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Book SynopsisTells the fascinating stories of the myriad women who shaped the early modern North American world from the colonial era through the first years of the RepublicWomen in Early America, edited by Thomas A. Foster, goes beyond the familiar stories of Pocahontas or Abigail Adams, recovering the lives and experiences of lesser-known womenboth ordinary and elite, enslaved and free, Indigenous and immigrantwho lived and worked in not only British mainland America, but also New Spain, New France, New Netherlands, and the West Indies. In these essays we learn about the conditions that women faced during the Salem witchcraft panic and the Spanish Inquisition in New Mexico; as indentured servants in early Virginia and Maryland; caught up between warring British and Native Americans; as traders in New Netherlands and Detroit; as slave owners in Jamaica; as Loyalist women during the American Revolution; enslaved in the President's house; and as students and educators inspired by the air of equali
Trade ReviewA number of essays are particularly valuable in that they examine understudied areas of women's experiences...Other essays provide new insight into better-studied subjects. * Choice *
These essays reveal the exciting intellectual payoff of a transcultural approach to womens lives in the past. Not only will readers confront a richly varied cast of historical actors, but they will come away convinced that womens relationships to each other, to men, to the law, the economy, and culture were central to the experimentation and adaptation of colonialism and nation-building. -- Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor,author of The Ties That Buy: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary America
Women in Early America, an ambitious series of eleven essays edited by Thomas A. Foster, offers a more compelling version of early America and its heroines. The collection attends to two lacunae at once by focusing on women, a group whose presence in the records is often hard to come by, to unearth overlooked and understudied figures only touched on in earlier research (if at all). -- Alana Shilling-Janoff * Times Literary Supplement *
A first-rate collectionvivid, varied, and provocativethat expands our view of early America. The expert essays interrogate sources, challenge assumptions, reconstruct mindsets, and vault over boundaries of nation, region, status, and culture. -- Nancy Woloch,Barnard College
I really think this book will become a landmark volume. Without losing sight of any of the complexities integral to our postmodern sensibilities, the authors have managed to return to a crucial but too often neglected subjectthe lived experiences of real women in Early America. Perhaps we can have it both ways after all. -- Camilla Townsend,Rutgers University
Sweeping in scope and impressive in originality, the essays collected in Women in Early America offer a timely assessment of the history of women in early America. The volume is strikingly diverse and remarkably inclusive, with essays that encompass the experiences of African, Native, and European women and their descendants and range geographically well beyond the eastern seaboard of North America to include the Caribbean, New Spain, New France, and indigenous settlements in the era before European contact. Highly readable and carefully researched, Women in Early America sparkles with insights that will fascinate and enlighten students and historians of gender, women, and early America. -- Terri L. Snyder,California State University, Fullerton
Historians must still prove stubborn archives, using gender theory, to understand how Native American, African America, and European women participated fully in the development of North American societies. These essays fulfill this mandate admirably. * Pennsylvania Magazine of History & Biography *
One of the most fascinating aspects of the books in the authors use of sources, from court records to ledger books to church documents. * Feminist Collections *
Table of ContentsContents 1. Dona Teresa de Aguilera y Roche before the Inquisition: The Travails of a Seventeenth-Century Aristocratic Woman in New Mexico 7 Ramon A. Gutierrez 2. "Women Are as Knowing Therein as the Men": Dutch Women in Early America 43 Kim Todt 3. Women as Witches, Witches as Women: Witchcraft and Patriarchy in Colonial North America 66 Matthew Dennis and Elizabeth Reis 4. Servant Women and Sex in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake 95 Betty Wood 5. Rebecca Kellogg Ashley: Negotiating Identity on the Early American Borderlands, 1704-1757 118 Joy A. J. Howard 6. Womanly Masters: Gendering Slave Ownership in Colonial Jamaica 139 Christine Walker 7. Women at the Crossroads: Trade, Mobility, and Power in Early French America and Detroit 159 Karen L. Marrero 8. The Agrarian Village World of Indian Women in the Ohio River Valley 186 Susan Sleeper-Smith 9. Loyalist Women in British New York City, 1776-1783 210 Ruma Chopra 10. "I Knew That If I Went Back to Virginia, I Should Never Get My Liberty"
