America's Women

400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines

Gail Collins

• Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061739224
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Rich in detail, filled with fascinating characters, and panoramic in its sweep, this magnificent, comprehensive work tells for the first time the complete story of the American woman from the Pilgrims to the 21st-century

In this sweeping cultural history, Gail Collins explores the transformations, victories, and tragedies of women in America over the past 300 years. As she traces the role of females from their arrival on the Mayflower through the 19th century to the feminist movement of the 1970s and today, she demonstrates a boomerang pattern of participation and retreat.

In some periods, women were expected to work in the fields and behind the barricades—to colonize the nation, pioneer the West, and run the defense industries of World War II. In the decades between, economic forces and cultural attitudes shunted them back into the home, confining them to the role of moral beacon and domestic goddess. Told chronologically through the compelling true stories of individuals whose lives, linked together, provide a complete picture of the American woman's experience, Untitled is a landmark work and major contribution for us all.

1

The First Colonists:
Voluntary and Otherwise

THE EXTREMELY BRIEF STORY OF VIRGINIA DARE

Eleanor Dare must have been either extraordinarily adventurous or easily led. In 1587, when she was pregnant with her first child, she set sail across the Atlantic, headed for a continent where no woman of her kind had ever lived, let alone given birth. The only English-speaking residents of the New World at the time were a handful of men who had been left behind during an earlier, unsuccessful attempt at settlement on Roanoke Island, in what is now Virginia. Eleanor’s father, John White, was to become governor of the new colony. Her husband, Ananias, a bricklayer, was one of his assistants.

Under the best of circumstances, a boat took about two months to get from England to the New World, and there were plenty of reasons to avoid the trip. Passengers generally slept on the floor, on damp straw, living off salted pork and beef, dried peas and beans. They suffered from seasickness, dysentery, typhoid, and cholera. Their ship could sink, or be taken by privateers, or run aground at the wrong place. Even if it stayed afloat, it might be buffeted around for so long that the provisions would run out before the travelers reached land. Later would-be colonists sometimes starved to death en route. (The inaptly named Love took a year to make the trip, and at the end of the voyage rats and mice were being sold as food.) Some women considered the odds and decided to stay on dry land. The wife of John Dunton, a colonial minister, wrote to him that she would rather be “a living wife in England than a dead one at sea.”

But if Eleanor Dare had any objections, they were never recorded. She and sixteen other women settlers, along with ninety-one men and nine children, encountered no serious problems until they stopped to pick up the men who had been left at Roanoke. When they went ashore to look for them, all they found were the bones of a single Englishman. The uncooperative ship’s captain refused to take them farther, and they were forced to settle on the same unlucky site.

Try to imagine what Eleanor Dare must have thought when she walked, heavy with child, through the houses of the earlier settlers, now standing empty, “overgrown with Melons of divers sortes, and Deere within them, feeding,” as her father later recorded. Eleanor was a member of the English gentry, hardly bred for tilling fields and fighting Indians. Was she confident that her husband the bricklayer and her father the bureaucrat could keep her and her baby alive, or was she beginning to blame them for getting her into this extremely unpromising situation? All we know is that on August 18, the first English child was born in America and christened Virginia Dare—named, like the colony, in honor of the Virgin Queen who ruled back home. A few days later her grandfather boarded the boat with its cranky captain and sailed back to England for more supplies, leaving Eleanor and the other settlers to make homes out of the ghost village. It was nearly three years before White could get passage back to Roanoke, and when he arrived he discovered the village once again abandoned, with no trace of any human being, living or dead. No one knows what happened to Eleanor and the other lost colonists. They might have been killed by Indians or gone to live with the local Croatoan tribe when they ran out of food. They were swallowed up by the land, and by history.

The Dares and other English colonists who we call the first settlers were, of course, nothing of the sort. People had lived in North America for perhaps twenty millennia, and the early colonists who did survive lasted only because friendly natives were willing to give them enough food to prevent starvation. In most cases, that food was produced by native women. Among the eastern tribes, men were generally responsible for hunting and making war while the women did the farming. In some areas they had as many as 2,000 acres under cultivation. Former Indian captives reported that the women seemed to enjoy their work, tilling the fields in groups that set their own pace, looking after one another’s youngsters. Control of the food brought power, and the tribes whose women played a dominant role in growing and harvesting food were the ones in which women had the highest status and greatest authority. Perhaps that’s why the later colonists kept trying to foist spinning wheels off on the Indians, to encourage what they regarded as a more wholesome division of labor. At any rate, it’s nice to think that Eleanor Dare might have made a new life for herself with the Croatoans and spent the rest of her life working companionably with other women in the fields, keeping an eye out for her daughter and gossiping about the unreliable men.

