A History of the Wife (22 page)

Divorce, if rare, was more available to New Englanders of both sexes and all classes than it had ever been in England, where it was the pre- rogative of the rich. Since marriage was not a sacrament for Puritans,

but merely a civil contract between two people, it could be undone like any other contract. Puritans granted divorce as a last resort, under the assumption that the aggrieved party, usually the woman, would then marry again and be safe from the temptations of either adultery or for- nication. In seventeenth-century Massachusetts, divorce was most commonly granted for adultery, desertion, long absence, failure to pro- vide, bigamy, and cruelty. Over half the divorce cases in New England cited adultery as the cause. One woman filed for divorce when her hus- band admitted “that he had Rog[e]red other women and meant to Roger Every Likely Woman He Could and as many as would Let Him.”
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New England women initiated divorce more often than men, which suggests that, unlike Benjamin and Sarah Keayne, wives were more desperate than their husbands to terminate an unhappy marriage. The charges against Sarah Keayne leveled by her husband in the First Church records indicate that it was not only her sexual behavior that was in question, but also her “prophecying.” Traditionally, a Christian wife was expected to remain silent in church, following an injunction

initiated by Saint Paul and reaffirmed by Governor John Winthrop.

Despite these expectations, some Puritan wives did speak out, among them Anne Hutchinson, whose pronouncements on religious matters led to what was known as the “Antinomian controversy” (a term of reproach rather than a reference to her ideas). The daughter of a nonconformist clergyman who had been removed from his pulpit, she emigrated from England to Boston in 1634 with her husband and chil- dren (she was to bear fifteen during her lifetime). In the New World, on the half-acre lot assigned to the Hutchinsons, Anne continued to fulfill the domestic and social obligations expected from the wife of a success- ful merchant. She also commanded respect as an experienced nurse and healer, who delivered babies and administered medicines made from her own herbal recipes.

But soon Anne took on another role: that of religious dissenter. Fol- lowing the lead of John Cotton, who preached a theory of total depend- ence on God’s grace (rather than on good works), Anne began to organize women’s meetings to discuss the Sunday sermon and expound her own unorthodox views. Here the women who had to sit silently in church were able to speak out and express themselves in the supportive company of other women. Soon the women-only sessions were expanded to include men, and Anne’s spacious parlor was harboring

sixty to eighty people.
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Before long the church authorities, threatened by Hutchinson’s growing influence, accused her of departing from accepted Puritan beliefs. Refusing to be silenced, she traveled to neighboring communi- ties, gathering supporters as well as detractors. Governor Winthrop, convinced that wives were meant to obey husbands and had no busi- ness questioning the established order, sided with the faction against her. She was charged with trying to play the part “
of a Husband [rather] than a Wife, and a preacher [rather] than a Hearer.
”
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Ultimately excom- municated and banished, she then moved out of Massachusetts with a small group including her husband and became one of the founders of Rhode Island. Four years later, after her husband’s death, she settled on Long Island Sound and was killed by Indians in August 1643.

Of course, few Puritan wives were either religious leaders or poets. Most were occupied with the endless chores of housekeeping and mothering. They married earlier than their English counterparts, usu- ally between twenty and twenty-three, and gave birth to an average of six or seven children. Under the best of circumstances, as in the case of Anne Bradstreet, they lived long enough to see their children into adulthood and died at a venerable age, but the premodern pattern of a wife’s early death, as well as the death of some of her offspring in child- hood, was probably more common. And it was certainly common for widowed husbands and wives to remarry, forming new families consist- ing of children from prior marriages. When we think of today’s “recom- bined” families occasioned by divorce, they pale in comparison with the number of recombined families occasioned by death in early Amer- ica. Sisters and brothers shared beds with half-siblings (sometimes three and four to a bed), as well as bedrooms with their parents.

Most New England families lived in homes consisting of only one or two rooms, with an outside wash house and dairy. Wives were respon- sible for keeping these spaces clean, for cooking meals, washing and mending clothes, spinning wool, churning butter, making bread, pre- serving foods, taking care of the children, and passing on all these skills to their daughters. They also taught them to make soap, wax, candles, and brooms. Most wives planted vegetable gardens, fed the hens and pigs, and milked the cows.

There was a clear-cut division of labor between men and women.

Most men obtained food from hunting, fishing, and tillage. They con- structed their homes, made the necessary tools, raised and sheared sheep, were active in the making of leather goods, and engaged in flax culture and lumbering.
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Some were shopkeepers, craftsmen, doctors, or lawyers. If a husband ran a business or practiced a craft, often his wife assisted him. Indeed, the keeping of a tavern and selling of spirits were so predicated on the cooperation of a wife that some authorities refused a license to the man without one. A man from Taunton, Massa- chusetts, was denied a renewal of his license after his wife’s death on the grounds that he was “not being soe capable of keeping a publicke house.”
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Husbands and wives counted on their children for help, and also on indentured or “covenant servants” aged eighteen to twenty-five, who committed to several years of labor in return for transportation to the New World and maintenance during their term of service. As many as one-third of colonial households included indentured servants; yet there never seemed to be enough servants to go around.
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Often, these servants had close relations with the mistress of the house, who took an interest in the young woman’s future and even helped her find a hus- band when her servitude came to an end. Indentured servants were prohibited from marrying beforehand, though some did, when an obliging bridegroom was willing to pay off the servant’s remaining time. The relations between employers and the domestic servants living under their roof always had the potential for discord, as in the case of Anne Bradstreet’s sister-in-law Mary Winthrop Dudley, who described her insolent servant to her stepmother as a “great affliction.” “If I should write to you of all the reviling speeches, and filthie language shee hath

used towards me I should but greive you.”
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Many servants had equally negative pictures of their mistresses, especially if the latter were given to administering blows—a right they and their husbands possessed as “superiors.” Some female servants were sexually harassed by their masters, as was Elizabeth Dickerman, who complained to the Middlesex County Court that her master John Harris had forced her to be with him, and that “if she tould her dame... shee had as good be hanged.” The court accepted Elizabeth’s charge and ordered John Harris to be whipped twenty stripes.
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When a servant became pregnant, by her master or any other man, she not only risked public ignominy, but also an extra year of service to make

up for the time lost in pregnancy, childbirth, and lying-in. A Virginia statute of 1672, recognizing the unfairness of this requirement when the master himself was the father of his servant’s bastard, decreed that he could not claim any extra service from her.
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One wonders how many mistresses looked the other way so as to accommodate their hus- band’s extramarital urges.

