England’s Queen Elizabeth I needed to secure colonies in the Americas to compete with her Catholic, Spanish rivals. As Spain claimed territory in South and Central America in the 16th century, Elizabeth focused her attention on North America. The English made several failed attempts to create permanent settlements in the 1570s and 1580s. Even though these early colonies did not result in permanent settlements, they nevertheless provided the English with valuable maps and information about climate. Finally, in July 1587, 150 men, women, and children set off for the English colony called Virginia, named for the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth.

But despite the name, these weren’t virgin, untouched lands. They were inhabited by hundreds of thousands of Indigenous peoples living in diverse communities and established nations up and down the coasts. The encounters between the sometimes matrilineal, more egalitarian Indigenous peoples and the patriarchal English arrivals were complicated and interesting due to these distinct gendered dynamics.

The English are not the only models of colonization we can explore in North America. The Dutch settled at the same time on land that lay between the English settlements at Jamestown and Plymouth. 

The cultural encounters continued as migrants and merchants from Latin America traveled north. Then, in 1619, the first enslaved Africans were brought to the English colonies. The effects of these merging peoples and cultures defined and shaped early English colonialism in the Americas. Affecting these encounters at every turn were important female figures.

Roanoke

The first English child born in the Americas was a girl named Virginia Dare, the granddaughter of the man who led the 1587 Roanoke expedition, one of England's first attempts to colonize North America. Her mother, Eleanor, had made the entire sea journey while she was pregnant and encountered the New World under conditions impossible to imagine. The settlers had arrived too late for a sufficient growing season to last the winter, so the leaders returned to England for more supplies. But war broke out between Protestant England and Catholic Spain, delaying the return voyage. After the English fleet defeated the Spanish Armada in a naval battle of epic proportions, the expedition leaders were able to return with supplies. But when they arrived, they found the settlement abandoned with no trace of its inhabitants. What happened to this “lost colony” and little Virginia? Were they killed? Did they starve? Were they absorbed into the local Indigenous tribes? Theories abound, but no one knows for certain.

A 1876 engraving called The Lost Colony depicts John White returning to Roanoke Island in 1590 to find the colony was no longer there. The letters CROATOAN were carved into the trunk of the tree, a signal, White thought, that the colony had relocated. But he never found them. (public domain)

For some, this lost colony may have signaled a bad omen about further colonization. But for the English, it did not. In 1607, the English settlement in Jamestown, Virginia was established. No women were among this initial group of Jamestown settlers because they were not seen as necessary in what was intended as a military and commercial colony. The failure at Roanoke led the English to seek success and stability before bringing women to settle. 

Because no English women joined the journey, this early period of cultural encounters is marked for its tolerance of interracial marriages. English men had long been exposed to evocative ideas about Indigenous women and their sexuality. For the last century, European explorers had returned with tales and sketches of the scantily clad and sensual Indigenous women. Some saw these marriages as a means of establishing peace and permanence in the Americas, while others saw them as morally wrong. We know the marriages were common enough because, by 1691, Virginia passed a law banning them. This law also suggests that, by the time it passed, there were enough English women in the colony to make it reasonable and feasible.​

Amonute 

How did Indigenous women view their encounters with the English? What did they think and feel at the sight of these strange men with different customs, dress, and beliefs? It's hard to know. So many of their stories can only be interpreted through the lens of English male settlers and the documents they left behind. 

The most famous interracial marriage was that of the native Amonute and the settler John Rolfe. Amonute is, of course, better known by her nickname Pocahontas, or “ill-behaved child.” She was the daughter of Chief Powhatan, the powerful leader of the Powhatan Confederacy, a collection of 30 Algonquian-speaking tribes near Jamestown. So much of her life is known, and yet, so much of what is popularly known is incorrect. 

