American History - What About The Ladies?

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.           

American History - The Great Awakening

It’s a good general rule in this world, that every action leads to some kind of reaction.  By the start of the eighteenth century, religion was swiftly becoming less important to the day to day lives of many in the Thirteen Colonies.  Mirroring a general trend back in Britain, the thought process today known as the Great Enlightenment was eroding away the power of the established Protestant faiths, leading people increasingly to alternative and less organized ways of seeing the world, such as deism, unitarianism, and universalism, which in essence were belief systems that saw God as real but not really all that interested in the day-to-day foibles of human kind, and even in some cases atheism.  The people of the Thirteen Colonies, feeling less connection to the droning of their various reverends, pastors, and ministers, whose formalized routines and focus on doctrinal minutia did little to excite, increasingly found other ways to spend their time and focus. 

Now as you can probably imagine, this was a pretty big fucking deal.  At the time, many colonies had legally established religions, such as the Congregationalist church, which was just Puritanism rebranded, in the New England colonies and the Anglican church in the southern colonies, giving them significant political and cultural power in their respective areas.  Only in the middle colonies was religion the chaotic mess we know today, with Dutch Reformists, Anglicans, Congregationalists, Quakers, Presbyterians, and Lutherans all mashed together, though the latter three were beginning to spread increasingly into the southern colonies.  However, as church attendance began to increasingly drop off and the colonial governments did away with the requirement that one had to be of a specific religion to vote or hold office, the old established religions began to lose power, which of course sparked all sorts of worries of what glue was going to hold communities together if they didn’t hold hands and say the exact same words in unison every Sunday.  Though of course what exactly those words were varied greatly depending upon which church you belonged.    

The issue of declining membership was something the existing leadership of the various churches was not well adapted to combat.  For most denominations, an extreme inward focus made it difficult for them to see the big picture, which was fewer people saw any type of organized religion as being a needed major part of their lives.  However, not all pastors took this decline laying down.  Beginning in the 1720s, a number of younger ministers began espousing new ideas, focusing on the basics of spiritual salvation and being a good person rather than the penny ante rules of a specific church’s doctrine.  It was a rather simple idea, to gain everlasting salvation, sinners simply had only to repent their sins and declare themselves wholly in league with God and his divine laws as laid out in the Bible.  Preferring self-examination to recitation, they made impassioned and vigorous speeches which stirred the hearts and minds, creating intense physical and emotional reactions.  Not content with just their own flocks, they began to travel, holding religious revivals and preaching to anyone who would listen, becoming known as evangelicals.  So unique was the experience at the time that they became the rock stars of their era, drawing crowds of thousands and even tens of thousands, though they at times also had to face down or flee from violent mobs. 

Starting in Britain, the evangelical movement spread to the Thirteen Colonies soon after, where the established churches reacted with horror and relief.  The more conservative leadership felt that such showmanship and simplification of doctrine was sacrilegious.  However, more liberal leaders noted that when evangelicals came through it resulted in more asses back in church, leading them to conclude that copying the evangelicals methods and simplified message was the only way to keep themselves relevant.  As a result, many of the established churches split into competing denominations, deep schisms from which some, such as the Congregationalists and the Quakers, never healed, remaining split to this day.  Others, such as the Presbyterian and Anglican churches, split but later rejoined with a much greater evangelical influence.  The infighting also led to significant growth in the established Baptist church, which early on embraced evangelism, and the new Methodist church, which was founded by evangelicals.     

Petering out by the 1760s, what became known as the Great Awakening led to a significant interest in spiritualism and an increase in church attendance, acting as a counterpoint to the Great Enlightenment, leading to the establishment of new religious educational institutions, and leading to a greater sense of unity and acceptance across the various Protestant faiths.  Beyond that it also had a strong influence on the lives of both women and African slaves.  Evangelical enthusiasm combined with its focus on introspection led to a significant increase in women keeping diaries and writing memoirs.  Though barred from taking leadership positions in the movement, they were encouraged to form women’s groups to discuss and share their thoughts and feelings.  At the same time, eager for new converts, both Baptist and Methodist evangelicals preached an appealing message of spiritual equality to slaves, leading to mass conversions and the effective end of what African religious traditions remained amongst them.  Under the auspices of spiritual egalitarianism, slave owners were encouraged to allow their slaves to become literate and to even free their slaves upon the death of their owners.  Though far from universally accepted, such ideals resulted in a small, but growing, population of free and educated former slaves living in the southern colonies, with some even forming Baptist churches specifically for the Black population, both free and enslaved.    