“FEDD UPON HER TILL HE HAD
CLEAN DEVOURED ALL HER PARTES”

Jamestown was founded in 1607 by English investors hoping to make a profit on the fur and timber and precious ore they thought they were going to find. Its first residents were an ill-equipped crew of young men, many of them the youngest sons of good families, with no money but a vast sense of entitlement. The early colonists included a large number of gentlemen’s valets, but almost no farmers. They regarded food as something that arrived in the supply ship, and nobody seemed to have any interest in learning how to grow his own. (Sir Thomas Dale, who arrived in 1611 after two long winters of starvation, said he found the surviving colonists at “their daily and usuall workes, bowling in the streetes.”) The first women to arrive were the wife of one Thomas Forrest and her maid, Anne Burras. They came in 1608, the only women in a colony of around 200 misfits and mercenaries. The Jamestown that greeted them was a fort, about an acre in size, with a shopping district composed of one storehouse and a church that looked “like a barne,” according to Captain John Smith. The homes were tumbledown shacks that one visitor said were inferior to the lowest cottage he had ever seen back in England.

There is no record of Mrs. Forrest’s first name, or what she thought when she discovered that she was marooned in what must have seemed like a long, rowdy fraternity party, minus food. All we hear is a report that she had a baby during the “Starving Time” of 1609–10, which killed all but about 60 of the settlers out of a population of 20 women and 470 men. People gnawed on “Dogges & horses…together with Rates, mice, snakes,” and one unnamed colonist killed his wife and turned her into dinner. He “fedd upon her till he had clean devoured all her partes,” wrote another colonist, who added that the man was “burned for his horrible villany.”

We don’t know if Mrs. Forrest and her baby survived the winter, but her former maid, Anne Burras, did. Anne, who was only fourteen when she arrived, soon married a twenty-eight-year-old laborer in Virginia’s first wedding ceremony and gave birth to a daughter—another Virginia—who also lived through the famine. So did Temperance Flowerdew, a young woman who had arrived in Virginia in 1609, after surviving a hurricane at sea. The storm hit a small fleet of boats destined for the colony. One, the Sea Venture, was destroyed, her passengers shipwrecked in an uninhabited part of Bermuda for nearly a year, while the crew turned the wreckage into two smaller boats. The marooned men and women weathered their ordeal on a warm island filled with food, while Temperance and the other émigrés who made it to Virginia were foraging for scraps and cooking rats. But after that unpromising beginning, a number of the women did very well. Temperance was the wife of two of the colony’s governors. The first, Captain George Yeardley, was knighted in 1618 and became one of the richest men in Virginia, with several plantations. He named one of them Flowerdew in honor of Lady Yeardley. After his death, Temperance, then about forty-two, married Captain Francis West, one of his successors. Joan Pierce and her young daughter, Jane, endured the long, hungry winter in Jamestown on their own while her husband, William, was stranded with the passengers on the Sea Venture. But after William finally made his way to the colony, he quickly became a wealthy planter. When Joan returned to England for a visit in 1629, she spent much of her time bragging about her garden in Jamestown and how she could “keep a better house in Virginia for 3 or 4 hundred pounds than in London.” Her daughter Jane grew up to marry John Rolfe after the death of his wife, Pocahontas.

Pocahontas was the one Native American woman who had a starring role in the colonists’ version of seventeenth-century history, although she suffers from having had her story told only from the point of view of Englishmen. Captain John Smith and the other early Virginia settlers tended to look upon her as a sort of colonial groupie, eager to befriend the Europeans and to become as much like them as possible. But they may have misread her entirely. Pocahontas was a member of her people’s nobility, and while she obviously enjoyed the company of the new white-skinned arrivals, her actions may have been dictated more by diplomacy than affection. Her father, Powhatan, was a powerful chief of a confederacy of Algonquin tribes, an aggressive warrior who was one of the suspects in the destruction of Roanoke. Pocahontas was his favorite daughter. She first visited Jamestown when she was ten, and she became a familiar figure in the tiny, struggling colony. She was certainly a good and useful friend. Her help in getting the Indians to provide food to the starving and feckless colonists was, Smith wrote, the salvation of the settlement. When Powhatan ordered Smith beheaded for venturing too far into his territory, Pocahontas raced in and put her head next to his on the chopping block and successfully begged for mercy.

The young Indian girl may have done all this simply because she liked Smith and the other Englishmen, or it may have all been part of Powhatan’s attempts to control the relationship between his tribe and the newcomers. Some historians think the beheading drama was staged to put Smith in Powhatan’s debt. Certainly Pocahontas understood the frictions between the whites and her own people—at one point, the English seized her and held her as hostage. Her marriage to the English leader John Rolfe cemented peace between the colonists and Powhatan’s confederacy for the rest of her life. Both husband and wife may have seen their union as diplomatic, rather than romantic. Rolfe wrote a letter to his superiors justifying the marriage “for the good of this plantation.” The bride-to-be did not confide her own feelings to anyone who had the power to write them down, but she was said to have already been married to a man from her own tribe. Later, she went with Rolfe and their young son to England in what we would today call a public relations tour, aimed at encouraging more investment in Virginia. She had her portrait painted wearing English clothes, satisfied all the nobility’s curiosity to see a “noble savage,” and was presented at court and reunited with her old friend John Smith. Before she could return home she died, probably of pneumonia. She was only about twenty years old.

