Women in Early America

by Thomas A Foster, Carol Berkin, Jennifer L Morgan

Overview

The fascinating stories of the myriad women who shaped the early modern North American world from the colonial era through the first years of the Republic.

Women in Early America goes beyond the familiar stories of Pocahontas or Abigail Adams, recovering the lives and experiences of lesser-known women―both ordinary and elite, enslaved and free, Indigenous and immigrant―who lived and worked in not only British mainland America, but also New Spain, New France, New Netherlands, and the West Indies.

In these essays we learn about the conditions that women faced during the Salem witchcraft panic and the Spanish Inquisition in New Mexico; as indentured servants in early Virginia and Maryland; caught up between warring British and Native Americans; as traders in New Netherlands and Detroit; as slave owners in Jamaica; as Loyalist women during the American Revolution; enslaved in the President’s house; and as students and educators inspired by the air of equality in the young nation.

The contributors showcase new research and analysis informed by feminist theory, gender theory, new cultural history, social history, and literary criticism. Women in Early America heeds the call of feminist scholars to not merely reproduce male-centered narratives, “add women, and stir,” but to rethink master narratives themselves so that we may better understand how women and men created and developed our historical past.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781479812196
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	11/21/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	306
Sales rank:	457,458
File size:	865 KB

About the Author

Thomas A. Foster is Professor of History at Howard University, in Washington, DC, and author of Sex and the Eighteenth-Century Man: Massachusetts and the History of Sexuality in America, and Sex and the Founding Fathers: The American Quest for a Relatable Past. He is also editor of Long Before Stonewall: Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality (NYU Press, 2007), New Men: Manliness in Early America (NYU Press, 2011), and Documenting Intimate Matters: Primary Sources for a History of Sexuality in America. Foster tweets at @ThomasAFoster.pasting
Carol Berkin is Presidential Professor of American Colonial and Revolutionary History and Women's History at Baruch College.
Jennifer L. Morgan is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University.

Table of Contents

Contents 

1. Doña Teresa de Aguilera y Roche before the Inquisition: The Travails of a Seventeenth-Century Aristocratic Woman in New Mexico 7 

Ramón A. Gutiérrez 

2. “Women Are as Knowing Therein as the Men”: Dutch Women in Early America 43 

Kim Todt 

3. Women as Witches, Witches as Women: Witchcraft and Patriarchy in Colonial North America 66 

Matthew Dennis and Elizabeth Reis 

4. Servant Women and Sex in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake 95 

Betty Wood 

5. Rebecca Kellogg Ashley: Negotiating Identity on the Early American Borderlands, 1704–1757 118 

Joy A. J. Howard 

6. Womanly Masters: Gendering Slave Ownership in Colonial Jamaica 139 

Christine Walker 

7. Women at the Crossroads: Trade, Mobility, and Power in Early French America and Detroit 159 

Karen L. Marrero 

8. The Agrarian Village World of Indian Women in the Ohio River Valley 186 

Susan Sleeper-Smith 

9. Loyalist Women in British New York City, 1776–1783 210 

Ruma Chopra 

10. “I Knew That If I Went Back to Virginia, I Should Never Get My Liberty”

Editorial Reviews

"These essays reveal the exciting intellectual payoff of a transcultural approach to womens lives in the past. Not only will readers confront a richly varied cast of historical actors, but they will come away convinced that womens relationships to each other, to men, to the law, the economy, and culture were central to the experimentation and adaptation of colonialism and nation-building."

Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor

"These essays reveal the exciting intellectual payoff of a transcultural approach to womens lives in the past. Not only will readers confront a richly varied cast of historical actors, but they will come away convinced that womens relationships to each other, to men, to the law, the economy, and culture were central to the experimentation and adaptation of colonialism and nation-building."

Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor

"Historians must still prove stubborn archives, using gender theory, to understand how Native American, African America, and European women participated fully in the development of North American societies. These essays fulfill this mandate admirably."

Pennsylvania Magazine of History & Biography

"Sweeping in scope and impressive in originality, the essays collected in Women in Early America offer a timely assessment of the history of women in early America. The volume is strikingly diverse and remarkably inclusive, with essays that encompass the experiences of African, Native, and European women and their descendants and range geographically well beyond the eastern seaboard of North America to include the Caribbean, New Spain, New France, and indigenous settlements in the era before European contact. Highly readable and carefully researched, Women in Early America sparkles with insights that will fascinate and enlighten students and historians of gender, women, and early America."

Terri L. Snyder

"I really think this book will become a landmark volume. Without losing sight of any of the complexities integral to our postmodern sensibilities, the authors have managed to return to a crucial but too often neglected subjectthe lived experiences of real women in Early America. Perhaps we can have it both ways after all."

Camilla Townsend

"Women in Early America, an ambitious series of eleven essays edited by Thomas A. Foster, offers a more compelling version of early America and its heroines. The collection attends to two lacunae at once by focusing on women, a group whose presence in the records is often hard to come by, to unearth overlooked and understudied figures only touched on in earlier research (if at all)."

Times Literary Supplement - Alana Shilling-Janoff

"One of the most fascinating aspects of the books in the authors use of sources, from court records to ledger books to church documents."

Feminist Collections

"A first-rate collectionvivid, varied, and provocativethat expands our view of early America. The expert essays interrogate sources, challenge assumptions, reconstruct mindsets, and vault over boundaries of nation, region, status, and culture."

Nancy Woloch

"A number of essays are particularly valuable in that they examine understudied areas of women's experiences...Other essays provide new insight into better-studied subjects."

Choice

"These essays reveal the exciting intellectual payoff of a transcultural approach to women’s lives in the past. Not only will readers confront a richly varied cast of historical actors, but they will come away convinced that women’s relationships to each other, to men, to the law, the economy, and culture were central to the experimentation and adaptation of colonialism and nation-building."-Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor,author of The Ties That Buy: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary America

"A first-rate collection—vivid, varied, and provocative—that expands our view of early America. The expert essays interrogate sources, challenge assumptions, reconstruct mindsets, and vault over boundaries of nation, region, status, and culture."-Nancy Woloch,Barnard College

“ Women in Early America , an ambitious series of eleven essays edited by Thomas A. Foster, offers a more compelling version of early America and its heroines. The collection attends to two lacunae at once by focusing on women, a group whose presence in the records is often hard to come by, to unearth overlooked and understudied figures only touched on in earlier research (if at all).”-Alana Shilling-Janoff, Times Literary Supplement

From the Publisher