When John Smith met Powhatan and Amonute (also known as Pocahontas), he and Powhatan negotiated a degree of peace between the encroaching settlers and the Confederacy. A trading relationship was established, and Powhatan would often send Amonute (Pocahontas) with these shipments. She became well known to the English and therefore was a useful negotiator in times of tension. Eventually, relations between the two cultures deteriorated, and Powhatan became sick of the ineptitude of the English planters and their constant need to trade for food. He moved his tribe further inland, and Amonute was not allowed to visit Jamestown anymore.

A Portrait of Pocahontas from 1618 by an English artist. It was originally included in a book of British monarchs and notables depicting her as a wealthy, Christian Englishwoman (public domain).

Amonute (Pocahontas) was captured in the midst of these increasing tensions. She was tricked by a captain’s wife into boarding an English ship.  In captivity, Amonute (Pocahontas) learned English and converted to Christianity, taking the Christian name Rebecca. When Powhatan learned of his daughter's capture, he complied with the ransom demands. 

After her capture, she met John Rolfe, a widower who had introduced the cash crop tobacco to the colony. The couple married and soon traveled to England, where they toured the country. John Smith saw her again. He had clearly not forgotten Amonute (Pocahontas) and had even written a letter to Queen Anne describing all she had done to help the English in Jamestown's early years. As they were about to embark on the voyage back to Virginia, Amonute (Pocahontas) fell ill and died. 

Amonute (Pocahontas) was a complicated Indigenous figure– kidnapped by English settlers but adopted English customs, daughter of Powhatan yet wife to Rolfe. Historians are left to puzzle over questions of choice, duress, assimilation, even conversation without hearing from Amonute (Pocahontas) herself. Yet she is an important figure as she helped to establish a semblance of peace for a time. Within the year, her father Powhatan died and the "Peace of Pocahontas" disintegrated. Perhaps through these marriages, but certainly through more political and economic relations, the colony survived. One English councilman noted, "When a plantation grows to strength, then it is time to plant with women as well as with men." ​

English Women in Jamestown 

Native women were not the only women to experience the cultural encounters. The first English women to arrive in Jamestown came in 1608 and were known as “tobacco brides,” women whose transportation across the ocean was paid for by men who made their living growing the cash crop tobacco. The Virginia Company offered substantial incentives to the women, including a dowry of clothing, linens, and other furnishings, free transportation to the colony, and even a plot of land. They were also promised their pick of wealthy husbands and were provided with food and shelter while they made their decision. These women journeyed across the ocean, not knowing a thing about the men that they were about to meet, but the opportunity would have certainly been appealing to poor European women. 

Anne Burras came to Virginia as the personal maid of Mistress Forrest in 1608. Mistress Forrest’s fate remains uncertain, but Anne Burras is well known. She married John Laydon three months after she arrived and had the first Jamestown wedding. Anne and John had four daughters who would help to stabilize the colony's growth. 

Temperance Flowerdew's encounters in the New World were dark. She arrived in the Fall of 1609, only to experience the "Starving Time," when 80 percent of Jamestown’s English population died. People ate whatever they could to survive; rats, snakes– and we know of at least one man who ate his wife and was later burned for his crime. Those who survived did so with the aid of local tribes like the Powhatan Confederacy. Temperance Flowerdew survived and married several times. Life expectancy was so low in the colonies that many women remarried and became very wealthy through their marriages.

Some English arrivals in the New World were forced. In 1615, the governor's request for more colonists was answered with a shipment of a hundred male felons to the colony. Incentives were increased, and private individuals began kidnapping men and women for the colonies. There were dozens of advertisements in English newspapers from parents looking for their lost daughters who were later discovered in the Americas. But the consequences were low.  In 1680, Ann Servant was fined only 13 shillings for kidnapping and selling Alice Flax to a ship headed to Virginia. On the contrary, a horse thief would have been hanged. This shows how valuable – or, you could say, invaluable – women were to the English colony’s success. 