“IT IS NOT KNOWEN WHETHER
MAN OR WOMAN BE THE MOST NECESSARY”

Almost every unmarried Englishwoman who emigrated to the Chesapeake must have dreamed of duplicating Temperance Flowerdew’s or Joan Pierce’s luck. There wasn’t much prospect of finding a good, upwardly mobile mate back home, where England was changing from a rather backward agricultural country to a mercantile giant and dislocating hundreds of thousands of rural workers in the process. Very few available men could support a family. In fact, there seemed to be very few men around, period—the country was still recovering from a plague that had mysteriously killed far more men than women. Of the many sales pitches offered by the colonies, none struck home with women more than the prospects of finding a suitable spouse. “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,” promised one promoter. (An even more enthusiastic propagandist announced that the women of North Carolina were terrifically fertile “and many Women from other Places who have been long Married and without Children, have remov’d to Carolina, and become joyfull Mothers.”)

The recruiters preferred not to mention certain details. Even after the food shortages ended, the Chesapeake was a death trap. The brackish water, mosquito-laden swamps, and steamy weather killed most people during their first year. Those who survived often suffered from weakness or periodic fits as an aftermath of their exposure to malaria. At least 6,000 people came to Virginia between 1607 and 1624; by 1625, only 1,200 survivors were still there. But the colonies’ sponsors were desperate to get females, by hook or by crook—their ventures were in danger of being wrecked on the shoals of dissolute, irresponsible young manhood. In 1619, the Virginia House of Burgesses, petitioning that wives as well as husbands be eligible for grants of free land, argued that in a new plantation, “it is not knowen whether man or woman be the most necessary.” London recruiters began searching for marriageable women, offering free passage and trousseaus for girls of good reputation and a sense of adventure. When they married, their new husbands had to reimburse the company with 120 pounds of good leaf tobacco. The first shipment of ninety “tobacco brides” arrived in Jamestown in the spring of 1620. The youngest, Jane Dier, was fifteen or sixteen when she left England. Allice Burges, at twenty-eight, was one of the oldest and said to be skillful in the art of brewing beer—important in a place where the water was generally undrinkable. Cicely Bray was from one of the best families, of a rank that required her to be addressed as “Mistress” rather than the more plebian “goodwife.” But all the brides were respectable women, mostly the offspring of middle-class tradesmen who had died, leaving them with no male protectors. All of them provided references, attesting to their honesty, sobriety, and past behavior. Anne Richards was “a woman of an honest [life] and conversation…and so is and ever hathe bynne esteemed,” wrote one of her parish elders.

We don’t know which tobacco brides won the golden ring and became a contented farm wife or a prosperous plantation mistress. Only a few of their disasters made it into history. Some of the women, including Cicely Bray, were killed in an Indian attack in 1622, when 347 settlers lost their lives. Examining the site of that massacre, modern archaeologists were puzzled to discover the skeleton of one woman with an iron band around her head that apparently had protected her from scalping. Women in England, they later deduced, used those bands to fasten a roll of cloth under their hair, to make their hairdo look fuller. Perhaps she was a tobacco bride, still trying to maintain her old standards of fashion.

Some British contractors, hired to provide the colonies with wives and female servants, simply went out and grabbed whatever warm bodies they could find, shoved them into a boat and set sail. In October 1618, a warrant was issued in England for one Owen Evans, who was kidnapping young women from their villages and sending them off to be sold in Bermuda and Virginia as indentured servants. “His undue proceedings breed such terror to the poor maidens as 40 of them fled out of one parish into such obscure and remote places as their parents and masters can yet have no news what is become of them,” reported a correspondent to King James I. The danger of being dragged off to America against one’s will figured prominently in the popular literature of seventeenth-century England—playwrights found the shanghai artists, or “spirits,” a handy deus ex machina for eliminating characters midplot. Parents sometimes pursued the spirits’ vessels down the Thames, where they ransomed their kidnapped children before they disappeared forever. The law didn’t seem to do much to dissuade the abductions. In 1680, a woman named Ann Servant confessed to attacking Alice Flax, a young maiden, putting her on board a ship and selling her in Virginia. Servant was fined a little over 13 shillings. In the coinage of the era, that was enough to buy a dozen lobsters or pints of ale, but hardly the value Alice Flax would have put on her liberty.

