A History of the Wife (20 page)

The Anglican priest and poet John Donne (1571–1631) devoted one of his ten Marriage Songs (Epithalamiums) to the “Equality of Persons.” He not only put the wife on a par with the husband in sexual matters, but blurred conventional gender boundaries in such lines as “her heart loves as well as his,” “The bridegroome is a maid, and not a man,” and “then the bride / Becomes a man.” Lovemaking was not a matter of rigid sex roles, but of uninhibited mutual pleasure, where women could sometimes act with the boldness of men, and men might sometimes take on the passive qualities attributed to women. As the husband of a woman who bore him twelve children, Donne envisioned domestic bliss as a total union of body and soul. Consider this wedding-night scene

from “The Bridegroomes Comming”:

Their soules, though long acquainted they had beene, These clothes, their bodies never yet had seene; Therefore at first shee modestly might start,

But must forthwith surrender every part,

As freely, as each to each before, gave either eye or heart.
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This is a far cry from the medieval distrust of the body and prior reli- gious instruction to engage in sex only for the benefit of procreation. It reflects a new appreciation of physical love in marriage, not only as a deterrent to “fornication” but also as a good in its own right.

Reading the poems and sermons written by Tudor and Stuart men allows us to understand the religious and cultural ambiance that sur- rounded women’s lives. But from the turn of the seventeenth century onward, we can do better: we can read the many surviving letters, diaries, memoirs, and poems penned by women themselves. From this point onward, it will be somewhat easier to enter into the subjective experience of married women. While this body of writing gives voice to only the most privileged, and tends to be guarded on many issues, it brings us closer to the wife of the past.

The letters from the Thynne family, mentioned earlier in connection with
Romeo and Juliet,
constitute a rich source of information about two generations of women from the landed gentry. The marriage between John Thynne and Joan Haywire in 1575 was an arranged marriage between a sixteen-year-old girl from a wealthy merchant family and John Thynne, heir to the Longleaf estate. Her letters to him throughout twenty-nine years of marriage show the growth of a young, deferential woman into an efficient and knowledgeable mistress, both at Longleaf and at her own dowry castle in Trashier. Her complaints that her hus- band was spending too much time in their London home, while she was left to manage affairs in the country, was repeated in similar letters by other women from the landed gentry.
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The second Thynne marriage, that of Thomas Thynne and Marie Marvin, began as a love match in 1595 and remained one until Marie’s death in childbirth eighteen years later, when she was only thirty-four. Despite the fact that Thomas’s parents were never reconciled to the

marriage, he inherited Longleaf upon the death of his father in 1604, and lived there with his wife, who took over the role of managing the estate. The move to Longleaf did, however, occasion some discord between the couple. Marie’s letters show how hurt she was when he did not trust her judgment in running his affairs and held “such a contempt of my poor wits.” She complained that he left her “like an innocent fool here” while he was in London—echoing her mother-in-law’s earlier complaint. Nonetheless, Marie insisted she would not be inferior to any of her neighbors “in playing the good housewife,” and continued to think lovingly of her spouse as “an admirable good husband.”

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Personal diaries, which began to be written around this time, provide an excellent record of the historical period and prevailing mentalities. One of the first and most important penned by an Englishwoman is the diary of the Puritan Lady Margaret Hoby (1571–1633).

Margaret Dakins Hoby was the only daughter of a large landowner in Yorkshire.
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According to the custom for women of her class and reli- gion, she was taken into the household of a strict Puritan from the landed nobility, the Countess of Huntingdon. Under her protection, Margaret learned to supervise a large estate, and was married at age eighteen to another protégé of the household. Widowed two years later without progeny, she quickly remarried, and then was once again wid- owed. At the age of twenty-five, she took as her third husband Sir Thomas Hoby, a man she had rejected earlier, perhaps because of his short stature and unprepossessing appearance.

Lady Hoby started her diary in 1599 as a record of her religious life. She began each day with family prayer and Bible reading, then prayed again in private, attended the public prayer and lecture given by the chaplain of the manor, and took part in the singing of Psalms that was usual in Puritan households. Before retiring, she also prayed once again in private. On Sundays she went to church twice. As the spiritual men- tor of her household, she read to the women and discussed the Sunday sermon with them.

