Essay draft 1

 

 Choose one of the following topics below. 

• Compare/contrast the role women played in Puritan Society in colonial Massachusetts with their role in the Great Awakening of the 18th century.  
• Why is the Declaration of Independence considered historically as a product of the Age of Enlightenment?

requirement of this assignment

• Write a 500 word essay

WOMEN IN THE COLONIES In contrast to New Spain and New France, English America had far more women, which largely explains the difference in population growth rates among the European empires in the Americas. More women did not mean more equality, however. As a New England minister stressed, “The woman is a weak creature not endowed with [the] strength and constancy of mind [ofmen].”Women, as had been true for centuries, were expected to focus on what was called “housewifery” or the “domestic sphere.” They were to obey and serve their husbands, nurture their children, and maintain their households. Governor John Winthrop insisted that a “true wife” would find contentment only “in subjection to her husband’s authority.” The wife’s role, said another Puritan, was “to guide the house etc. and not guide the husband.” A wife should view her spouse with “a noble but generous Fear, which proceeds fromLove.”Not surprisingly, the lopsided power relationship in colonial households at times generated explosive tensions that festered over the years. One long- suffering wife used the occasion of her husband’s death to vent her frustrations by commissioning the following inscription on his tombstone: “Stranger, call this not a place of fear and gloom \ To me it is a pleasant spot— It is my hus-band’s tomb.” Another woman focused her frustrations on her own tombstone. It read: “She lived with her husband fifty years \ And died in confident hope of a better life.”

Women in most colonies could not vote, hold office, attend schools or colleges, bring lawsuits, sign contracts, or become ministers. Divorces were allowed only for desertion or “cruel and barbarous treatment,” and no matter who was named the “guilty party,” the father received custody of the children. A Pennsylvania court did see fit to send a man to prison for throwing a loaf of hard bread at his wife, “which occasioned her Death in a short Time.”

“WOMENS WORK” Virtually every member of a household worked, and no one was expected to work harder than women. As John Cotton, a Boston minister, admitted in 1699, “Women are creatures without which there is no Comfortable living for a man.” Women who failed to perform the work expected of them were punished as if they were servants or slaves. In 1643, Margaret Page of Salem, Massachusetts, was jailed “for being a lazy, idle, loitering person.” In Virginia two seamstresses were whipped for fashioning shirts that were too short, and a female indentured servant was forced to work in the tobacco fields even though she was sick. She died in a furrow, with a hoe still in her hands. Such harsh conditions prompted a song popular with women and aimed at those back in England considering coming to Virginia: “The Axe and Hoe have wrought my overthrow. If you do come here, you will be weary, weary, weary.”During the eighteenth century, women’s work typically involved activities in the house, garden, and fields. Many unmarried women moved into other households to help with children or to make clothes. Others took in children or spun thread into yarn to exchange for cloth. Still others hired themselves out as apprentices to learn a skilled trade or craft or operated laundries or bakeries. Technically, any money earned by a married woman was the prop-erty of her husband.Farm women usually rose and prepared breakfast by sunrise and went to bed soon after dark. They were responsible for building the fire and hauling water. They fed and watered the livestock, tended the garden, prepared lunch (the main meal) and dinner, milked the cows, got the children ready for bed, and cleaned the kitchen before retiring. Women also combed, spun, spooled, wove, and bleached wool for clothing; knitted linen and cotton, hemmed sheets, and pieced quilts; made candles and soap; chopped wood, mopped floors, and washed clothes. Female indentured servants in the southern colo-nies commonly worked as field hands.Meals in colonial America differed according to ethnic groups. The English focused their diet on boiled or broiled meats— venison, mutton, beef, and pork. Meals were often cooked in one large cast iron pot, combining “stew meat” with potatoes and vegetables, which were then smothered with butter and seasoned with salt. Puddings made of bread or plums were the favorite dessert, while beer with just a little alcohol content was the most common beverage, even for children and infants. Cooking was usually done over a large open fireplace. The greatest accidental killer of women was kitchen fires that ignited long dresses.

One of the most lucrative trades among colonial women was the oldest: prostitution. Many servants took up prostitution after their indenture was ful-filled, and port cities had thriving brothels. They catered to sailors and sol-diers, but men from all walks of life frequented “bawdy houses,” or, in Puritan Boston, “disorderly houses.” Virginia’s William Byrd, perhaps the wealthiest man in the colony, complained in his diary that he had walked the streets of Williamsburg trying to “pick up a Whore, but could not find one.”Local authorities frowned on such activities. In Massachusetts, convicted prostitutes were stripped to the waist, tied to the back of a cart, and whipped as it moved through the town. In South Carolina, several elected public officials were dismissed because they were caught “lying with wenches.” Some enslaved women whose owners expected sexual favors turned the tables by demanding compensation.