Besides wanting to populate the new colonies, the English government was also eager to get rid of its more undesirable citizens, who were overloading the urban jails. Some convicts were involuntarily deported; others were given the choice between a long jail term and life as an indentured servant across the ocean. Sarah Wilson, a former lady’s maid in the court of Queen Charlotte, was found guilty of stealing a jewel in the royal palace. She was undoubtedly relieved when her death sentence was reduced to transportation to Maryland. There, she escaped from her masters and made her way to South Carolina where she introduced herself as Queen Charlotte’s sister, Princess Susanna Carolina Matilda. Wilson happily sold royal preferments to the gullible colonists until she was undone by advertisements by her Maryland master, seeking the return of his runaway servant.

France sent a raft of convicts to its colony in Louisiana, some of them women who shared Sarah Wilson’s spirit. “The wenches in crossing Paris sang as though without care, and hailed passers-by, inviting them to come along on a voyage to the Mississippi,” wrote a French diarist who watched 300 female prisoners, each with a yellow bow in her hair, riding off to the port. The French female convicts were all expected to enthusiastically embrace careers as farmwives in the rough, steamy colony, a transmutation that was easier said than done. Even the women who arrived in New Orleans as the French equivalent of tobacco brides were unhappy and demanded to go home. (Good Parisians, they complained endlessly about the quality of the local food.) One of the commissioners of the colony in the 1720s, after listing the problems the women had caused him, hopefully suggested that they might be shipped off to marry into the hostile Indian tribes.

Most of the single women who came to the southern colonies, however, voluntarily sold themselves as indentured servants. They paid the cost of their passage with a term of four or five years in service. At the end, they were supposed to receive food, clothing, and tools to give them a start in life, then emerge into a world filled with wife-hungry young men and take their pick. That really did happen in many cases. Some women were even luckier and married their employers, or they met men with enough resources to purchase their freedom for them. But many others had fatally bad luck. A quarter of the indentured servants died before they gained their freedom. Those who lived often got pregnant before their term of service was up—a study in one Maryland county showed that 20 percent of the women who arrived as servants during the second half of the seventeenth century wound up in court for bearing illegitimate children. Some of them must have been seduced or raped by the master of the house, but they were still punished as if they had chosen freely. Their service was extended to repay their master for the labor lost to childbearing, and if a mother was still under indenture by the time the baby was weaned, her child was bound out as a servant, even though still a toddler. The legislature reasoned that servants who were impregnated by their employers could not be allowed to go free because “it might probably induce such loose persons to lay all their bastards to their masters.”

The court records reveal terrible stories of women found “beaten to a jelly” or infected with fatal cases of syphilis by rapacious masters. A Maryland couple, Captain and Mistress Bradnox, were infamous for their treatment of servants. When one of them, Thomas Watson, died from an apparent beating, another servant, Sarah Taylor, testified in court that she had seen Thomas confined without food and water and forced to drink his own urine. Sarah’s outspokenness did not endear her to the Bradnoxes, who beat her with a knotted rope. When she ran away and took shelter with a sympathetic local planter, the county commissioners made her benefactor ask Captain Bradnox’s forgiveness in open court, and Sarah was required to apologize to her master and mistress on her knees. But Sarah’s story went on, through more beatings and assaults, until she finally appeared in court, asking for ...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1: The First Colonists: Voluntary and Otherwise
• 2: The Women of New England: Goodwives, Heretics, Indian Captives, and Witches
• 3: Daily Life in the Colonies: Housekeeping, Children, and Sex
• 4: Toward the Revolutionary War
• 5: 1800–1860: True Women, Separate Spheres, and Many Emergencies
• 6: Life Before the Civil War: Cleanliness and Corsetry
• 7: African American Women: Life in Bondage
• 8: Women and Abolition: White and Black, North and South
• 9: The Civil War: Nurses, Wives, Spies, and Secret Soldiers
• 10: Women Go West: Pioneers, Homesteaders, and the Fair but Frail
• 11: The Gilded Age: Stunts, Shorthand, and Study Clubs
• 12: Immigrants: Discovering the “Woman’s Country”
• 13: Turn of the Century: The Arrival of the New Woman
• 14: Reforming the World: Suffrage, Temperance, and Other Causes
• 15: The Twenties: All the Liberty You Can Use in the Backseat of a Packard
• 16: The Depression: Ma Perkins and Eleanor Roosevelt
• 17: World War II: “She’s Making History, Working for Victory”
• 18: The Fifties: Life at the Far End of the Pendulum
• 19: The Sixties: The Pendulum Swings Back with a Vengeance
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Searchable Terms
• About the Author
• Praisefor Gail Collins and America’s Women
• Also by Gail Collins
• Copyright
• About the Publisher