Her diary also records her numerous activities as a busy manor wife concerned with every aspect of the management of their estate at Hack- ness, which had been a part of her dowry. Her time was spent supervis- ing the servants, paying wages and other bills, doctoring the sick, and

lending a hand in domestic tasks, such as washing linen, weighing and spinning wool, dying cloth, making wax lights and oil, distilling aqua vitae, overseeing the beehives, and preserving food. She kept an eye on the workmen who sowed rye and planted corn. She bought sheep and had trees planted. She seems to have enjoyed working in the garden, taking especial pride in her roses. She and her servants made most of the clothing for the family, and Margaret herself took care of the health of her household by administering medicine and performing simple surgery.

When neighbors came to call, their conversations were dutifully sober: On March 13, 1600, they spoke “of diuers nedfull dutes to be known”—duties such as choosing marriage partners for their children and becoming godparents to the children of their friends and relatives. Families of her station also took children into their homes, as she her- self had been taken in by the Countess of Huntingdon. Her diary entry of March 1603 reads: “my Cossine Gates brought his daughter, Iane, beinge of the age of 13 years auld, to me, who, as he saied, he freely gaue to me.” Since she had no children of her own, the presence of a thirteen-year-old girl may have been very welcome.

Her husband seems to have been away much of the time. As a mem- ber of Parliament and numerous commissions, a justice of the peace and self-appointed judge of those who did not attend church regularly, he functioned largely in the public sphere, while she ran the estate and looked after their private interests. Their principal joint activities when he was home were dining, attending church, taking walks, and dis- cussing business matters. Theirs was an ordered Puritan existence—a stable partnership, if not a union of soul mates.

Concerning her inner spiritual life, Lady Hoby was given to rigor- ous self-examination. She accepted God’s punishment for the smallest of sins, and often fasted as a form of penance. Here are some of her self-recriminations.

September 10, 1599: “[I] neclected my custom of praier, for which, as for many other sinnes, it pleased the Lord to punishe me with an Inward assalte.”

September 14, 1599: “Lord, for Christs sack, pardone my drouse- ness which, with a neclegent mind, caused me to ommitt that medeta- tion . . . which I ought to haue had.”

July 1600: “I please the lord to touch my hart with such sorrow, for

some offence Cometted, that I hope the lord, for his sonne sake, hath pardoned it accordinge to his promise.... I read a paper that wrought a farther humiliation in me. I thanke god.”

Margaret Hoby, a devout Christian, was far removed from the hair shirt and histrionics of Margery Kempe two centuries earlier. Her brand of Puritan introspection was quieter, less public, yet no less aware of personal failings, no less fearful of God’s punishment, no less hopeful for forgiveness and salvation. This is the Puritan conscience that would be transported to America.

THE PURITANS’ BAGGAGE

Our knowledge of married women’s lives in seventeenth-century New England is considerably enriched by another “first”—Anne Brad- street (c. 1612–1672), the first American poet of either sex. Her history was both typical and atypical of the lives of colonial wives. On the one hand, following the norms of her time, she married a man of her social rank and religious sect, gave birth to eight children, and remained pri- marily at home while her husband was active in business and public life. On the other, Bradstreet was exceptionally well educated, espe- cially for a female, and became a renowned poet on both sides of the Atlantic. We look to her work, as to that of Héloïse, Margery Kempe, and Christine de Pizan, for an example of what was possible for a remarkable woman within the tight gender constraints of the past.