Not every encounter in the New World was bad. Because women were so few, they were able to be more selective in their choice of male partner. Consequently, men frequently complained about the perceived power imbalance. The English followed laws of coverture. This meant that a married woman was “covered” by her husband. Legally and financially, she had few rights. But these laws were relaxed to attract women to the colony. Women who inherited land at the deaths of their husbands could continue planting and harvesting their crops. Women like Sarah Harrison refused to say “obey” in their marriage vows. Other women would court and be engaged to multiple men at a time, testing out their prospects. Women used their scarcity to their advantage.

Despite the social power and freedoms women experienced in the New World, women were denied the right to vote, as well as other property rights. Margaret Brent of Maryland became the first woman to demand the right to vote in the colonies. She was a landowner herself, and Lord Baltimore had appointed her his estate representative. She was denied the right to vote despite her position on account of her gender. Gender, it seems, was strictly binary.

But that binary was challenged in Virginia when the reality that the gender binary was not so black and white became public. Thomasine Hall was raised as a woman in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England. When Thomasine was about 24 years old, her brother joined the English Army, and she decided to accompany him. To join the Army, Thomasine cut her hair, wore men's clothing, and adopted the name Thomas. Upon arriving in the Virginia colony, Thomas started working for John Tyos on a small tobacco plantation as an indentured servant. Initially, Thomas continued dressing and performing tasks as a man, but at some point switched to doing more feminine labor. Although John Tyos accepted this change and affirmed Thomasine's female identity to the community, other members of the community were less comfortable. 

Thomas(ine)'s body was inspected by three married women who concluded that they were indeed male. However, John Tyos, Thomas(ine)'s master, disagreed. The situation became more complex when another community member, John Atkins, considered buying Thomas(ine)'s indenture contract from John Tyos. John Atkins felt uncertain about making the purchase without knowing Thomas(ine)'s gender. He needed to determine what kind of work Thomas(ine) could perform and how much to pay for the contract because gender defined these jobs and male indentures were worth more. Thomas(ine) confessed to having a small vaginal opening but no functional male genitalia. Those involved kept changing their view on what clothes Thomas(ine) should wear. 

Eventually, the entire community became aware of Thomas(ine)’s story, and they were harassed on the street and assaulted by two men who lifted their skirts to inspect their body. The men concluded Thomas(ine) was definitively male, and Thomas(ine) was forced to assume male clothing. In 1629, Thomas(ine) Hall was tried for pretending to be a woman in front of the Quarter Court of Virginia. This public display challenged the conventional gender roles in the colony. After hearing Thomas(ine)'s account, the governor delivered an extraordinary verdict: Thomas(ine) was declared to be both a man and a woman. As a result, Thomas(ine) was mandated to wear clothing representing both genders: men's breeches and shirt, along with a woman's cap and apron. The new clothing prevented Thomas(ine) from blending in with colonial society ever again. Although this might have been perceived as the community's desired punishment, the court failed to address the questions regarding Thomas(ine)'s future work capabilities. Thomas(ine) disappeared, but this case shows how gender was understood and controlled in the English colonies.

An illustration from a textbook on American history published in 1886. It depicts the arrival of young women to Jamestown in 1621 (public domain).

Enslaved Women 

As the English battled nature to "settle" and tame these new lands, they required human labor. Native Americans died from European diseases at unimaginable rates. So, to keep the supply of cheap laborers coming, the colonists turned to the already thriving slave trade and peoples already immune to diseases. 

On August 20, 1619, a ship named the White Lion, carrying “20 and odd” Angolans originally kidnapped and trafficked by Portuguese traders, landed in Jamestown. The arrival of these enslaved Africans marks the beginning of African slavery in North America. The White Lion and the Treasurer, English privateer ships, had attacked a Portuguese ship loaded with enslaved West Africans bound for Mexico. The Portuguese ship began its journey with 350 West Africans; more than 100 had already died during the crossing from disease, abuse, and neglect.  The White Lion and the Treasurer took 60 of the healthiest West Africans, split them between the two ships, and headed to Virginia, separating those who had survived the voyage from others who may have spoken their language or who they may have known. 

