Women's Roles In The Colonial Era

During the colonial era of the seventeenth-century women lived as second class citizens women were not seen as equal to men in any way, in fact, they were seen in likelihood to animals, and men were seen as superior beings. In households, men were referenced as the lord of the home it was God, man, wife, then the child. Women were looked at as evil beings because of Eve’s shortcoming in the Bible. Families all worked together on their family farm. It was a time of self-sufficiency. By the late nineteenth century at the turn of the Revolution women started to gain a new reputation of purity due to the Virgin Mary as beliefs started to shift so did society, women had opportunity to education, industrialization began, women’s work became
bearing
Gender roles in families greatly differed between men and women from colonial times to the revolutionary era. Women of the colonial times lived lives much like European counterparts legally and socially subservient to men trapped within a patriarchal structure (Evans p.22-23).
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During the colonial era, the women’s roles were to keep house, spin, do farm work, and take care of the kids. Families often time shared large one room open living spaces which required them to be closer and more intimate (Evans p.27-28). The men headed their households and did work outside of the home such as chopping firewood, clearing land, hunting, and farming work. The boys would collect firewood and water and, were apprenticed; expected to learn and perform duties of adult tradesmen. The girls would help with the house choirs and begin to learn their perspective roles preparing to be future wives(L4). Girls were often times even given names like
Patience, Silence, and Mindwell just to name a few these were everyday reminders of their roles in a subservient world in which they lived. It was all to prepare them for a life of