The Exploitation Of Women In American Colonies
By 1750, the British thirteen colonies had witnessed a significant increase in the colonial population, which came out to an approximated total of more than one million. As the toll of diseases on the lifespan of American citizens decreased, the life expectancy additionally increased as infant mortality rates decreased due to better sanitation and more food. A natural increase in American citizens was important to the population growth, but the constant European immigration and forced African slave immigration was a factor as well. Unfortunately, however, this successful increase in population did not limit the natural formation of a colonial social ladder. The bottom of which was reserved for slaves and indentured servants, the next tier sat only women, the following tier was set aside for poor farmers, and at the top, successful planters in the south and wealthy merchants in the north were the colonial aristocracy. Although many historians argue that the years accompanying the American Revolution received women - both enslaved and free - with little social changes, the eighteenth century was rife with new changes for the American woman.
Between the years of 1674 and 1813, almost every aspect of American colonial life was influenced by gender, taking after the ideas of the motherland, Britain. Normally, women in the British colonies assumed the traditional roles of a European woman, including taking care of the home and raising the children. On small farms in the New England colonies and sprinkled throughout all the colonies, they worked the fields and cared for livestock alongside their husbands and children, in addition to tending to their domestic tasks. Urban women, freed from the traditional chores of spinning and candle making, due to cloth and candles being purchasable in the cities, had more leisure time and could often be seen helping their husbands tend to their shops or taverns.
Women married earlier, giving them the opportunity to have more children, and large families were normal as more hands could help take care of the family farm. It was not uncommon at all for a woman to have eight children and more than forty grandchildren. Under American law in the eighteenth century, single and widowed women could inherit and manage property until marriage, in which they were forced to give up these rights. After a husband’s death, widows once again assumed these rights and often managed her husband's land and perhaps business as well. Propertied women were given a degree of power based on their rank; they were able to act independently of their husbands by securing legal rights, even when their marriages had disintegrated and the law provided no options for divorce.
In marriage, men were expected to rule over their wives as their superior, and all property - even that previously of the woman - belonged to the husband. Upon marriage, a wife’s legal identity ceased to have a separate legal existence from her husband as the law stated that she was to become a feme covert (a married woman), after having been a feme sole (a single woman or widow) rendering her a legal dependent of her husband, unable to own property, make contracts, or collect wages. While women were legally disabled upon marriage, they still maintained access to the legal devices of premarital agreements and equity jurisdiction that lightly improved the harsh effects of American law in the eighteenth century.
In a relationship, men were the primary workers and wage earners of a household, however, there were some positions, other than the responsibility of housework and childcare that were offered to women. One example of such a profession open to solely women was midwifery, which required years of training. However, if a woman was employed in the 1800s, her usual employment was typically one of low status, and a low pay-rate, and involved fewer skills and responsibilities than a man’s job. The types of work available for women were confined to mainly the professions that could be seen as an extension of women's traditional responsibilities, including domestic service, working with textiles, and nursing.
In general, beyond work, women's public roles were mainly confined to the exercise of moral and domestic virtues through participation in religion and charity. In politics, women possessed almost no formal rights, though they could informally influence the decisions of the governmental men. Following the American Revolution, women who ran households in the absence of men during the battles that took place and the conventions that followed became more assertive. Abigail Adams, for example, - the wife of John Adams, the second president of the United States - became an early advocate of women's rights when she prompted her husband to 'remember the ladies” in countless letters to him when creating the new American government directly after America’s freedom from Britain.
Most pre-Revolutionary ministers, predominantly from Puritan Massachusetts, preached the moral superiority of men, however, enlightened thinkers rejected this claim and arguing that a republic could only succeed if all citizens were virtuous and educated. Their argument stemmed from the fact that the primary raisers of society were actually American mothers and in order to create a successful republic where all citizens are knowledgeable and morally good, women must be somewhat educated and schooled in virtue so they could teach the children of the republic and guide the family as a whole towards republican virtue. Elevated women, mainly mothers, to a new prestigious level of respect gained only by being the “special keepers of a nation’s conscience”. This idea came to be known as republican motherhood and increased the support and thus the desire for education for women.
