Life in Colonies

Despite the grim end to the 1600s, life in the American colonies during the 1700s stabilized and, in some ways, improved for white women. White women in the American colonies contributed to their household and community’s success and wellbeing through a wide range of responsibilities like managing households with tasks like baking, sewing, educating children, producing soap and candles, as well as supporting or running family businesses such as farms or shops.

While women had more children compared to today, infant mortality was high, with one to three out of ten children dying before their fifth birthday. Giving birth was also dangerous, with a mortality rate of about one in 100 women. The availability of skilled midwives and the wealth of the colony often impacted maternal and infant mortality rates.

As the colonies stabilized and diversified, social classes started to emerge. In the 1700s, women in the middle class often assisted their husbands in taverns, trades, or business ventures. However, despite their contributions, women had limited rights due to the concept of coverture. Coverture meant that women were socially, civilly, and legally represented and protected by their male heads of household, resulting in the denial of property and voting rights. Even though life expectancy was low, around 46-47 years old, becoming a widowed head of household did not grant women the right to vote.

 In the colonial era, women were active participants in various cottage industries, such as textile production, pottery, candle making, and soap making. They often worked from home, utilizing their skills and creativity to produce goods that were essential for local consumption and trade. The operation and management of a household depended heavily on women’s work, and her work in the dairy, garden, kitchen, or spinning wheel was just as essential to the family’s wellbeing as what her husband or father did in the fields or on a shipyard. As the Industrial Revolution gained momentum, women continued to be crucial contributors to the expanding manufacturing sector. They worked in factories, mills, and textile industries, operating machinery and performing tasks such as spinning, weaving, and assembling products. Women's labor and expertise were pivotal in fueling the early stages of industrialization, shaping not only the economic landscape, but also paving the way for social and political advancements in the years to come. In fact, women and children were actually the most desirable workers in some of the first factories because they had fewer ties to the land and fewer obligations to agrarian farms. Plus, since women working out of the home – especially widows – were assumed to be in poverty and in economic desperation, they were a stable workforce whose labor could be purchased at a minimal cost.

Each colony had its own governing arrangements with appointed colonial governors and colonial assemblies making decisions about taxes. However, these assemblies began to be disbanded by the British Parliament during the build-up to the American Revolution, which the colonists saw as evidence of corruption. Women had little participation in these political processes.

The colonies had their own distinct characteristics. New England colonies were heavily Puritan and placed a greater emphasis on education. They specialized in shipbuilding and craftsmanship. Southern colonies focused on cash crops like cotton and tobacco, aiming to export wealth back to England, resulting in fewer investments in cities and schools. The middle colonies, recently acquired from the Dutch, welcomed people from diverse backgrounds and engaged in farming, fishing, and merchant activities.

For free and upper-class women, life was relatively better, and notable outliers like Susanna Wright emerged. Susanna grew up in a Quaker family that emphasized equal education opportunities for girls. On the Pennsylvania frontier, she pursued intellectual and business interests, conducting botanical studies, writing essays, and serving as the chief clerk of the Wright's Ferry court. She advocated for the underprivileged in her community and cared for the sick, delving into medicinal herbs and medical science. Susanna also campaigned for fair treatment of Native communities facing displacement by English settlers, establishing her reputation in the Wright's Ferry community.

With financial independence from her father's successful ferry business and inherited lands, Susanna could pursue her scientific endeavors. She became the first person in Pennsylvania to successfully cultivate silkworms, exporting silk fibers to England for high-quality fabric production. Her achievements contributed to the development of silk worm farms and weaving factories among other colonies.

Susanna's prominence connected her with influential figures of the time, including Benjamin Franklin, with whom she maintained a close friendship. She acknowledged her privilege, recognizing that many women in the colonies had limited opportunities, compelled to subordinate themselves to the wishes of their fathers and husbands due to prevailing laws, religious practices, and social customs.

Enslaved Women

Enslaved women and girls had no such privileges. From a young age, girls were assigned small tasks like picking up trash, tending to younger children, cleaning cotton, or scaring birds away from newly planted rice fields. As they reached adolescence, enslaved girls typically took on more regular labor. Older women who could no longer work in the fields were sometimes tasked with caring for enslaved children. The work patterns of enslaved women varied throughout their lives and according to the region they were in as enslavers aimed to extract maximum profits from their labor. 