ELIZABETH LUCAS PINCKEY On occasion, circumstances forced women to exercise leadership outside the domestic sphere. Such was the case with South Carolinian Elizabeth Lucas Pinckney (1722–1793). Born in the West Indies, raised on the island of Antigua, and educated in England, “Eliza” moved to Charleston, South Carolina, at age fifteen, when her father, George Lucas, inherited three plantations. The follow-ing year, however, Lucas, a British army officer and colonial administrator, was called back to Antigua, leaving Eliza to care for her ailing mother and younger sister— and to manage three plantations worked by slaves. She wrote a friend, “Ihave the business of three plantations to transact, which requires much writing and more business and fatigue...[but] by ris-ing early I find I can go through much business.”

Eliza loved the “vegetable world” and experimented with several crops before focusing on indigo, a West Indian plant that produced a coveted blue dye for coloring fabric, espe-cially military uniforms. Indigo made Eliza’s family a fortune, as it did for many other plantation owners. In 1744, she married Charles Pinckney, a wealthy wid-ower twice her age, who was speaker of the South Carolina Assembly. She made him promise that she could continue to manage her plantations.

As Eliza began raising children, she “resolved to make a good wife to my dear husband...a good mother to my children...a good mistress to my servants [making] their lives as comfortable as I can.” She also pledged “not to be luxurious or extravagant in the management of my table [family budget] and family on the one hand, nor niggardly and covetous, or too anxiously con-cerned about it on the other.”In 1758, Charles Pinckney died of malaria. Now a thirty- six- year- old widow, Eliza refused to succumb to grief and self- pity. Instead, she redoubled her already extraordinary work ethic. She added her husband’s large planta-tions to her already substantial managerial responsibilities, in part because her demanding duties took her mind off the loss of her “dear husband.”

Self- confident, self- aware, and fearless, Eliza Pinckney signaled the possibility of women breaking out of the confining tradition of housewifery and assum-ing roles of social prominence and economic leadership.

WOMEN AND RELIGION During the colonial era, no denomination allowed women to be ordained as ministers. Only the Quakers let women hold church offices and preach (exhort) in public. Puritans cited biblical passages claiming that God required “virtuous” women to submit to male authority and remain “silent” in congregational matters. Governor John Winthrop demanded that women “not meddle in such things as are proper for men” tomanage.Women who challenged ministerial authority were usually prosecuted and punished. Yet by the eighteenth century, as is true today, women made up the overwhelming majority of church members. Their disproportionate attendance at services and revivals worried many ministers, since a feminized church was presumed to be a church in decline.In 1692, the influential Boston minister Cotton Mather observed that there “are far more Godly Women in the world than there are Godly Men.” In explaining this phenomenon, Mather argued that the pain associated with childbirth, which had long been interpreted as the penalty women paid for Eve’s sinfulness, was in part what drove women “more frequently, & the more fervently” to commit their lives to Christ.

In colonial America, the religious roles of black women were different from those of their white counterparts. In most West African tribes, women frequently served as priests and cult leaders. Although some enslaved Africans had been exposed to Christianity or Islam, most tried to sustain their tradi-tional African religion once they arrived in the colonies. In America, black women (and men) were often excluded from church membership for fear that Christianized slaves might seek to gain their freedom. The acute shortage of women in the early settlement years made them more highly valued in the colonies than they were in Europe; thus over time, wom-en’s status improved slightly. The Puritan emphasis on a well- ordered family life led to laws protecting wives from physical abuse and allowing for divorce. In addition, colonial laws gave wives greater control over the property that they had brought into a marriage or that was left after a husband’s death. But the age- old notion of female subordination and domesticity remained firmly entrenched in colonial America. As a Massachusetts boy maintained in 1662, the superior aspect of life was “masculine and eternal; the feminine inferior and mortal.”

The Great Awakening’s most controversial element was the emergence of women who defied convention by speaking in religious services. Among them was Sarah Haggar Osborne, a Rhode Island schoolteacher who organized prayer meetings that eventually included men and women, black and white. When concerned ministers told her to stop, she refused to “shut my mouth and doors and creep into obscurity.”

