At this point, probably around half of you are getting just a little perturbed that one specific subject hasn’t been mentioned all that much. Unfortunately, the reason for this is until the eighteenth century, not too much had changed in the way of women’s rights. At the time, people lived within fairly strict gender norms, with men handling the farm work and hunting and women taking care of the home and children. This was an arrangement that was fairly widespread around the world, due to it making some sense way back in the old hunter gatherer days, though there’s a big difference between voluntarily doing things out of convenience and forcing people to do them. However, there were also many arbitrary rules set up by a bunch of controlling dicks, the formation of which tended to follow the same pattern. Women being worshipped because they could create life, men realizing that their dicks had something to do with it, and finally men reducing women to property under the auspices of protecting them and their magic vaginas from other “bad” men. Anyways, what this translated to in the colonial era was a legal system which only gave women minimal recognition as individuals, limiting or outright refusing them the right to vote or have a direct voice in government, the ability to own and inherit property, and the ability to choose their own significant other.
While women technically speaking could own property between the time they reached adulthood and got married, most got married in their teens so it didn’t make that much of a difference. Opportunities for young women outside of marriage were few and far between, with servant being the most common. Once a woman married, herself and anything she owned became the property of her husband, who could do not whatever the hell he wanted, up to and including beating her. While divorce was possible in severe cases of violence, or abandonment or infertility by either party, permission had to be given by the colonial assembly, which given it was made up of old frumpy men rarely granted what few cases they considered, which were rarely brought forth due to the social stigma and the fact that the whole process was quite public. Though widows could technically own property again after the death of their husbands, they couldn’t inherent it, ownership instead going to their husband’s closest living male heirs. While some widows could make some money working as midwives, brewers, or seamstresses, most were dependent upon whatever relatives could help take care of them, who often solved the issue of another mouth to feed by finding the widow a new husband as quickly as possible.
How this all translated in the colonies varied depended upon where you lived. The Puritans who settled New England via moving over whole families tended to stick to such rules pretty strictly, though they did allow women to learn how to read, though only to read the bible, which didn’t really add many new ideas to the mix. The southern colonies, being more financial ventures, were a bit looser due to a general shortage of women, a large part of whom came over as indentured servants. As such, a tradition arose where women had greater say in who they married, though getting knocked up outside of wedlock was not uncommon, which often resulted in a forced marriage regardless of under what conditions the copulation occurred and the shitty power dynamics related to indentured servitude basically being short term slavery. In the middle colonies there was a strong Quaker influence, which had a much more inclusive view towards women’s education and involvement in day-to-day affairs. The Germans and Dutch in the region were also more inclined to allow women to own their own property, though in both cases such practices were largely limited to these specific groups. The frontier was probably the most free place for colonial women, what with arbitrary rules and gender norms making even less sense when living in such difficult circumstances, but such freedoms quickly disappeared the moment so-called civilization began to be established.
In contrast, most Native American societies tended to have a more equitable view when it came to women. While similar gender roles still existed, with men acting as hunters and protectors and women caring for the home and children, farming was seen as women’s work. As a result, property was controlled by women and was passed down via the maternal line, which was how most natives traced their ancestry. Women had custody over their children and could break a marriage at any time. While leadership positions were held by men, women had a voice in their selection and their views were given equal weight as the opinions of men. Given this, it should not be all that surprising that when colonial women were captured by natives during wars or raids, around a third of those who had the opportunity to go home chose not to do so. However, in general neither side really had a strong understanding of each other’s cultures. Colonists seeing native women working in the fields stereotyped native men as being lazy, while natives seeing colonial men farming stereotyped them as a bunch of sissies for doing women’s work.
Though the contact between colonial and native culture had an affect on both, overall native culture tended to get the shitty end of the stick, which meant native women especially got fucked over, though not always immediately. In many ways, the growth of the fur and hide trade actually grew the power of women in many native groups for a time. With the men travelling further afield and being gone for longer periods of time, they took a much larger role in leading their communities. However, when the trade moved further westward things would often take a turn for the worse. Communities who chose to become more nomadic to move with the trade tended to become more patriarchal, women no longer having the power afforded to them by their ownership of land, a situation similar to the cultural shift which occurred on the Great Plains following the introduction of the horse. Communities who chose to remain also tended to become more patriarchal, having to adopt European agricultural practices in order to do so. Losing their role as hunters, the men increasingly took over the role of farmers, disenfranchising women as they adopted the European ways of doing things. However, not all of the men were happy with being relegated to what they saw as women’s work, leading to increased consumption of alcohol and increased violence against women.
Perhaps the men and women treated the most equally in the colonial period were slaves, which being slaves and all, were expected to work themselves to death no matter what their gender. Though undeniably fucked up and equality in the worst way possible, similar to livestock, a young and healthy breedable woman could be worth more than a working age man in good condition, dependent upon supply and demand. However, enslaved women most definitely still had the somehow shittier end of this already extremely shitty stick. With no protections aside from the possible degradation of their monetary value, enslaved women faced violence not just from their owners, but also from enslaved men, a situation worsened by the slave population being a mish-mash of many different African cultures and in constant fluctuation as people were bought and sold. While the mass conversion of slaves to Christianity during the Great Awakening of the mid-eighteenth century provided some stability via a newly created broadly shared sense of community and tradition, enslaved African women remained most certainly at the bottom of the heap.