The White Lion arrived in August 1619 and sold 20 enslaved Africans for “victuals.” The Treasure arrived a few days later and sold two or three additional enslaved Africans. Both ships then sailed on to Bermuda, where the remaining kidnapped Africans were sold. A woman whose name would be recorded as Angelo, likely a misspelling of Angela, was one of the African people sold in Virginia. Angela was purchased by William Pierce, John Rolfe’s father-in-law (Rolfe had remarried after Pocahontas died in 1617). When the census of the colony was taken in 1625, Angelo was one of nine Africans listed, and she was still a servant in Pierce’s household. Over six years, she had survived capture, enslavement, the transatlantic trauma, and disease. There is no record of her after 1625.

Although slavery was not yet contingent on race in Virginia, racism toward Africans was not new to the English. In England, Africans had become scapegoats for society's problems, and even Queen Elizabeth declared that "blackamoors" be driven from the land. While they worked alongside indentured servants, enslaved Africans had no legal standing, no papers specifying the terms of their work. Angela was one of four laborers working and living in the Pierce household. She was the only African.

Given the horrors of the Middle Passage, it is no wonder the enslaved rebelled and, despite the power differences, did so in large numbers. Quantitative historians have found that one in ten of the more than 36,000 ships that crossed the Middle Passage in a four-year period had a slave insurrection on board. What empowered these people to rebel? The only relevant correlation they could find for why these rebellions occurred was that the more women, the more likely a rebellion. 

Women were treated differently during transport. Sometimes they were spared the cramped, disease ridden spaces below deck in order to entertain the European enslavers above deck. There, though experiencing unmentionable crimes, they were sometimes left unchained and within proximity of weapons. Their enslavers may have underestimated them or may have assumed they were less likely to rebel than their male counterparts.

Illustration from an 1840 American Anti-slavery Almanac that would have been used to sway Northerners to the cause of abolition. Such images were often directed to an audience of white women (public domain).

The ship log for a much later ship, the Thomas, in 1797 stated, “two or three of the female slaves have they discovered that the armorer had incautiously left the arms chest open… conveyed all the arms, which they could find, threw the ball kids to the male slaves, about 200 of them immediately ran up the force cuddles and put to death all the crew who had come in their way.”

Others weren’t so naive. In 1776, one enslaver aboard the Thames noted, “For your safety as well as mine…You’ll have the needful guard over your Slaves, and put not too much confidence in the Women nor Children lest they happen to be instrumental in your being surprised which may be fatal.”

Before Virginia passed its first slave code law in 1661, Africans were not officially slaves. But no matter what they were legally called, they worked under brutal conditions. Some worked under contracts similar to white indentured servants, laboring until they had paid the cost of their passage, room and board, and freedom dues. Africans laboring under these indenture-like contracts had to survive long enough to pay back the considerable sum. Others were indentured for life. 

Mary Johnson, a Black woman, arrived in 1622 as the indentured maid of a planter in Virginia.  She married Antonio (Anthony) Johnson, a Black man indentured on the same plantation, and the two finished their indenture sometime after 1635. By 1650, Mary and Anthony Johnson had four children and owned a large tobacco farm where they employed five indentured servants, four White and one Black. Free Black people were common in these early years. In the South, Black women used their talents to become prominent businesswomen– white merchants complained endlessly about them. Trading women were bold and unafraid to speak up. One man said that the “insolent and abusive manner” of these women made him afraid. 

It took several decades for slavey as a legal status defined by race to develop in the colonies. The Johnson’s story is evidence that there was a period when Black servants, like their White counterparts, could buy their freedom. But overtime, this was less and less possible. Virginia passed the first fugitive slave law in 1661. This law added additional penalties to the crime of running away to any White servant who ran away with an African servant. In essence, the law required the White servant to compensate employers for the lost labor of enslaved workers. Labor, the law finds, that was rightfully owned by the employer. 

