Women in Early America
Women in Early America

Author: Thomas A Foster

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2015-03-20

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 1479812196

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Tells 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, edited by Thomas A. Foster, 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. Foster showcases the latest research of junior and senior historians, drawing from recent scholarship informed by women’s and gender history—feminist theory, gender theory, new cultural history, social history, and literary criticism. Collectively, these essays address the need for scholarship on women’s lives and experiences. 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.

Founding Mothers & Fathers
Founding Mothers & Fathers

Author: Mary Beth Norton

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2011-08-03

Total Pages: 511

ISBN-13: 0307760766

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Much like A Midwife's Tale and The Unredeemed Captive, this novel is about power relationships in early American society, religion, and politics--with insights into the initial development and operation of government, the maintenance of social order, and the experiences of individual men and women.

First Generations
First Generations

Author: Carol Berkin

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 1997-07-01

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 1466806117

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Indian, European, and African women of seventeenth and eighteenth-century America were defenders of their native land, pioneers on the frontier, willing immigrants, and courageous slaves. They were also - as traditional scholarship tends to omit - as important as men in shaping American culture and history. This remarkable work is a gripping portrait that gives early-American women their proper place in history.

Family Life in 19th-Century America
Family Life in 19th-Century America

Author: James M. Volo

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2007-08-30

Total Pages: 441

ISBN-13: 0313081123

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Nineteenth century families had to deal with enormous changes in almost all of life's categories. The first generation of nineteenth century Americans was generally anxious to remove the Anglo from their Anglo-Americanism. The generation that grew up in Jacksonian America matured during a period of nationalism, egalitarianism, and widespread reformism. Finally, the generation of the pre-war decades was innately diverse in terms of their ethnic backgrounds, employment, social class, education, language, customs, and religion. Americans were acutely aware of the need to create a stable and cohesive society firmly founded on the family and traditional family values. Yet the people of America were among the most mobile and diverse on earth. Geographically, socially, and economically, Americans (and those immigrants who wished to be Americans) were dedicated to change, movement, and progress. This dichotomy between tradition and change may have been the most durable and common of American traits, and it was a difficult quality to circumvent when trying to form a unified national persona. Volumes in the Family Life in America series focus on the day-to-day lives and roles of families throughout history. The roles of all family members are defined and information on daily family life, the role of the family in society, and the ever-changing definition of family are discussed. Discussion of the nuclear family, single parent homes, foster and adoptive families, stepfamilies, and gay and lesbian families are included where appropriate. Topics such as meal planning, homes, entertainment and celebrations, are discussed along with larger social issues that originate in the home like domestic violence, child abuse and neglect, and divorce. Ideal for students and general readers alike, books in this series bring the history of everyday people to life.

Inheritance and Family Life in Colonial New York City
Inheritance and Family Life in Colonial New York City

Author: David E. Narrett

Publisher:

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13:

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This book breaks new ground by offering the first detailed and systematic analysis of inheritance practices in New York City from the beginning of Dutch settlement in the 1620s to the onset of the American Revolution. By analyzing a broad range of original sources--including more than 2,300 wills--David E. Narrett shows how the transmission of property at death reflected the distribution of power and authority within the family. The author makes an especially important contribution to early New York history by explaining the Dutch origins of social and family customs, and by tracing the persistence of Dutch ways following the English conquest of New Netherland in 1664. He demonstrates that seventeenth-century Dutch law was particularly favorable to women since it sanctioned community property within marriage, the drafting of mutual wills by spouses, and the equal (or nearly equal) division of property among all children. While the book maintains its comparative focus on the Dutch and English traditions, it also includes material on other ethnic groups (for example, French Huguenots and Jews) living in a pluralistic society. Narrett utilizes both Dutch and English language sources to examine such pertinent topics as the relationship between law and social custom, primogeniture, kinship and communal ties, charitable bequests, the manumission of slaves, and the literacy level of testators.Written in a clear and precise manner, the book includes many tables that will give readers immediate access to supporting data, and a conclusion establishes the relationship of Narrett's findings to relevant scholarship. A valuable addition to the literature on inheritance, this is a book whose conclusions and data will be mined by colonialists, legal historians, and historians of women and the family.