Being a good housekeeper, with or without servants, was the sine qua non of a good wife. American women, of necessity, identified them- selves with housekeeping and often took pride in their ability to cook, preserve, spin, weave, knit, sew, and embroider. The story of colonial, republican, and frontier wives, from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, is savored with apple pies and colored with hand-patched quilts. These homey objects, however sentimentalized in our time, were nonetheless true markers of a wife’s accomplishments. In her remarkable book,
Good Wives,
Laurel Ulrich notes that a cook might be known for such specialties as “roast pork or goose with apples,... eel pie flavored with parsley and winter savory,... leek soup or goose- berry cream,” though for ordinary meals the most common dishes were boiled meat and beans, parsnips, turnips, onions, or cabbage.
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In most homes, where everything was cooked on a single blaze within a cav- ernous fireplace, the one-pot meal was the norm.

Then there were “seasonal specialities”—cheese making in the spring, gardening in the summer, and cider-making in the fall. Anyone who has ever picked apples and smelled them fermenting has had a whiff of the pungent, time-consuming process undertaken to produce the gallons of cider that would be enjoyed throughout the year.

A woman like Beatrice Plummer of Newbury, “who took pride in huswifery,” was appreciated by her first two husbands, before she had the misfortune to marry a man more interested in her financial worth than her ability to make bacon and bread.
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Though he had signed a prenuptial agreement allowing her to retain ownership of the estate she had inherited from her previous husband, the new husband changed his mind and tried to force her to tear it up. Ultimately their marital dis- cord ended up in court, leaving behind testimony to one housewife’s pride as a cook and homemaker and one husband’s rapacious concern for her property. Because she had not torn up the prenuptial document, she was able to hold on to her estate. It is not clear whether she held on to the husband, who was fined for his abusive conduct.

Prenuptial agreements allowing women to control the property they possessed prior to marriage were rare, but less rare than in England, where they had been used only by the rich. The contract signed by one Plymouth, Massachusetts, woman and her husband in 1667 stated that she was entitled “to enjoy all her house and lands, goods and cattle, that she is now possessed of, to dispose of them at her own free will.”
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Upon marriage, a husband automatically gained control of his wife’s property unless a prenuptial agreement stipulated otherwise. The male appropriation of female property followed the English common law principle that treated the husband and wife as a “unity,” with her worldly possessions “merging” into his. He had the right to rule over her entire estate, except for personal items, such as her clothes, bed-

ding, and other “paraphernalia.”

Legally, a husband was his wife’s guardian, and as such, liable for her conduct, including her debts. If she committed a minor crime, the court ordered the husband to pay the fine, though the wife often had to endure some form of public humiliation. For example, “scolds” con- victed of defaming others by their gossip and abusive tongues were placed in a “ducking” stool and submerged in water.

If a wife wanted to sue someone for wrongs done her, it was usually her husband who brought the suit, though she could file suit herself if she had her husband’s permission. Single, divorced, or widowed women—
feme sole,
to use the common law term—could sue on their own behalf and enter into other legal and business transactions, but married women could not engage in business ventures, except as assis- tants to their husbands.

One right a woman did have was to be named as executor of her husband’s will. By law, a widow was entitled to a third of her husband’s estate; in practice, husbands often specified that a larger portion be set aside for their widows or that they be allowed to continue living in the family dwelling.
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Some women inherited a husband’s farm or trade, which, as widows, they were allowed to run. Others took the widow’s portion to start new enterprises, such as innkeeping and the sale of liquor—businesses that were overwhelmingly associated with widows in early New England.

Many women—then as now—could expect to end their lives in wid- owhood. This was not the result of greater longevity for women, as it is today, since seventeenth-century men and women had roughly the

same life expectancy. But wives were generally younger than their hus- bands, if only by a few years, and thus died somewhat later. While wid- owhood could entail a certain amount of independence for the rare woman with sizable means, most widows were dependent on their chil- dren, particularly their sons, for a room in the family dwelling or a monetary allotment. In the worst-case scenarios, poor widows fell back upon the generosity of the church or public charity.

The study of early American history has, until recently, lacked attention to women. Attempts to rectify this neglect during the past thirty years have produced excellent results, yet these studies are by no means abundant, and they are by no means consistent in the pictures they offer of colonial wives.

Some (for example, Lyle Koehler’s) tend to emphasize the negative aspects of women’s subordinate position, reminding us that whatever new freedoms were enjoyed in the New World, these did not include greater freedom for daughters and wives. Nancy Woloch argues that the ideology of female subordination, prevalent in England as elsewhere in Europe, “was transported intact and easily replanted in colonial soil,” and that as a result, women in the colonies were excluded from posi- tions of power and authority and only entered public history “by catas- trophe or deviance—such as Indian captivity or witchcraft charges.”
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Other historians, (for example, Laurel Ulrich) without denying the sub- missiveness demanded of women, underscore the many ways wives commanded authority as mothers, deputy husbands, neighbors, mid- wives, philanthropists, and even frontier heroines.