THE
Pennsylvania
Magazine
OF HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY
Women in Eighteenth-Century
Pennsylvania: Toward
a Model of Diversity
S
INCE THE PUBLICATION IN 1972 of James T. Lemon's The Best
Poor Man's Country: A Geographical Study of Early Southeastern
Pennsylvania, scholars of the Middle colonies, like their colleagues working on the Chesapeake and lower South, have exploded
the New England mythologizing in early American studies. As historians have broadened the scope of their research to encompass the "lower
sort," Native Americans, and Africans and African Americans within
the developmental model of colonial history, conceptualizations based
primarily on the perceptions of Puritan ministers and "great families"
have lost force. Under attack even by historians of early Massachusetts
and its neighbors, Perry Miller's declension model, which sets forth
the fragmentation of corporate Puritanism over the seventeenth and
early eighteenth centuries, lacks explanatory power for other regions
of British North America.1
In particular, the presence of many ethnic and religious groups in
the Middle colonies differentiates Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jer-
1
James T. Lemon, The Best Poor Man's Country: A Geographical Study of Early Southeastern
Pennsylvania (Baltimore, 1972); Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth
Century (New York, 1939); Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge, 1953); Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern
British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill, 1988); Michael Zuckerman, with a reply by Jack P. Greene, "Farewell to the 'New England Paradigm' of Colonial
Development," Pennsylvania History 57 (1990), 66-78.
T H E PENNSYLVANIA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY & BIOGRAPHY
Vol. CXV, No. 2 (April 1991)
164
JEAN R. SODERLUND
April
sey, and New York from regions to the north and south. This diversity
has impeded construction of a model of middle Atlantic development
that fires the imagination or promotes intellectual debate with nearly
the same vigor as Miller's declension. While historians of early New
England, and of the southern colonies as well, have felt some ease in
describing hegemonic cultures dominated by Puritans and Anglicans
of English descent, religious and ethnic divisions in Pennsylvania and
adjacent colonies prohibit easy generalizations. Indeed, few common
cultural elements are apparent. In fact, as recent studies have made
clear, residents of the Middle colonies, like significant portions of the
United States population as a whole in later years, shared the experience of building a multicultural society.2 The most salient feature of
that society was the working out of a modus vivendi by individuals and
groups originating from rigidly ethnocentric cultures. While posing a
more difficult challenge than other regions to understanding the creation of dominant power structures, the Middle colonies offer a model
more closely congruent with United States society today.
As the field of early American history, and that of Pennsylvania in
particular, has moved towards this understanding, knowledge of the
part played by women in shaping interethnic and inter-religious relationships has lagged far behind. On the one hand, women have gone
largely unrecognized as significant historical actors by the authors
of most influential works on colonial Pennsylvania. Investigators of
interchurch rivalries, family and community structures, agricultural
practices, local and provincial politics, and specific ethnic groups and
classes have retained a mind-set symbolized by the phrase, "best poor
man's country." In early Pennsylvania history, women remain distinct
from "society," "community," and rigidly defined turfs of politics,
business, and religion, despite the obvious fact that they comprised
roughly one-half of the population and apparently surpassed men in
numbers in many churches.
On the other hand, those of us who have researched the status and
contributions of women in early Pennsylvania have largely failed to
2
Michael Zuckerman, "Introduction: Puritans, Cavaliers, and the Motley Middle," in
Zuckerman, ed., Friends and Neighbors: Group Life in America's First Plural Society (Philadelphia, 1982), 3-25. See also Sally Schwartz, "A Mixed Multitude": The StruggleforToleration
in Colonial Pennsylvania (New York, 1987); J. William Frost, A Perfect Freedom: Religious
Liberty in Pennsylvania (Cambridge, 1990).
1991
A MODEL OF DIVERSITY
165
appreciate the importance of the multicultural model. In early American women's history, even among most scholars who focus on Pennsylvania women, the paradigm of New England remains dominant. At
the core of this paradigm, like that of declension, is the concept of
one hegemonic ideology/experience modified over time by economic
forces. The model has spawned debates, which tend to assume a
broad-based commonality among women, over the economic status of
women in colonial America, the impact of the American Revolution,
and the nature of women's authority in society. The primacy of New
England and its conceptual framework has made Pennsylvania women
seem oddly tangential to the course of American women's history,
when in fact their diversity places them at its center.
