Women in Early America encapsulates the diversity and vibrancy of scholarship on women in North America between the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. As Carol Berkin and Thomas A. Foster explain in the foreword and introduction respectively, the collection aims to reflect the sophistication of recent work in gender history while still foregrounding “women's lives and experiences” (3). The companion to Foster's similarly wide-ranging New Men: Manliness in Early America (2011), Women in Early America contains eleven essays that readers will find particularly useful in undergraduate teaching.
In keeping with early Americanists’ turns toward Atlantic and continental perspectives, the volume extends well beyond the thirteen colonies of mainland British North America. Matthew Dennis and Elizabeth Reis's essay on witchcraft, for example, incorporates West Africa and Spanish New Mexico as well as New England. Adopting a consensus position, Dennis and Reis suggest that witchcraft accusations reflected both gendered power and colonial tensions between Europeans and others. Christine Walker's essay on female slave owners persuasively argues that in eighteenth-century Jamaica, the most profitable colony in the British Empire, slave ownership was far from an exclusively male enterprise. Both white women and free women of color routinely acquired, sold, and supervised slaves.
Essays by Ramón A. Gutiérrez and Kim Todt likewise move beyond the British Empire. They demonstrate that different legal regimes presented distinctive constraints and opportunities for women. In Spanish New Mexico, Gutiérrez finds, the Inquisition became a tool in men's rivalries, leading the wife of a seventeenth-century governor to be imprisoned and ensnared in a protracted legal battle. In contrast, Todt contends that Dutch law and educational practices afforded women in the New Netherlands greater economic freedom than their British American counterparts.
Three essays concern borderlands and North America's interior. Essays by Joy A. J. Howard and Karen L. Marerro highlight women's ability to acquire social and economic authority as they crossed porous boundaries between European and Native American societies. Howard examines the little-known case of Rebecca Kellogg Ashley, a white woman who became a trusted Iroquois interpreter, thus cultivating an identity that was associated with her repeated movements across cultures rather than her parentage. Marerro likewise argues that French and Native American women in the Detroit region moved between European and Native societies as they participated in trade and forged alliances through marriage. Susan Sleeper-Smith's chapter, meanwhile, reminds us that interactions between white and Native American societies could also be to the detriment of women. Offering a powerful example of gender history's ability to rewrite historical narratives, Susan Sleeper-Smith contends that in the Ohio river valley, disruptions to Native American women's agricultural labor lay at the heart of early United States Indian policy and catalyzed native resistance to American troops.
Other essays remain within traditional geographies of early America but push forward recent scholarship. Betty Wood not only provides an exceptionally clear survey of laws governing sexual conduct in the colonial Chesapeake, but also uses court records to access servant women's sexual practices. Ruma Chopra examines ordinary loyalist women in New York during the Revolution. Emphasizing such women's experiences of sexual violence and economic hardship, she insists that they received little protection from the British Empire. Complicating portrayals of the runaway slave as male, Erica Armstrong Dunbar examines why Ona Judge Staines, Martha Washington's favored female slave, ran away. The volume's final essay, by Mary C. Kelley, argues that the female academies founded during the post-revolutionary period expanded their students’ reading, writing, and oratorical practices, leading to women's large-scale entry into “public life” (246).
As Jennifer Morgan writes in her afterword, Women in America powerfully insists that, in every society, women were “deeply embedded in the political economies in which they lived” and that studying them is therefore critical for recovering “the complexities of those landscapes” (273). The collection's scope and its straightforward discussions of historiography make it especially valuable for the classroom. Instructors seeking to enhance their courses’ attention to women and gender will almost certainly find individual articles that complement – or complicate – their existing coverage. When assigned in its entirety, the collection invites discussion of different modes of analysis and of women's lives across regions and empires.
Foster's collection also highlights interpretive challenges facing women's and gender historians. Keeping women's lives at the forefront of its analysis, the volume devotes relatively little attention to comparisons between women's and men's circumstances, or to the cultural discourses through which early Americans interpreted bodies and shaped understandings of gender difference. In addition, while individual essays touch on patriarchal power, the collection as a whole equally emphasizes women's opportunities and skills, whether social, economic, or legal. How should we analyze the experiences of female subjects within a broadly defined early America while still attending to gendered power? Containing an impressive range of topics and methodologies, Women in Early America furthers this important conversation for historians and their students alike.