In the 18th century, most wealthy and middle-class parents were willing to invest in education for their sons in hopes of increasing their chances of establishing a profitable career but very rarely was a daughter educated. Middle-class families could generally only afford to educate their sons and lower-class families could never hope of affording enough money to educate any of their children, regardless of gender. If a daughter was educated, however, the main purpose of which in colonial America was usually only to become better skilled in household duties and nothing else, in order to be a useful wife for their husband, and not a burden. A small percentage of wealthy girls might be taught by a governess or sent to a rudimentary school to learn the basics of reading and writing.
In some New England colonies, both girls and boys attended a dame school, which offered a local woman’s assistance in the teaching of numbers and the alphabet to the young children all while going about her daily chores. The program prepared boys with the basic skills needed to enroll in a town school and taught the domestic skills of sewing and knitting to the female students. After enrolling in the dame school - the equivalent to today’s kindergarten education - boys were given the opportunity to continue their education while the majority of girls could not as they were now done with the education states deemed fit to give girls. All but a few towns in New England specifically barred girls from town schools, however, towards the end of the 18th century, more towns began permitting girls to attend schools, but the change was slow and tedious, and girls were often taught separately from the boys.
The years between the 1780s and 1790s mark the beginning of a number of important educational experiments for Pennsylvanian women. One of the most pivotal moments in the history of women’s education was the initial opening of the Young Ladies Academy in Philadelphia in 1787. It was said to be the first all-female academy in the United States and set an example for the many academies that were later opened in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Less than a year after opening its doors, this Academy had nearly one hundred girls enrolled. It additionally gave young women the opportunity to hold a visible civic role by holding annual public examinations for graduates. Although many men only believed in a woman’s education solely for the purpose of passing on their knowledge to their sons, some Academy students challenged these limitations imposed by men.
Not all women who arrived on the east coast immigrated on their own free will and were subject to the same laws and rights as normal immigrant women; the majority of which came chained as African slaves. The proportion of women who arrived as slaves greatly exceeded that of those who arrived as free migrants, for at least four-fifths of all women who arrived in North America prior to the nineteenth century were not European or of European descent. Women were additionally more predominant among free black populations in the upper south and cities such as New Orleans, where urban markets allowed them to sell goods or services and purchase their emancipation with the profits of their sales.
In the tobacco and rice-growing south, plantation owners held the fertility of women and African slave births in high esteem as each infant meant more hands in the fields and more money in the long run. Very much unlike their southern counterparts, however, northern slave owners - often times the poorer farmers - in the colonial period did not prize fertility in their female slaves as they wished against paying for the upbringing of the children and being financially burdened by supporting them. Enslaved women, for this reason, may have attempted to avoid pregnancies in the north because their unwanted children were likely sold and given away by the slave owner.
For even a free woman in the colonies, such male crimes against a woman as, rape and sexual coercion were difficult crimes to establish and gain convictions for in the colonial courts. Unfortunately, viewed as the inferior race, as they were both an enchained female and an African American, many enslaved women endured coerced sexual intercourse with masters, overseers, and other white authorities, but accusations were exceptionally uncommon and practically nonexistent, although the law stated that it was possible to charge and convict a white man for raping an enslaved woman. In contrast to the rights of and laws against enslaved and free African women and their descendants, female immigrants from Europe were governed by the seemingly universal law of coverture, and additionally, specific colonial statutes that defined their access to property, the nature of their labor, and the contours of their speech. Regardless of their legal status - whether enslaved or free - all women were free to use the town courts for protecting their interests in property as well as their rights against rape and the man who committed such crimes.
Historians of early American women have often argued that the American Revolution did not substantially alter the legal status of free women and their universal rights in all the states, yet the eighteenth-century witnessed many changes in the discriminatory view of women. At the beginning of the century, women were lucky when allowed a slight education in the skills of sewing and other docile, traditional tasks, but by the end of the century, many had access to the all-female academies opening up in the New England colonies. Although the Revolution did not challenge or alter the law of domestic relations, and may have in fact, strengthened female subordination in the early Republic, legal changes that came about following the end of the Revolution did, however, liberalize complete divorce in the United States.