How then do we evaluate the status and contributions of women in
this multicultural society? First, scholars should liberate Pennsylvania
women from their seeming irrelevancy. Three basic themes in women's
history have left Pennsylvania women outside the story: 1) the cultural
dominance of New England; 2) the middle Atlantic experience of
women as generalized from Quaker women's lives; and 3) the Revolution as bench mark in women's experience.
A major reason for the primacy of New England, or the "eastern"
states as mid-Atlantic contemporaries called it, is that such excellent
scholars as Joy Day Buel, Richard Buel, Jr., Nancy F. Cott, Elaine
F. Crane, Mary Maples Dunn, Nancy Hewitt, Carol Karlsen, Lyle
Koehler, Mary P. Ryan, and Laurel T. Ulrich have focused on the
region, including the adjacent parts of New York state dominated in
the nineteenth century by families of Yankee stock. Historians have
reached generally convincing conclusions about the status of women
among a population that, with the major exception of Rhode Island,
was fairly homogeneous in terms of ethnicity and religion. Within the
dominant Puritan/Congregational culture, scholars have conceptualized the impact of economic change (or lack thereof) on women's
status.3
3
Joy Day Buel and Richard Buel, Jr., The Way of Duty: A Woman and Her Family in
Revolutionary America (New York, 1984); Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's
Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven, 1977); Elaine Forman Crane, " 'The Sin
of an Ungoverned Tongue': Women and the Church in Colonial New England" (paper
presented at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, New York City,
1985); Mary Maples Dunn, "Saints and Sisters: Congregational and Quaker Women in the
Early Colonial Period," in Janet Wilson James, ed., Women in American Religion (Philadelphia, 1980), 27-46; Nancy A. Hewitt, Women's Activism and Social Change: Rochester, New
166
JEAN R. SODERLUND
April
That stimulating, well-researched work has been and is being conducted on New England is in itself not a problem; rather, the difficulty
arises when generalizations about "American women" are made from
these studies.4 In the first place, the protagonists of the New England
studies were mostly middle- and upper-class women who were literate
and active in churches and benevolent societies. They left a literary
trail and offered to twentieth-century historians (of equivalent status
and interests) the intellectual framework for understanding how the
lives of their foremothers compared with their own. Secondly, the New
England focus has obscured the variant experiences of women of other
regions in British North America—the Middle colonies, Chesapeake,
and lower South. Since we appear to know a great deal about the social
history of New England women, the conclusion reached too often is
that we have extensive knowledge of the social history of all American
women and thus can direct our research in different directions.
This was the prevailing opinion expressed in December 1987 at a
symposium on gender in the early republic sponsored by the Philadelphia Center for Early American Studies, when a group of historians
of women assessed briefly the state of knowledge on the subject and
offered suggestions for further research.5 Three of the panelists were
specialists on New England (Nancy F. Cott, Robert A. Gross, and
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg) and another (Lynn Hunt) an expert on
France. The major work of the fifth panelist (Christine M. Stansell)
concerned working-class women in New York City. The moderator
(Linda K. Kerber) encouraged a wide-ranging discussion, and indeed
York, 1822-1872 (Ithaca, 1984); Carol F. Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman:
Witchcraft in Colonial New England (New York, 1987); Lyle Koehler, A Search for Power:
The "Weaker Sex"in Seventeenth-Century New England (Urbana, 1980); Mary P. Ryan, Cradle
of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (Cambridge, 1981);
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern
New England, 1650-1750 (New York, 1982); Ulrich, "Martha Ballard and Her Girls:
Women's Work in Eighteenth-Century Maine," in Stephen Innes, ed., Work and Labor in
Early America (Chapel Hill, 1988), 70-105; and Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha
Ballard Based on Her Diary 1785-1812 (New York, 1990).