This law would be followed quickly by another in 1662 that distinguished for the first time between children born to White women indentured servants and children born to Black enslaved women. Under this law, women held in slavery gave birth to slaves, while women working as indentured servants did not. We will discuss this law in more detail in chapter 3. Important here is to note that what began as a system in which there was some, if limited opportunity for African women to gain their freedom, women like Mary Johnson, became over time a more rigid, race based system of permanent enslavement. The 1662 law was a significant part of this effort to distinguish slavery from servitude by linking slavery to race, and it used gender to do it. 

Racist ideas about African people, especially women, contributed to the growing idea, in law but also in White society more broadly, that slavery was justified and Black people should be treated differently. Black women were eroticized and deemed exotic by European men. They were believed to be the enduring, lustful Jezebel whose sexuality needed to be controlled. These notions about African women were increasingly opposite to the views held for white women. Unlike White women, enslaved women did every imaginable job alongside men. They labored in fields, served in domestic roles, and became master seamstresses and weavers-- some earning money in the markets. 

A depiction of enslaved women at work, published in 1798 (public domain). The artist, an English architect, lived and traveled in Virginia for a few years and kept a journal of his travels.

One job specific to enslaved women was wet nursing, where enslaved women were forced to provide sustenance to the offspring of their enslavers. Wealthy Englishwomen were accustomed to the practice of hiring a poor woman to breastfeed her babies. In the colonies, both poor White mothers and enslaved Black mothers were used for this purpose. But for enslaved women, this was forced upon them. Often separated from their own children who were weaned from breast milk far too young, Black mothers were exploited for their milk.

Not all Black people in the Americas were enslaved. In fact, many of the original “20 and odd” Africans brought to North America were treated as indentured servants. But gradually, as more people came and more laws were passed to define slavery and reinforce the power of slaveowners by dividing groups that had similar interests (like poor white people, indentured servants, etc.), American slavery became synonymous with race as well as a life sentence. Slavery spread throughout the colonies, so that no colony could claim to be innocent of it. Even in the North. ​

Massachusetts 

When the Massachusetts Bay Colony was settled, people came mainly in families. Seventeen women were aboard the Mayflower that landed at an abandoned Wampanoag village on Cape Cod in 1620. We do not know their thoughts upon landing. But we do know that Dorothy Bradford, the governor’s wife, fell overboard in the bay. Bradford barely recorded his wife’s death, writing “Death. Dec. 7.  Dorothy, Wife to Mr. William Bradford.” Was she so distraught from the journey? Was she horrified at the cold New England scene? Was she longing for her life back home and the son she left behind? Did she die by suicide? Historians may never know. We do know that Mary Chilton, a 13-year old, was the first English woman to disembark. 

In what would become the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the first settlers were a mix of religious separatists and Puritans. The colony functioned largely like a Puritan theocracy. Women, daughters of the biblical Eve who “corrupted Adam” into eating the apple, did not have the right to question their male heads of house. 

Nevertheless, women had to eschew traditional gender roles and ideals in order for the colony to survive. They worked the land, did construction, and ran businesses– things their sisters in England would have been appalled by. Ten percent of people involved in trade in Boston were women– mostly widows. Elizabeth Poole purchased land from the Wampanoag and was a stockholder in the ironworks. Many businesses that were “run by men” were actually run by their wives while they traveled. 

Some women did not take kindly to the Puritan leadership’s treatment of women and began standing against the government. Perhaps most notable was Anne Hutchinson. Like many women of her time, Hutchinson gave birth to over a dozen children. She was not formally educated, but learned to read and write. Hutchinson was 43 years old when she arrived in Boston from England in 1634. As a midwife, Hutchinson developed strong ties to local women and began holding meetings in her home. She became a spiritual leader and stood against the all-male authority, a challenge to acceptable gender roles. She gained a following of both men and women by questioning Puritan teachings about salvation.