Similarly, in western Massachusetts, Bathsheba Kingsley spread the gospel among her rural neighbors because she had received “immediate revelations from heaven.” When her husband tried to intervene, she pummeled him with “hard words and blows,” praying loudly that he “go quick to hell.” Jonathan Edwards denounced Kingsley as a “brawling woman” who should “keep chiefly at home.” For all the turbulence created by the revivals, however, churches, even the more democratic Baptist and Methodist congregations, remained male bastions of political authority.

JEFFERSON’S DECLARATION In Philadelphia, thirty- three- year- old Thomas Jefferson, a brilliant, freckle- faced Virginia planter and attorney serving in the Continental Congress, had drafted a statement of independence that John Adams and Benjamin Franklin then edited.The Declaration of Independence was crucially important not simply because it marked the creation of a new nation but because of the ideals it expressed and the grievances it listed. Over the previous ten years, colonists had deplored various acts of Parliament impinging on their freedoms. Now, Jefferson directed colonial resentment at King George III himself, arguing that the monarch should have reined in Parliament’s efforts to “tyrannize” the colonies. In addition to highlighting the efforts of the British government to tax thecolonists and restrict their liberties, Jefferson also noted the king’s 1773 decree that sought to restrict population growth in the colonies by “obstructing the laws for the naturalization of foreigners.” British authori-ties had grown worried that the mass migration to America threatened to “ de- populate” the home country. So, beginning in 1767, the government began banning “bounties” offered to immigrants by many colonies and ended the practice of providing large land grants in America to encourage settlement.

After listing the various objections to British actions, Jefferson asserted that certain truths were self- evident: that “all men are created equal and inde-pendent” and have the right to create governments of their own choosing. Governments, he explained, derive “their just powers from the consent of the people,” who are entitled to “alter or abolish” those governments when denied their “unalienable rights” to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happi-ness.” Because King George III was trying to impose “an absolute tyranny over these states,” the “Representatives of the United States of America” declared the thirteen “United Colonies” of British America to be “Free and Independent States.”

THE CONTRADICTIONS OF FREEDOM Once the Continen-tal Congress chose independence, its members revised Jefferson’s draft dec-laration before sending it to London. Southern representatives insisted on deleting Jefferson’s section criticizing George III for perpetuating theAfri-can slave trade. In doing so, they revealed the major contradiction at work in the movement for independence. The rhetoric of freedom that animated the Revolution did not apply to the widespread system of slavery that fueled the southern economy. Slavery was the absence of liberty, yet few Americans confronted the inconsistency of their protests in defense of freedom— for whites.

In 1764, a group of slaves in Charleston watching a demonstration against British tyranny by white Sons of Liberty got caught up in the moment and began chanting “Freedom, freedom, freedom.” But that was not what southern planters wanted for African Americans. In 1774, when a group of slaves killed four whites in a desperate attempt to gain their freedom, Georgia planters cap-tured the rebels and burned them alive.James Otis, a Harvard- educated lawyer, was one of the few Whigs who demanded freedom for blacks and women. In 1764, he had argued that “the colonists, black and white, born here, are free British subjects, and entitled to all the essential civil rights of such.” He went so far as to suggest that slavery itself should be ended, since “all men...white or black” were “by the law of nature freeborn.”

Otis also asked, “Are not women born as free as men? Would it not be infamous to assert that the ladies are all slaves by nature?” His sister, Mercy Otis Warren, became a tireless advocate of American resistance to British “tyranny” through her poems, pamphlets, and plays. In a letter to a friend, she noted that British officials needed to realize that America’s “daughters are politicians and patriots and will aid the good work [of resistance] with their female efforts.”Slaves insisted on independence too. In 1773, a group of enslaved Afri-can Americans in Boston appealed to the royal governor of Massachusetts to free them just as white Americans were defending their freedoms against British tyranny. In many respects, the slaves argued, they had a more com-pelling case for liberty: “We have no property, We have no wives! No chil-dren! No city! No country!”

A few months later, a group of four Boston slaves addressed a pub-lic letter to the town government in which they referred to the hypoc-risy of slaveholders who protested against British regulations and taxes. “We expect great things from men who have made such a noble stand against the designs of their fellow- men to enslave them,” they noted. But freedom in 1776 was a celebration to which slaves were not invited. George Washington himself acknowledged the con-tradictory aspects of the Revolutionary movement when he warned that the alternative to declaring independence was to become “tame and abject slaves, as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway [absolute power].” Washington and other slaveholders at the head of the Revolutionary move-ment, such as Thomas Jefferson, were in part so resistant to “British tyranny” because they witnessed every day what actual slavery was like— for the blacks under their control.Jefferson admitted the hypocrisy of slave- owning Revolutionaries. “South-erners,” he wrote to a French friend, are “jealous of their own liberties but trampling on those of others.” Phillis Wheatley, the first African American writer to publish her poetry in America, highlighted the “absurdity” of white colonists claiming their freedom while continuing to exercise “oppressive power” over enslaved Africans.