4
For the most influential synthesis of this kind, see Mary Beth Norton, "The Evolution
of White Women's Experience in Early America," American Historical Review 89 (1984),
609-19.
5
The edited and revised proceedings were published in "Beyond Roles, Beyond Spheres:
Thinking about Gender in the Early Republic," William and Mary Quarterly (hereafter,
WMQ) 46 (1989), 565-Z5.
1991
A MODEL OF DIVERSITY
167
the respondents exposed a number of areas concerning women and
gender requiring exploration, including transatlantic connections, poverty, and the construction of manhood as well as womanhood. But the
weight of argument held that the most fruitful avenue of future inquiry
lay in investigating gendered meanings in the language of politics and
republican ideology. Smith-Rosenberg in particular argued that with
such study, "gender becomes central to any understanding of the ways
the hegemonical discourses of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
took form, institutionally reproduced, and altered themselves."6
A number of scholars felt disquieted as they left that session. To be
on the cutting edge of women's history, the most vocal participants
seemed to be saying, one must abandon the questions and methods of
social history—the tools for understanding the work, material condition, kinship relationships, sexuality, attitudes, and beliefs of a broad
range of early Americans—to seek gendered meanings in political
discourse. Historians should adopt the methodology of literary critics
to elicit evidence about the centrality of gender in the discourse of the
new republic from its canonical and not-so-canonical texts.
The importance of placing gender, and by implication women, at
the center of the history of early America is not questioned. The conceit
that approximately 50 percent of the population, because they were
disadvantaged legally and politically, had no part in expelling the
British, disestablishing the churches, and building new economic and
political structures should be put to rest. By going to the heart of the
republic—its ideology—the discursive approach has the potential for
moving beyond studies that undervalue women's participation in revolution and nation-building.
But for the social historian who thinks in terms of varied economic
interests, religions, and ethnic groups, an approach that targets ideology
alone is too narrowly focused. To argue that republican ideology contained notions of womanhood and manhood, one accepts the existence
of a single ideology with its accompanying conceptions of gender.
Whose ideology is this? "Social historians' work with nonelite, even
nonliterate people," Jan Radway commented in the discussion period
6
Ibid., 570; see also Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "Domesticating 'Virtue': Coquettes and
Revolutionaries in Young America," in Elaine Scarry, ed., Literature and the Body: Essays on
Populations and Persons (Baltimore, 1988), 160-84.
16 8
JEAN R. SODERLUND
April
of the December 1987 conference, "has altered the way in which we
understand American history and culture. In this new departure, is
there not a dangerous bias toward print, toward high culture, toward
elites? . . . Could this trend be seen as a move on the part of academic
elites to reinscribe the importance of 'high' language and the canon,
and thus to avoid the challenges posed by social history?"7 For historians of women in early Pennsylvania in particular, the "new departure"
to literary discourse is certainly premature. While some scholars fluent
in the history of New England middle- and upper-class women may
feel prepared to discuss "American women" as some unified force,
much work still needs to be done on the rest of early American society,
including the Middle and southern colonies, before we can discuss
with any certainty the range of attitudes and beliefs concerning gender
and the status of women in this period.
The second tendency in early American women's history that serves
to marginalize Pennsylvania women is the focus on Quakers as exemplars of mid-Atlantic women. Despite the fact that Friends were only
a minority of Pennsylvania's population by the 1720s (though still in
political control), scholarship on Quaker women dominates the field.8
7
"Beyond Roles," 578.