Anne Dudley Bradstreet was born in either 1612 or 1613 in North- hampton, England. Her father was a lawyer and estate manager, and her mother a gentlewoman. As scrupulous Puritans, they experienced religious discrimination under King James I, who was notoriously unfriendly to any deviation from the rites of the established Anglican church. The family was closely connected to the Puritan minister John Dod, coauthor of the influential treatise
A Godlie Forme of Household Government: For the Ordering of Private Families, according to the direction of God’s Word.
In it, Dod echoed the hierarchy that had existed in Chris- tianity for centuries—the wife was to be subservient to her husband, just as children were to be subservient to parents, and servants sub- servient to their masters. Since this order was believed to be ordained by God, it was only by maintaining it and respecting one’s superiors that an individual had any chance of salvation. But Dod also echoed

more recent Protestant theology in his vision of spouses as spiritual equals, the wife seen as her husband’s Christian “sister” and “inheritor with him of the Kingdom of heaven.”
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Anne Dudley met her future husband, Simon Bradstreet, when she was only nine. At that time he was assistant estate manager to her father, then steward to the earl of Lincoln. Eleven years her senior, Simon had studied at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, a center for non- conformist religious views to which the Dudleys had also sent Anne’s brother. Unlike her brother, Anne received a nonsystematic education at home.

Anne married in 1628 when she was only fifteen or sixteen, consid- erably earlier than the average English bride of twenty-four or twenty- five. Within two years of their wedding, Simon and Anne Bradstreet and the Dudley family emigrated from England to Massachusetts. They crossed the Atlantic in 1630 on the
Arbella,
named for Anne’s child- hood friend, Lady Arbella Johnson, who also emigrated with her hus- band. The
Arbella
was one of eleven ships carrying seven hundred passengers to the Massachusetts shores.

The reasons for immigration were religious. The Dudleys and Brad- streets were increasingly uncomfortable in the anti-Puritan climate that existed under James I and Charles I. Like the Pilgrims a few years ear- lier, they looked to the New World as a haven where they could prac- tice their religious beliefs more freely and create a society closer to their understanding of the will of God.

The ten-week crossing on the
Arbella,
with its malodorous, tightly packed quarters, must have been especially hard on gentry folk like the Dudleys and Bradstreets. The women and children slept in compart- ments between the main deck and the roof of the hold, and the men slept in hammocks. Their diet consisted of saltmeat or fish and hard bis- cuits, and the only heat came from a cooking stove. Cold winds, rough waters, and seasickness plagued most of the passengers, but the only casualty on the
Arbella
was the birth of a stillborn child. When they arrived in Salem in June, they encountered a frontier community that was bleaker than anything they had anticipated.
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Many of the settlers, like Lady Arbella and her husband, died within the first months. Before the winter had set in, the Dudleys and Bradstreets moved to nearby Charleston, and, in 1631, to Cambridge (then called Newtowne), where Harvard College would be founded by the end of the decade.

Like many other immigrant wives coming to America since the sev- enteenth century, Anne Bradstreet experienced both a difficult journey and a sense of shock upon arrival. She must have wondered if this land of sparse shelter and bad manners could provide a suitable home for her and her family. As she later wrote: “I fovnd a new World and new manners at wch my heart rose,” meaning manners that disgusted her.
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Yet Anne was arriving with many more resources than most immi- grants, namely her relatively affluent parents, her siblings, and a hus- band, who, like her father, was to become influential in the governance of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Her initial afflictions were compounded by “a lingering sicknes like a consvmption together wth a lamenesse,” a condition which she inter- preted as a “correction” sent by the Lord to humble her and do her good.
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It was common for Christians, and especially for Puritans, to interpret illness as a trial sent by God. Anne was to have many such tri- als throughout her lifetime.

Equally unsettling was the fact that she did not, for the first five years of her marriage, produce a child. As she remembered: “It pleased God to keep me a long time wthout a child wch was a great greif to me, and cost me many prayers + tears before I obtained one. . . .”
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American wives, like their European counterparts, could think of few curses worse than barrenness. Children were considered a blessing from the Lord, especially in a country where the injunction to “be fuitful and multiply” had no geographical limits and where children supplied much of the farm and household labor. Most married women desired children and had frequent pregnancies, limited only by the natural con- traception that occurs from breast-feeding. Anne could have bought fertility medicines from the midwife Jane Hawkins, who practiced in Boston in the 1630s, or she could have taken a common potion made of dried beaver testicles grated and mixed with wine, believed to facili- tate conception.
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But on such matters, she left no record.