as sex slaves, childbearers, companions. In 1619, the year that the first black slaves came to Virginia, ninety women arrived at Jamestown on one ship: “Agreeable persons, young and incorrupt… sold with their own consent to settlers as wives, the price to be the cost of their own transportation.”
Many women came in those early years as indentured servants—often teenaged girls—and lived lives not much different from slaves, except that the term of service had an end. They were to be obedient to masters and mistresses. Sexual abuse by their masters was common. According to the authors of America’s Working Women (Baxandall, Gordon, and Reverby): “They were poorly paid and often treated rudely and harshly, deprived of good food and privacy.”
In 1756, Elizabeth Sprigs wrote to her father about her servitude: “What we unfortunate English People suffer here is beyond the probibility of you in England to Conceive, let it suffice that I one of the unhappy Number, am toiling almost Day and Night…with only this comfort that you Bitch you do not halfe enough.…”
Of course these terrible conditions provoked resistance. For instance, the General Court of Connecticut in 1645 ordered that a certain “Susan C, for her rebellious carriage toward her mistress, to be sent to the house of correction and be kept to hard labor and coarse diet.…”
Whatever horrors can be imagined in the transport of black slaves to America must be multiplied for black women, who were often one-third of the cargo. Slave traders reported:
I saw pregnant women give birth to babies while chained to corpses which our drunken overseers had not removed.… [p]acked spoon-fashion they often gave birth to children in the scalding perspiration from the human cargo.… On board the ship was a young negro woman chained to the deck, who had lost her senses soon after she was purchased and taken on board.
A woman named Linda Brent who escaped from slavery told of another burden:
But I now entered on my fifteenth year—a sad epoch in the life of a slave girl. My master began to whisper foul words in my ear. Young as I was, I could not remain ignorant of their import.… My master met me at every turn, reminding me that I belonged to him, and swearing by heaven and earth that he would compel me to submit to him. If I went out for a breath of fresh air, after a day of unwearied toil, his footsteps dogged me. If I knelt by my mother’s grave, his dark shadow fell on me even there. The light heart which nature had given me became heavy with sad forebodings.…
Even free white women, not brought as servants or slaves but as wives of the early settlers, faced special hardships. Eighteen married women came over on the Mayflower. Three were pregnant, and one of them gave birth to a dead child before they landed. Childbirth and sickness plagued the women; by the spring, only four of those eighteen women were still alive.
All women were burdened with ideas carried over from England. English law was summarized in a document of 1632 entitled “The Lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights”: “In this consolidation which we call wedlock is a locking together. It is true, that man and wife are one person, but understand in what manner.… Her new self is her superior; her companion, her master.…”
Julia Spruill describes the woman’s legal situation in the colonial period: “The husband’s control over the wife’s person extended to the right of giving her chastisement—But he was not entitled to inflict permanent injury or death on his wife.…”
As for property: “Besides absolute possession of his wife’s personal property and a life estate in her lands, the husband took any other income that might be hers. He collected wages earned by her labor.… Naturally it followed that the proceeds of the joint labor of husband and wife belonged to the husband.”
For a woman to have a child out of wedlock was a crime, and colonial court records are full of cases of women being arraigned for “bastardy”—the father of the child untouched by the law and on the loose. A colonial periodical of 1747 reproduced a speech “of Miss Polly Baker before a Court of Judicature, at Connecticut near Boston in New England; where she was prosecuted the fifth time for having a Bastard Child.”
… I take the liberty to say, that I think this law, by which I am punished, both unreasonable in itself, and particularly severe with regard to me.… Abstracted from the law, I cannot conceive…what the nature of my offense is. I have brought five fine children into the world, at the risque of my life; I have maintained them well by my own industry, without burthening the township, and would have done it better, if it had not been for the heavy charges and fines I have paid.…[n]or has anyone the least cause of complaint against me, unless, perhaps, the ministers of justice, because I have had children without being married, by which they missed a wedding fee. But can this be a fault of mine?
The father’s position in the family was expressed in The Spectator, an influential periodical in America and England: “Nothing is more gratifying to the mind of man than power or dominion.… I look upon my family as a patriarchal sovereignty in which I am myself both king and priest.”
A best-selling “pocket book,” published in London, was widely read in the American colonies in the 1700s. It was called Advice to a Daughter: “You must first lay it down for a Foundation in general, That there is Inequality in Sexes, and that for the better Oeconomy of the World; the Men, who were to be the Law-givers, had the larger share of Reason bestow’d upon them.…”
Against this powerful education, it is remarkable that women nevertheless rebelled. Women rebels have always faced special disabilities: they live under the daily eye of their master; and they are isolated one from the other in households, thus missing the daily camaraderie that has given heart to rebels of other oppressed groups.
Anne Hutchinson was a religious woman, mother of thirteen children, and knowledgeable about healing with herbs. She defied the church fathers in the early years of the Massachusetts Bay Colony by insisting that she, and other ordinary people, could interpret the Bible for themselves.
She was put on trial twice: by the church for heresy, and by the government for challenging their authority. At her civil trial she was pregnant and ill, but they did not allow her to sit down until she was close to collapse. At her religious trial she was interrogated for weeks, and again she was sick, but challenged her questioners with expert knowledge of the Bible and remarkable eloquence. When finally she repented in writing, they were not satisfied. They said: “Her repentance is not in her countenance.”
She was banished from the colony, and when she left for Rhode Island in 1638, thirty-five families followed her. Then she went to the shores of Long Island, where Indians who had been defrauded of their land thought she was one of their enemies; they killed her and her family. Twenty years later, the one person back in Massachusetts Bay who had spoken up for her during her trial, Mary Dyer, was hanged by the government of the colony, along with two other Quakers, for “rebellion, sedition, and presumptuous obtruding themselves.”
It remained rare for women to participate openly in public affairs, although on the southern and western frontiers conditions made this occasionally possible.
During the Revolution, the necessities of war brought women out into public affairs. Women formed patriotic groups, carried out anti-British actions, wrote articles for independence. In 1777 there was a women’s counterpart to the Boston Tea Party—a “coffee party,” described by Abigail Adams in a letter to her husband John:
One eminent, wealthy, stingy merchant (who is a bachelor) had a hogshead of coffee in his store, which he refused to sell the committee under six shillings per pound. A number of females, some say a hundred, some say more, assembled with a cart and trunks, marched down to the warehouse, and demanded the keys, which he refused to deliver. Upon which one of them seized him by his neck and tossed him