“WE ALWAYS HAD GOVERNED OURSELVES” Historians still debate the causes of the American Revolution. Americans in 1775–1776 were not desperately poor: overall, they probably enjoyed a higher standard of living than most other societies and lived under the freest institutions in the world. Their diet was better than that of Europeans, as was their average life span. In addition, the percentage of free property owners in the thirteen colonies was higher than in Britain or Europe. At the same time, the new taxes forced on Americans after 1763 were not as great as those imposed on the British people. And many American colonists, perhaps as many as half, were indifferent, hes-itant, or actively opposed to rebellion.So why did the Americans revolt? Historians have highlighted many fac-tors: the clumsy British efforts to tighten their regulation of colonial trade, the restrictions on colonists eager to acquire western lands, the growing tax burden, the mounting debts to British merchants, the lack of American rep-resentation in Parliament, and the role of radicals such as Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry in stirring up anti- British feelings.Yet other reasons were not so selfless or noble. Many wealthy New Englanders and NewYorkers most critical of tighter British regulations, such as Boston merchant John Hancock, were smugglers; paying more British taxes would have cost them a fortune. Likewise, South Carolina’s Henry Laurens and Virginia’s Landon Carter, both prosperous planters, worried that the British might abolish slavery.

Overall, however, what Americans most feared and resented were the Brit-ish efforts to constrict colonists’ civil liberties, thereby denying their rights as British citizens. As Hugh Williamson, a Pennsylvania physician, explained, the Revolution resulted not from “trifling or imaginary” injustices but from “gross and palpable” violations of American rights that had thrown “the miserable colonists” into the “pit of despotism.”Yet how did the diverse colonies develop such a unified resistance? Although most Patriots were of English heritage, many other peoples were represented: Scots, Irish, Scots- Irish, Welsh, Germans, Dutch, Swedes, Finns, Swiss, French, and Jews, as well as growing numbers of Africans and diminishing numbers of Native Americans. In 1774, Thomas Hutchin-son, the royal governor of Massachusetts, assured British officials that “a union of the Colonies was utterly impracticable” because the colonists “were greatly divided among themselves in every colony.” He predicted that Americans would ultimately “submit, and that they must, and moreover would, soon.”Hutchinson was wrong, of course. What most Americans— regardless of their backgrounds— had come to share by 1775 was a defiant attachment tothe civil rights and legal processes guaranteed by the English constitutional tradition. This outlook, rooted in the defense of sacred constitutional princi-ples, made the Revolution conceivable. Armed resistance made it possible, and independence, ultimately, made it achievable.

The Revolution reflected the shared political notion that all citizens were equal and independent, and that all governmental authority had to be based on longstanding constitutional principles and the consent of the governed. This “republican ideal” was the crucial force that transformed a prolonged effort to preserve rights and liberties enjoyed by British citizens into a movement to create an independent nation. With their declaration of independence, the Revolutionaries— men and women, farmers, artisans, mechanics, sailors, mer-chants, tavern owners, and shopkeepers— had become determined to develop their own society. Americans wanted to trade freely with the world and to expand what Jefferson called their “empire of liberty” westward, across the Appalachian Mountains. The Revolutionaries knew the significance of what they were attempt-ing. They were committing themselves, stressed John Adams, to “a Revolu-tion, the most complete, unexpected, and remarkable of any in the history of nations,” and none of them could “foresee the consequences” of a war for independence.

Perhaps the last word should belong to Levi Preston, a Minuteman from Danvers, Massachusetts. Asked late in life about the British efforts to impose new taxes and regulations on the colonists, Preston responded, “What were they? Oppressions? I didn’t feel them.” He was then asked, “What, were you not oppressed by the Stamp Act?” Preston replied that he “never saw one of those stamps...I am certain I never paid a penny for one of them.” What about the tax on tea? “ Tea- tax! I never drank a drop of the stuff; the boys threw it all overboard.” His interviewer finally asked why he decided to fight for inde-pendence. “Young man,” Preston explained, “what we meant in going for those redcoats was this: we always had governed ourselves, and we always meant to. They didn’t mean we should.”