Ebb Tide in New England Women, Seaports, and Social Change, 1630-1800
Elaine Forman Crane
The status of women in four New England seaports (Boston, Salem, Newport, and Portsmouth) during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is thoroughly documented in this illuminating work. Although the female population was preponderant in these urban towns, 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.
Elaine Forman Crane is Professor of History at Fordham University. She is the author of A Dependent People: Newport, Rhode Island, in the Revolutionary Era, and the editor of The Diary of Elizabeth Drinker, a three-volume work, and The Diary of Elizabeth Drinker: The Life Cycle of an Eighteenth-Century Woman, both published by Northeastern University Press. She lives in New York City.
352 pages notes / bibliography / index 1998 * ISBN 1-55553-337-X * $50.00 cloth 1998 * ISBN 1-55553-336-1 * $17.95 paper American History Boston History Women's History Women's Studies
Women's Voices, Women's Lives Documents in Early American History
Berkin, Carol (editor) Horowitz, Leslie (editor)
Containing a wealth of primary sources, this reader offers a rich sampling of women's experiences in colonial America. Carol Berkin and Leslie Horowitz gather together a broad spectrum of documents that crosscuts race, class, and region, presenting the voices of African American, European, and Native American women, the rich and poor, and women in the south, the middle colonies, and New England.
The editors draw on diaries, letters, essays, court documents, sermons, wills, plantation records, newspapers, fiction, and advice manuals to reconstruct women's lives and roles during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In addition to sources that convey women's experiences in their own words, the work includes prescriptive and proscriptive materials, most written by men, to further illuminate women's behavior and attitudes. The book is divided into six thematic chapters: sex and reproduction, marriage and family, women's work, religion, politics and the law, and changing gender ideologies. Introductory essays by the editors place each section within historical, cultural, and social context, and each source is annotated with information about the document's author and insightful interpretation of its typicality or its special circumstances.
This enriching collection fills a major gap in the study of early American women, and it is sure to stimulate further discussions about both the common and diverse aspects of their lives.
Carol Berkin is Professor of History at Baruch College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of First Generations: Women in Colonial America, co-author of Making America: A History of the United States, and co-editor of Women of America: A History and Women, War, and Revolution. She lives in New York City. Leslie Horowitz is a Ph. D. candidate in American history at Cornell University. She lives in Ithaca, New York.
224 pages headnotes 1998 * ISBN 1-55553-351-5 * $42.50 cloth 1998 * ISBN 1-55553-350-7 * $15.95 paper
Reinventing Cotton Mather in the American Renaissance Magnalia Christi Americana in Hawthorne, Stowe, and Stoddard
Christopher D. Felker
Northeastern University Press [c1993] xx, 309 p.; ill. Includes bibliographical references (p. 287-298) and index. SUBJECTS: American fiction, 19th century, History and criticism Democracy in literature Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804-1864., Grandfather's chair Mather, Cotton, 1663-1728., Magnalia Christi Americana New England, Politics and government, Historiography Political fiction, American, New England, History and criticism Politics and literature, New England, History, 19th century Puritan movements in literature Puritans in literature Stoddard, Elizabeth, 1823-1902., Morgesons Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 1811-1896., Minister's wooing LC: 93042071//r952 Class: PS374.P6 ISBN: 1-55553-187-3 Cloth in US: $45.00
Recollections of the Early Republic Selected Autobiographies
Joyce Appleby, editor
300 pages map 1997 * ISBN 1-55553-302-7 * $45.00 cloth 1997 * ISBN 1-55553-301-9 * $16.95 paper American History
Salem-Village Witchcraft A Documentary Record of Local Conflict in Colonial New England
Stephen Nissenbaum and Paul Boyer, editors
Few episodes in American history have aroused such intense and continued interest as the witchcraft trials and executions at Salem Village, Massachusetts, in 1692. This collection draws exclusively on primary documents to reveal the underlying conflicts and tensions that caused that small, agricultural settlement to explode with such dramatic force.
416 pages maps 1993 * ISBN 1-55553-164-4 * $45.00 cloth 1993 * ISBN 1-55553-165-2 * $16.95 paper American History
December 12, 1999