Apart from their physical and reproductive labor, enslaved women were subjected to the oppressive demands of fulfilling the sexual desires of slaveholders, overseers, and other men in positions of power. The colony of Virginia, quickly followed by other colonies, passed a law in 1662 that laid out the principle of partus sequitur ventrem, or, “that which is born follows the womb.” This essentially dictated that the status of any child born would be based on the status – free or enslaved – of the mother,  regardless of the father's legal standing. In other words, enslaved women gave birth to children who would inherit the status of slavery. While this was described as a way to settle questions about whether children should be free or enslaved, it also gave slave owners incentives to rape their enslaved women in order for them to produce more slaves. Obviously, this cast a long shadow over the lives of enslaved women. While enslaved women’s experiences in slavery share many aspects in common with their male counterparts, the reality is also that, for enslaved women, fertility and reproduction added another dimension to their experiences that cannot wholly be understood by the rest of us. Because enslaved women were workers, mothers, and survivors of sexual assault (enslaved women cannot provide true consent), one historian has argued that enslaved women were then “either especially oppressed or comparatively privileged” (perhaps in terms of material comfort).

Women dominated the ranks of the enslaved people who worked in the homes of slaveholders because this work was considered "domestic" and traditionally associated with women and girls. House duties encompassed a wide range of responsibilities, including cleaning, cooking, washing, and caring for all members of the white family, from adults to infants. Consequently, many enslaved women of various ages spent a significant portion of their adult lives working within the homes of their white enslavers. These women were both close to their enslavers and also more monitored by them: which proved to be a strange predicament. Many of these women dedicated their time to caring for children, undertaking tasks such as clothing, feeding, and bathing them. Enslaved women who were lactating (producing milk) even served as wet nurses for white infants, sometimes being forced to wean their own child early in order to prioritize the wellbeing of their masters’ baby. 

Gradually, slaveholders created a stereotype of an older domestic woman, often known as the "mammy." Typically, this caricature was of a loyal, overweight or obese woman who was conventionally unattractive, yet devoted to the family. This trope of a Black woman – obedient and solely devoted to her work – was used to justify slavery. Enslavers argued these women wouldn’t be so obedient if they didn’t really love the family that enslaved them. This caricature was also used as a shield to cover for some of the sexual abuses taking place within the Southern home. The mammy caricature is explicitly desexualized. She was designed to portray unattractiveness. This move to convey the mammy as older and overweight implicitly meant that the slave owner’s wife and family were safe. No reasonable white man would want to have sex with her. Though we know that sexual assault and unequal relationships existed between masters and enslaved women, the mammy lie conveyed the idea that Black women were undesirable, existed to serve white families, and supported the institution of slavery.

White women often upheld the system of slavery and benefited from it. The typical female slave owner, as well as the average male slave owner, claimed legal ownership of ten  enslaved individuals or fewer. It is important to remember that most slaves in the South were concentrated in the hands of a small share of slave owners. Over time in the South, the proportion of those southerners who owned slaves shrank. The vast majority of slave owners in the South were of the small farm or middling sort. These slave owners had less than ten, but no more than fifty  slaves. The elite among slave owners held in their possession fifty slaves or more, and the best land, and enough of it to make that investment in labor profitable. That being said, in most cases, their ownership extended to fewer than five people. Young white girls often received enslaved people as gifts, even as infants. As when we talked about indentured servants and their freedom dues, those gifts needed to be something that the women could take with them. It was not uncommon for women to receive slaves as wedding gifts, particularly with the expectation that they might serve as wet nurses when the bride became pregnant. Women also purchased them from slave markets across the Southern region. White women were a part of the culture of slavery. While their responses to slavery varied, most were responsible for at least directing the house slave and clothing and feeding their slaves.

Like men, Southern slave owning women could be benevolent enslavers, or they could be incredibly cruel, and were just as likely to inflict violent punishments upon their slaves. One woman starved her enslaved people and taunted them with candies. When one girl succumbed to her hunger, the slaver rocked her rocking chair atop the girl's head while her daughter whipped her, permanently deforming her jaw. The inclusion of her white daughter as the whipper shows how the violence of slavery was something that was taught from generation to generation.