Becky Shattuck > Recent Status Updates

"Among the Seneca...traditional life retained its vitality until the English colonists won." "Reformers like Handsome Lake pressed for adaptation to Anglo-American ways." His followers were urged to adopt "patriarchal nuclear families" that focused on "the father-son relationship," which was "reinforced by H. L.'s injunction against divorce and the use of abortifacients and required that women cede autonomy" (p. 77).

"Indian children were weaned much later than [those] of English colonists, sometimes not until their 5th yr. Breastfeeding was probably used as a birth control method...and in some tribes, abstinence from sex for up to 3 yrs after the child's birth was practiced to control family size. If a woman became pregnant during nursing years, drug-induced abortion was an acceptable means of spacing children in a family" (p71)

"Because extra foodstuffs often constituted the only surplus wealth of their societies, women's control over the underground silos in which crops were stored brought them clear social and political power. For example, men of the Iroquois could not undertake war in Iroquois women refused to unlock the treasury of cornmeal needed ot sustain their raiding parties or armies" (p. 62).

"The degree to which agriculture sustained Native American life on the East Coast varied." Northern tribes "still relied heavily on hunting for survival and...were...patrilieal and patrilocal." In southern New England, women's "planting, harvesting, and foraging actually provided 90 percent of the calories consumed in their villages" (p. 61).

"Throughout most of the region the English colonized, agriculture was well developed and Indian communities were organized around its farmers rather than the nomadic patterns of its hunters [...] A man hunted; a woman tilled the soil [...] The responsibility for maintaining group continuity often fell on women, and in many instances led to the creation of matrilineal kinship systems and matrilocal residence" (p. 58).

"It was captivity, not death in battle, that became the primary narrative of [Puritan] encounter with Indian and French Catholic cultures [...] Men were more likely than women to escape or to die. Women were considerably more likely to remain with their captors [...] at least 1/3 of women taken to New France chose to remain [within the Abnaki world], and at least 40% converted...and married French husbands" (p. 44).

"When the Quakers arrived in Mass. in the 1650s, [...] Quaker women enraged and shocked Puritan officials [...] In 1662, the Quaker Deborah Wilson walked naked through Salem. Her purpose, she said, was to call attention to the cruelty and immodesty of the government's practice of stripping Quaker women to the waist to whip them in public" (p. 41).

"In Mass., the Bay Company leadership appointed all ministers... The Hutchinsons...protested that those tasks belonged to the congregation" (p.38). "Anne Hutchinson's house had become a gathering place for women's meetings at which women--who were denied attendance at the public lecture or weekday sermon--gathered to discuss scripture. The magistrates wanted no such opportunities to fall into Hutchinson's hands" (39)

"When Daniel Ela was found beating his wife, he defended his actions...his wife, he argued 'was his servant and his slave.'" [...] "When John Tillison chained his wife by the let to a plow in order to keep her from leaving the house, or when a Maine husband kicked his wife and hit her with a club because she refused to feed his pig, they were considered to be exercising their right to discipline subordinates." (p.31)

"Seventeenth-century New England society carefully replicated the patriarchal family structure of old England" (p. 26). Unlike the Chesapeake colonies where a low ratio of women and a high death rate blurred some of the roles that men and women filled and allowed women to have more authority and inheritance rights, the women of New England followed stricter gender and familial roles.

In Chesapeake society, due to tobacco farming, "men outnumbered women by six to one in the earliest decades" (p. 6). "Most immigrant women were not legally free to become wives until their mid- or late-twenties" (p.7). Males "could expect to live to only until their mid-forties; women until about thirty-nine" (p.7). Thus, "some historians argue that women as mothers held a privileged place in these households" (p.9).

"No collective portrait of colonial women can emerge as long as our knowledge of European women in the colonial period remains so much deeper, broader, and more particular than our knowledge of Indian or African-American women." (preface)