When church and community leaders became aware of her popularity and the content of her preaching, she was put on trial for heresy. Oddly, the trial was not solely about her religious ideas. Puritan leaders also took issue with the fact that those ideas were coming from a woman.

Anne Hutchinson on Trial, an illustration published in 1876 (public domain)

In the trial, Governor Winthrop said, “Mrs. Hutchinson, you are called here as one of those that have troubled the peace of the commonwealth…you are known to be a woman that hath had a great share in the promoting and divulging of those opinions that are the cause of this trouble…and you have maintained a meeting and an assembly in your house that hath been condemned by the general assembly as a thing not tolerable…in the sight of God nor fitting for your sex.”

At a time when men ruled, and women were expected to remain silent, Hutchinson asserted her right to preach and overstepped her presumed place “as a woman.” Hutchinson’s husband supported her, but her former mentor, Reverend John Cotton, turned on her, describing her meetings as a “promiscuous and filthy coming together of men and women…” Hutchinson was excommunicated, and her family was banished from the colony– forced to move away. Eventually, she and her children were killed in a raid by Native Americans, which some people think was provoked by the Puritans.

Hutchinson was a popular figure, and many notable women were moved to her cause, including Mary Dyer. Dyer, along with her husband, supported Hutchinson, attending her lectures and home Bible study sessions. Like Hutchinson, Dyer was expelled from the colony for her defiance. Prior to expulsion, Dyer had given birth to a stillborn baby in Massachusetts. After she left, Governor Winthrop had the baby’s body exhumed and examined. He wrote a description of the baby’s deformed body and had it sent around the English world as evidence of God’s punishment for Hutchinson and Dyer’s heresy. At the time, many Puritans believed in the idea that “monstrous births,” or the births of children with varying levels of deformity or defect such as to label them “monstrous,” were manifestations of the mother’s “sickness.” In this case, Dyer’s heretical behavior.

In this 1905 painting, the artist imagines the scene -- Mary Dyer being led to the gallows in Boston in 1660. Published in McClure’s Magazine, the caption read “At her appearing the multitude was hushed, awed by that air she wore.” (public domain)

Dyer left New England and converted to Quakerism. She became a preacher, which was allowed within the Quaker faith, and returned to New England to protest a new law that banned Quakers in 1657. She traveled through New England preaching and was eventually arrested. She would go on to be arrested, tried, and banished numerous times. Once, two Quakers were hanged next to her while she was spared because she was a woman. She was banished from Massachusetts, but Dyer was unrelenting. Despite pleas from her husband and family, she traveled again to Massachusetts, was arrested, and was hanged there for her religious beliefs and actions. Her last words were, “Nay, I came to keep bloodguiltiness from you, desiring you to repeal the unrighteous and unjust law made against the innocent servants of the Lord. Nay, man, I am not now to repent." 

New Netherlands 

The English were not the only ones interested in North America. The Dutch also established settlements in “New Netherlands,” an area encompassing parts of modern-day Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. Dutch explorers mapped out the major waterways and drew remarkably accurate maps in the early 1600s. They established an intricate three-way trade between the Pequots and the Mohawks and built forts to secure their trade. But by mid-century, few Dutch settlers came, and tensions between the Dutch and both the Lenape, indigenous people who lived across much of what the Dutch called New Netherlands, and their English neighbors were rising. 

Called “The Duke’s Plan,” this is a depiction of New Amsterdam in 1661. New Netherlands was the name for the entire Dutch colony, while New Amsterdam referred to Manhattan, the colony’s capital (public domain)

Despite protest, English migrants, unhappy in Puritan Massachusetts, increasingly settled in Dutch territories. In 1637, tensions between the various groups resulted in one of the worst massacres of Indigenous peoples. Mystic, Connecticut was (and is still) home to the Pequot tribe, whose reduced territory lay east of the Connecticut River (the Dutch called it the Fresh River). The new English settlers disrupted an otherwise peaceful and mutually beneficial trade. Tensions increased following a series of murders. Ultimately, the crisis ended with an inconceivably horrible massacre led by Englishman Captain John Mason on May 26, 1637. He burned the Pequot village, killing as many as 700 people, including women and children. The Pequot who survived chased after and attempted to hunt down the English as they returned to Massachusetts, but failed. Surviving Pequot who were captured were enslaved by the English, but they did not submit. As a result, the Massachusetts colonists shipped the Pequot to Bermuda, where they were traded for African slaves. In 1638, the first Africans were forcibly imported to Massachusetts on a cargo ship, which included two African women. 

