Colonial Era Women

The Colonial Era was an interesting time for women. They were starting to believe they deserve more rights than they were given. Some might say it was a golden age for them, and then others would disagree. In the 5 articles; “Women in Work and Poverty: The Difficulties of Earning a Living” by Lyle Koehler, “The Planters Wife: The Experiment of White Women in Seventeenth-Century Maryland” by Lois Green Carr and Lorena S. Walsh, “Women Before the Bar” by Cornelia Hughes Dayton, “Gender, Work and Wages in Colonia New England” by Gloria L. Main, and “The Myth of the Golden Age” by Mary Beth Norton, they talk about whether women became more liberated during this time, or if it was a fabrication.
Most believe it was considered the golden age for
They discuss the awful lifestyle girls are born into, how women’s health was not a priority, especially during childbirth, and even how being a slave was harder for women than for men. This is all found in the article, “The Myth of the Golden Age”, by Norton. Norton talks about chores that were made for women and were time consuming and difficult. One of these chores were making clothes by spinning cloth. It was time consuming and hard, considering it demanded more technical skill and bulky loom, and young girls would usually learn early on to relieve their mothers of the chore. Women were forced to do the household chores and care for the children, and when daughters were old enough they would help their mothers. These young girls were not given a choice, they started to learn these chores early on because they were expected to continue the work when they had a family of their own. Young boys still were expected to help their fathers with hard labor, but they had many more choices than girls did. Women were expected to have a lot of children because the more kin, the more working hands you had around the house. Women were debilitated from constantly having to go through childbirth. Most women were pregnant or nursing a baby during their mature years. They had poor health, and were exhausted from having to care for all the children and doing all the housework. Present day, we have maternal leave and medicine that helps a woman recover from childbirth, but in the colonial era no one cared as much. Having a child was painful and having to care for a newborn while making sure all the household labor is finished was exhausting. As you can imagine, having to bare children while being a slave was extra excruciating. Slave women were pretty much forced to have as many children as possible from their masters, since any child born from a slave women was now a slave.