American History - American Enlightenment

Now as has been covered before, throughout the latter half of the seventeenth century and pretty much the entirety of the eighteenth century, Europe was in the grips of something which became known by all sorts of high falutin names, the Age of Reason and the Great Enlightenment being the most humble of them.  Now aside from some fairly pompous asshats enjoying the smell of their own farts a little bit too much, the Great Enlightenment was a pretty damn big deal in that it applied the scientific method to all parts of life, which began to bring up all sorts of interesting ideas previously not considered.  People began to ask all sorts of interesting questions, such as are people born with certain God given rights, why do we treat some people like shit while not others, who really gets to claim they are speaking for God, and why the hell is the aristocracy in charge?  It was from these questions that a large part of what we now call western civilization developed, including the separation of church and state, democracy, a focus on data driven research, universal rights, civil rights, and capitalism. 

Of course, being beholden to Britain and whatnot, these new ideas of course spread to the Thirteen Colonies via books and various pamphlets, which thanks to the ridiculously high levels of literacy for the time there, were available to a significant part of the population.  In many ways the Thirteen Colonies were the most open to the new ideas of the Great Enlightenment given in many ways they were already living them.  The colonies all contained a multitude of people of different backgrounds and religions, with most protecting the rights of individuals to live their lives as they preferred.  Wealth and power in the colonies was held by the merchant class rather than an entrenched aristocracy, meaning no matter what station in life you were born into you had a chance to become somebody, as long as you somehow managed to accumulate enough money.  Each colony was largely run by an elected assembly, which thanks to the wide availability of land was voted on by a significant portion of the property owning male population.  Though theoretically under the power of a royal governor and the laws and royal edicts of Britain, thanks to distance and the British government really not giving two shits, these elected assemblies were largely allowed to run each colony as they saw fit.

Throughout the Thirteen Colonies, there was a more general willingness to think about the world differently and to try something new.  Many of those who had immigrated had done so because the Old World either treated them like shit or gave zero opportunity for improvement.  The New World not only provided the opportunity to do away with both problems, it also put them in direct contact with societies and cultures with different norms, both via Europeans from different countries and religions, but also the vastly different Native American cultures.  The Algonquian and Iroquoian cultures they first encountered, with their more egalitarian societies, greater gender equality, and more localized and democratic politics, stood in stark contrast to the more European way of doing things and greatly influenced the development of what was becoming a separate American culture. 

Though most pronounced at first in the middle colonies, the ideas of what became known as the American Enlightenment quickly spread into the southern and New England colonies.  The most pronounced early shift in this expansion was the ending of the Puritanical theocracies which for so long dominated the New England colonies.  Though there was a last burst of Puritanical zealotry via a spate of witch trials in the 1690s, laws limiting rights based upon religious belief were almost entirely revoked by the start of the eighteenth century.  Another change was a shift in the culture of universities in the colonies.  Originally founded as religious institutions and trade schools, they shifted to a more non-secular curriculum, with a greater focus on scientific research, history, and the study and development of the arts.   

In many ways, the development of the principles of the Great Enlightenment took hold faster in the Thirteen Colonies than they did back in Britain and Europe.  As the divide widened over time, discontent with being held back by a political system half a world away began to grow.  For those born in the colonies, most had never been to Europe, and felt less connection to it with each new generation.  For those immigrating, the entire point was to find something new.  Though far from the only cause of the eventual revolution, this growing divide was certainly a part of what made the separation later seem inevitable.