Women in Early America
Women in Early America

Author: Dorothy Auchter Mays

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2004-11-23

Total Pages: 518

ISBN-13: 1851094342

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This volume fills a gap in traditional women's history books by offering fascinating details of the lives of early American women and showing how these women adapted to the challenges of daily life in the colonies. Women in Early America: Struggle, Survival, and Freedom in a New World provides insight into an era in American history when women had immense responsibilities and unusual freedoms. These women worked in a range of occupations such as tavernkeeping, printing, spiritual leadership, trading, and shopkeeping. Pipe smoking, beer drinking, and premarital sex were widespread. One of every eight people traveling with the British Army during the American Revolution was a woman. The coverage begins with the 1607 settlement at Jamestown and ends with the War of 1812. In addition to the role of Anglo-American women, the experiences of African, French, Dutch, and Native American women are discussed. The issues discussed include how women coped with rural isolation, why they were prone to superstitions, who was likely to give birth out of wedlock, and how they raised large families while coping with immense household responsibilities.

The Maid Narratives
The Maid Narratives

Author: Katherine Van Wormer

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2012-09-17

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 0807149705

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The Maid Narratives shares the memories of black domestic workers and the white families they served, uncovering the often intimate relationships between maid and mistress. Based on interviews with over fifty people -- both white and black -- these stories deliver a personal and powerful message about resilience and resistance in the face of oppression in the Jim Crow South. The housekeepers, caretakers, sharecroppers, and cooks who share their experiences in The Maid Narratives ultimately moved away during the Great Migration. Their perspectives as servants who left for better opportunities outside of the South offer an original telling of physical and psychological survival in a racially oppressive caste system: Vinella Byrd, for instance, from Pine Bluff, Arkansas, recalls how a farmer she worked for would not allow her to clean her hands in the family's wash pan. These narratives are complemented by the voices of white women, such as Flora Templeton Stuart, from New Orleans, who remembers her maid fondly but realizes that she knew little about her life. Like Stuart, many of the white narrators remain troubled by the racial norms of the time. Viewed as a whole, the book presents varied, rich, and detailed accounts, often tragic, and sometimes humorous. The Maid Narratives reveals, across racial lines, shared hardships, strong emotional ties, and inspiring strength.

The Women of Colonial Latin America
The Women of Colonial Latin America

Author: Susan Migden Socolow

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-02-16

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 0521196655

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A highly readable survey of women's experiences in Latin America from the late fifteenth to the early nineteenth centuries.

Georgia's Frontier Women
Georgia's Frontier Women

Author: Ben Marsh

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2012-06-01

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 0820343978

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Ranging from Georgia's founding in the 1730s until the American Revolution in the 1770s, Georgia's Frontier Women explores women's changing roles amid the developing demographic, economic, and social circumstances of the colony's settling. Georgia was launched as a unique experiment on the borderlands of the British Atlantic world. Its female population was far more diverse than any in nearby colonies at comparable times in their formation. Ben Marsh tells a complex story of narrowing opportunities for Georgia's women as the colony evolved from uncertainty toward stability in the face of sporadic warfare, changes in government, land speculation, and the arrival of slaves and immigrants in growing numbers. Marsh looks at the experiences of white, black, and Native American women-old and young, married and single, working in and out of the home. Mary Musgrove, who played a crucial role in mediating colonist-Creek relations, and Marie Camuse, a leading figure in Georgia's early silk industry, are among the figures whose life stories Marsh draws on to illustrate how some frontier women broke down economic barriers and wielded authority in exceptional ways. Marsh also looks at how basic assumptions about courtship, marriage, and family varied over time. To early settlers, for example, the search for stability could take them across race, class, or community lines in search of a suitable partner. This would change as emerging elites enforced the regulation of traditional social norms and as white relationships with blacks and Native Americans became more exploitive and adversarial. Many of the qualities that earlier had distinguished Georgia from other southern colonies faded away.

Domestic Revolutions
Domestic Revolutions

Author: Steven Mintz

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 1989-04-03

Total Pages: 603

ISBN-13: 1439105103

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An examination of how the concept of “family” has been transformed over the last three centuries in the U.S., from its function as primary social unit to today’s still-evolving model. Based on a wide reading of letters, diaries and other contemporary documents, Mintz, an historian, and Kellogg, an anthropologist, examine the changing definition of “family” in the United States over the course of the last three centuries, beginning with the modified European model of the earliest settlers. From there they survey the changes in the families of whites (working class, immigrants, and middle class) and blacks (slave and free) since the Colonial years, and identify four deep changes in family structure and ideology: the democratic family, the companionate family, the family of the 1950s, and lastly, the family of the '80s, vulnerable to societal changes but still holding together.