English lust for control did not end and was not just directed against people of color. In 1664, the English invaded Long Island, seizing the heart of Dutch territories in the Americas. The two European powers were in a standoff that the Dutch knew they would lose without reinforcements. Instead of fighting or committing treason by negotiating, the Dutch navigated this complicated situation by sending in the wives of two councilmen to negotiate a peace: Lydia de Meyer and Hillegond van Ruyven. Both women had status in the fort and were thus respected as negotiators by the English. The women diffused the situation and protected their people. Van Ruyven’s account to the Dutch investigators was scathing, “Now these dirty dogs [the English] want to fight, now that they’ve got nothing to lose. And we have our property here, which we would lose if we fought.” For her, the human life in New Amsterdam, the colonial capital of New Netherlands, was more important than the pride of the Dutch government. 

This painting from 1932 called the “Fall of New Amsterdam” depicts a scene from 1664 when the women of New Amsterdam asked the Dutch not to fire on the British in the harbor (public domain). 

The English invaders then turned to secure peace with the Indigenous communities in the region by signing new contracts and treaties with their neighbors. In 1670, they purchased Staten Island from the Lenni-Lenape. The contract was signed by ten young people to reflect what they hoped would last generations. No English girls were present, but three Lenni-Lenape girls signed, reflecting the stark differences in women’s rights and powers in the two cultures.

Bacon’s Rebellion

Back in Virginia, tensions between cultures, classes, and the Indigenous people on the frontier came to a head in the 1670s. Virginian society was highly unequal, and the poor frontier person’s most bitter complaint was that the governor of Virginia traded furs with the Natives and got rich, but would not come to protect them from raids on their lands. 

It was white frontier wives who were perhaps the most enthusiastic about genocidal war against the natives because they were often home alone while their spouses traded. When Nathanial Bacon decided to overthrow the government after the Virginia Governor refused Bacon’s request to send colonial troops against the Indigenous communities, women were some of his most ardent supporters. Sarah Drummond’s enthusiasm came out when she said, “I fear the power of England no more than a broken straw.”

When Bacon attacked Jamestown, he rounded up the wives of the wealthy, powerful men and strapped them to the ramparts. If the leaders of Jamestown wanted to get to Bacon and suppress the rebellion, they would have to go through their own wives first. Nevertheless, Lady Frances Berkley, the wife of the governor, fled to London and returned with a thousand troops. 

In a dramatic painting from 1876, Lydia Cheeseman faints in front of Governor Berkeley as her husband is condemned to death for treason. Notice the contrast between Cheeseman, a beautiful young woman, and the unfeeling courtroom and angry old woman (public domain).

After Bacon’s defeat, his followers, including the women, were rounded up. Sarah Grendon escaped the death penalty by pleading that she was simply an “ignorant woman.” 

King Philip's War 

The women of New England were not much better than Virginia women in their treatment of Indigenous populations. By 1675, colonists in New England were engaged in the bloodiest war in U.S. history (as a percentage of the population) with the Wampanoag Confederacy. 

