Description
Book SynopsisThe author reconstructs the lived experience of both captors and captives to show that captivity was always intertwined with gender struggles, providing a novel perspective on the struggles over female authority pervasive in colonial America.
Trade ReviewFoster contributes to recent scholarship that places Colonial New England in wider social and geographic contexts by examining the Puritans' relationships with their Native American and French Canadian neighbors and frequent foes.... The inversion of Puritan gender roles—women supervised men and often assigned them to 'women's work'—socially emasculated the men, a position so humiliating that captivity narratives neglected descriptions of female captors, denied them agency, or portrayed them as stylized savage squaws, maidens of salvation, or surrogate mothers. Recommended.
* Choice *
Foster suggests that male captives published their accounts not only to promote Anglo-American cultural superiority but also as a personal means of redeeming their own masculinity and authority.... The Captors' Narrative is a well-thought and well-written contribution to the study of female authority in colonial America. At the same time, it is an important corrective to the growing literature on captivity narratives.
-- Emerson W. Baker * Journal of American History *
Foster's suggestive study, rich in original data and stories of cross-cultural interactions, will prompt new questions about both the relation of archive to narrative and the categories we use to interpret the complexity of early colonial identities.
-- Teresa Toulouse * William and Mary Quarterly *
Many British-American men lived under the wing or, as Foster tells it, under the thumb of women in New France. His book's title tells us that it is also about French Canada's Catholic women, but it is more sympathetic to New England captive men and underlines the gender differences for those men as opposed to their sisters and female counterparts.... Foster presents us with captive stories from three points of view: French-Canadian women and New England Puritan men and women. He writes well, raises questions, and gives some answers on peace and war, on prisoners of war, on women's versus men's advantages and disadvantages in war, and about trying to get along with neighbors with different languages, religions, and cultures. His book is a good place to ponder all of these problems.
-- June Namias * American Historical Review *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Narratives of Captor and Captive
1. The Farm: Lives of the Congregation Notre-Dame
2. The Frontier: Girls' Own Errand into the Wilderness
3. The Hospital: Paradoxes of the Grey Sisters
4. The Seigneury: Obscuring Marguerite and Louise Guyon
5. The Household: Captive and Canadienne
AfterwordNotes
Index
