been made from the start of the seventeenth century to settle the inhospitable coast of New England. The first successful attempt was that of the Plymouth Pilgrims in 1620. They were a group of about a hundred religious separatists who had already lived for a decade in exile in the Netherlands. Although important in folklore, and possibly for their religious organisation, their plantation on Cape Cod was historically less significant than neighbouring colonies. They never obtained a charter or colony status, and were merged with Massachusetts in 1691.¹¹

The colony of Massachusetts Bay was the dominant settlement in seventeenth-century New England. Although economic motives were evident, the main impetus in its foundation in 1629 was religious, and intimately linked with theLaudian persecution of puritanism in England. In the eyes of its sponsors, the Massachusetts Bay Company, the colony was to be a holy commonwealth, an exemplar to unreformed or backsliding protestantism in England and Europe. Its church polity was a form of Congregationalism, and political and religious power was placed in the hands of the visible saints. During its first ten years it received a flood of some 16,000 refugees, who were organised in townships around the Bay and up the navigable rivers. Representative institutions were quickly, if not altogether willingly, granted, and for most of the century the central political authority was an elected governor, a court of assistants and a house of deputies, with the towns as the local unit of government.

Massachusetts tried to remain as independent as possible from England, although it owed its original charter of 1629 to the Crown. The only period of modest relaxation was during the post-Civil-War years. Although its puritan leadership persisted in trying to maintain provincial insularity from England, economic considerations pulled in the opposite direction. Most colonists practised subsistence agriculture, but a significant minority engaged, with increasing success, in trade based on the export of fish, timber products, and, later, rum. A flourishing merchant marine was based on such ports as Boston and Salem and plied coastal, transatlantic, West Indian and Mediterranean sea routes. Connections with English mercantile houses were a vital link in this commercial web, and militated against isolationism. The home rule of the Bay Company was successfully challenged by the new English imperialism of the Restoration, and in 1684 Massachusetts was forced to surrender its charter. The second charter, issued after the alarums of the Glorious Revolution in 1691, made Massachusetts into a royal colony and broke the grip of the godly on its political machinery.

Intellectually, Massachusetts had been by far the most cultivated colony of the Stuart period. It boasted Harvard College, a printing press, a remarkably well-educated clergy and laity with scientific, literary and scholarly—as well as theological—interests and achievements. The initial Utopian enthusiasm and purpose inevitably waned in the face of stability, prosperity, and a growing sentiment towards a measure of toleration. It retained, however, a purposeful sobriety and earnestness. It was undoubtedly one of the greatest achievements of seventeenth-century English puritanism, if not the greatest. Its neighbours, Rhode Island and Connecticut, were found...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I Introduction
• Part II A New World
• Part III Cultural Contrasts
• Epilogue
• Index