Ebb Tide in New England: Women, Seaports, and Social Change, 1630-1800Although the female population was preponderant in Boston, Salem, Newport, and Portsmouth, Elaine Forman Crane finds that women of this period gradually became less autonomous and more dependent on men than they had been in the early years of English settlement. Challenging the prevailing notion that women's lives improved during the revolutionary era, the author convincingly argues that women's voices grew weaker and their presence dimmer as the market economy and government expanded. Drawing from census lists, church records, merchants' ledgers, newspapers, town records, and family papers, Crane traces the evolution of religious, commercial, and legal institutions to show how women suffered a deterioration in economic standing, a growing public invisibility, and a heightened reliance on male decision making. She frames her narrative within the context of European women's experiences, revealing a parallel decline in status as the patriarchal structures of church, state, and market became more elaborate and interconnected. Ebb Tide in New England offers a fresh perspective on ordinary women's lives in the colonial and revolutionary periods, and it makes a strong case for viewing the feminization of poverty in contemporary America as a product of these historical origins. |
Contents
| 3 | |
| 9 | |
| 21 | |
| 53 | |
Women and the Seaport | 98 |
A Severe Legislation | 139 |
Dependence Disorder and the Law | 174 |
Patriarchy Preserved | 205 |
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Popular passages
Page 67 - Let your women keep silence in the churches : for it is not permitted unto them to speak ; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law.
Page 296 - England, shall be, from time to time, and forever hereafter, a body corporate and politic, in fact and name, by the name of the Governor and Company of the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, in New England, in America...
Page 81 - That though women might meet (some few together) to pray and edify one another; yet such a set assembly, (as was then in practice at Boston,) where sixty or more did meet every week, and one woman (in a prophetical way, by resolving questions of doctrine, and expounding scripture) took upon her the whole exercise, was agreed to be disorderly, and without rule.
Page 87 - Williams so oft as she was called for, they required to have him censured. But there stood up one Arnold, a witty man of their own company, and withstood it, telling them that, when he consented to that order, he never intended it should extend to the breach of any ordinance of God, such as the subjection of wives to their husbands, etc., and gave divers solid reasons against it.
Page 298 - The Book of the General Lawes and Libertyes concerning the Inhabitants of the Massachusetts, Collected out of the Records of the General Court, for the several Years wherein they were made and established...
Page 67 - ... rule, and not fit for women's modesty; but that the elders might examine her in private. So she was asked, if she did consent in the confession of faith made by her husband, and if she did desire to be admitted, etc. ; whereto she answered affirmatively...