From the time of English arrival in Massachusetts, the Wampanoag had seen much of their world change, and European diseases had killed 90 percent of the tribes in New England. The Wampanoag were a matrilineal people, passing inheritance through female lines. Weetamoo was the leader of one of the tribes in the Wampanoag Confederacy and sister-in-law to the Great Sachem. In her lifetime, she married many times to form alliances that held the Confederacy together. When her husband died in English custody, she called foul. Time passed and she remarried, but eventually things between the Wampanoag and the English became too tense and her sister’s husband, Metacom, called Philip by the English, went to war. Weetamoo’s various marriages throughout her life meant that she commanded the allegiance of every major tribe in the Confederacy. Weetamoo had to decide whether to lead her people to war or try to negotiate. She had witnessed, and actively resisted through land deeds, the encroachment of the English on land supposedly belonging to her people. While her husband sided with the English, she sided with Metacom. She dissolved the political marriage and turned those allied with her against the English.

A 1901 illustration from a US History textbook that depicted Mary Rowlandson, carrying her 6 year old daughter, taken prisoner during King Philip’s War (public domain). 

During the war, a colonist named Mary Rowlandson was captured and brought to Weetamoo. She was held for 11 weeks. Years later, she published a book in 1682 about her experience that we can read as a primary account. The account became a bestseller, went through four editions, and shaped the way settlers saw Native communities and future captives would relate their own stories. Rowlandson complained that Weetamoo didn’t give her enough to eat. In reality, Weetamoo was in charge of a massive war effort in a time of scarcity. Rowlandson was ransomed home while Weetamoo was killed during the war. She was so feared by the English settler soldiers that they mounted her severed head on a pole as proof that she had been defeated.

After the war, so much changed in New England. The indigenous people who were still living there were sold into slavery or pushed further west. Some fled and joined with neighboring tribes on the outskirts of the region. Many natives, like the Abenaki Nation of northern New England, resorted to raiding English villages for supplies, sometimes killing or capturing settlers, and ransoming captives back to their families. 

Hannah Emerson Duston lived in Haverhill, Massachusetts, and was a victim of these political tensions. She was 40-years old when the Abenaki raided her town, capturing some of the women. Duston had given birth about a week before. Cotton Mather, who provided the only account of the event, wrote that the raiders smashed her baby against a tree, killing it. The Abenaki brought the women up the Merrimack River, deep into modern day New Hampshire, making camp on a small island in the river. Duston got hold of a hatchet and massacred her captors. She was then able to load the other women in the canoes and paddle home to Massachusetts. Duston’s massacre and the political tensions that surround it unfortunately represent how many of these initial cultural encounters took shape.  ​

Conclusion

What is there to make of all of this? The English and the Dutch sought colonies in the New World, but approached those goals in different ways. The Dutch sought to trade with their Indigenous neighbors, while the English encroached on their land and expelled them from it. These examples show us that, in history, individuals make choices.  

African peoples were brought to the Americas by force, and it was their labor that ensured the success of the colonies. But both they and the Indigenous peoples resisted the European colonists at every opportunity. 

Violent encounters between cultures in British North America occurred because of the choices that people made, and English women and their Dutch, Powhatan, Lenni-Lenape, Wampanoag, and African counterparts were central to the stories that defined this period. 

By the end of this era, so much remained in question. Was it possible for Native Americans and the English to find peace after such a horrible beginning? Would women be able to use the challenges of frontier life to forge greater freedoms for themselves? And how would the treatment of enslaved women shape the evolution of American slavery and history?

Checking For Understanding

1. Why did England seek to establish colonies in North America, and how did competition with Spain influence these efforts?

2. How did Amonute (Pocahontas) help shape relations between the Powhatan Confederacy and the English settlers at Jamestown?

3. In what ways did English women in Jamestown experience greater opportunities or freedoms than women in England? Give at least two examples.

4. Who was Thomas Hall, and what does Hall’s court case reveal about colonial ideas of gender?

5. Why was the arrival of enslaved Africans in Virginia in 1619 significant, and what role did women play in resistance during the Middle Passage?

6. How did Anne Hutchinson and Mary Dyer challenge Puritan authority in Massachusetts, and what consequences did they face?

7. Compare the experiences of Native American, European, and African women in the colonies. What were some similarities and differences in their roles, rights, and challenges?