Women in Early America

Thomas A Foster · Carol Berkin · Jennifer L Morgan

03/2015 · NYU Press

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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 Republic.

Women in Early America goes beyond the familiar stories of Pocahontas or Abigail Adams, recovering the lives and experiences of lesser-known women―both ordinary and elite, enslaved and free, Indigenous and immigrant―who 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 equality in the young nation.

The contributors showcase new research and analysis informed by feminist theory, gender theory, new cultural history, social history, and literary criticism. Women in Early America heeds the call of feminist scholars to not merely reproduce male-centered narratives, “add women, and stir,” but to rethink master narratives themselves so that we may better understand how women and men created and developed our historical past.

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Thomas A. Foster is Professor of History at Howard University, in Washington, DC, and author of Sex and the Eighteenth-Century Man: Massachusetts and the History of Sexuality in America, and Sex and the Founding Fathers: The American Quest for a Relatable Past. He is also editor of Long Before Stonewall: Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality (NYU Press, 2007), New Men: Manliness in Early America (NYU Press, 2011), and Documenting Intimate Matters: Primary Sources for a History of Sexuality in America. Foster tweets at @ThomasAFoster.pasting Carol Berkin is Presidential Professor of American Colonial and Revolutionary History and Women's History at Baruch College. Jennifer L. Morgan is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University.