Recent work dealing at least in part with Quaker women in Pennsylvania includes:
Rosemary Abend, "Constant Samaritans: Quaker Philanthropy in Philadelphia, 1680-1799"
(Ph.D. diss., University of* California, Los Angeles, 1988)5 Margaret Hope Bacon, Mothers
8
of Feminism: The Story of Quaker Women in America (San Francisco, 1986); Mary Maples
Dunn, "Women of Light," in Carol Ruth Berkin and Mary Beth Norton, eds., Women oj
America: A History (Boston, 1979), 114-36, and "Saints and Sisters"; J. William Frost, The
Quaker Family in Colonial America: A Portrait oj the Society oj Friends (New York, 1973); Joan
M. Jensen, Loosening the Bonds: Mid-Atlantic Farm Women, 1750-1850 (New Haven, 1986);
Barry Levy, Quakers and the American Family: British Settlement in the Delaware Valley (New
York, 1988); Jack D. Marietta, The Reformation oj American Quakerism, 1748-1783 (Philadelphia, 1984); Terri L. Premo, Winter Friends: Women Growing Old in the New Republic)
1785-1835 (Urbana, 1990); Jean R. Soderlund, "Women's Authority in Pennsylvania and
New Jersey Quaker Meetings, 1680-1760," WMQ 44 (1987), 722-49; Nancy Tomes, "The
Quaker Connection: Visiting Patterns among Women in the Philadelphia Society of Friends,
1750-1800," in Zuckerman, ed., Friends and Neighbors, 174-95; Robert V. Wells, "Family
Size and Fertility Control in Eighteenth-Century America: A Study of Quaker Families,"
Population Studies 25 (1971), 73-82; and Wells, "Quaker Marriage Patterns in a Colonial
Perspective," WMQ 29 (1972), 415-42. Work in progress at this writing includes that
of Margaret Haviland and Marilyn Dell Brady on Quaker women's benevolence in late
eighteenth-century Philadelphia, Carol Karlsen on Iroquois-Quaker relations, Jessica Kross
on spirituality, Rebecca Larson on traveling ministers, Nancy Rosenberg on education, and
Jean Soderlund on authority.
1991
A MODEL OF DIVERSITY
169
Of course, much remains to be done on eighteenth-century Quakers,
as Mary Maples Dunn has argued convincingly in a recent article,9
but the difference in volume of work completed on Quakers and that
on women of other backgrounds is remarkable. Historians of women in
Pennsylvania and New Jersey, like their counterparts in New England,
have concentrated on the people who left the best record. While many
scholars have examined the role of women within the Society of
Friends in considerable detail, the history of Presbyterian, Swedish
Lutheran, German Lutheran and Reformed, Mennonite, and Anglican women in Pennsylvania awaits thorough investigation.10 Page
Putnam Miller discussed the role of Presbyterian Sarah Ralston in
establishing benevolent societies in early nineteenth-century Philadelphia, but more generally the topic of women in the Presbyterian church
in Pennsylvania remains untouched. Doris E. Andrews looked at the
participation of Methodist women from the church's earliest years.
Her study uncovered the declining role of women in the Methodist
leadership as the religion matured, even though women dominated
congregations in numbers. Stephanie G. Wolf also found evidence of
feminization among Germantown's Dunkard, Lutheran, and Reformed church membership.11
The focus on Quakers pushes the mid-Atlantic region to the edges
of women's history and at the same time reinforces the notion of a
hegemonic middle- and upper-class culture. Because women Friends
served as ministers and were responsible, along with men, for church
9
Mary Maples Dunn, "Latest Light on Women of Light," in Elisabeth Potts Brown and
Susan Mosher Stuard, eds., Witnesses for Change: Quaker Women over Three Centuries (New
Brunswick, 1989), 71-85.
10
Although records of religions other than the Society of Friends are unlikely to yield
much evidence of women's formal participation in church governance, painstaking research
in personal papers, sermons, and court records (like that conducted by Laurel Ulrich for Good
Wives) will elucidate the nature of women's piety and informal authority. Linkage of such
sources as church membership lists, birth, death, and marriage records, wills, and court
documents will provide evidence concerning such topics as feminization of membership,
intermarriage, inheritance, and benevolence.
11
Page Putnam Miller, A Claim to New Roles (Metuchen, 1985), 9-16; Doris Elisabett
Andrews, "Popular Religion and the Revolution in the Middle Atlantic Ports: The Rise of
the Methodists, 1770-1800" (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1986), 164-217;
Stephanie Grauman Wolf, Urban Village: Population, Community, and Family Structure in
Germantown, Pennsylvania, 1683-1800 (Princeton, 1976), 217. Janet Lindman of the University of Minnesota is examining the role of women among Baptists.
170
JEAN R. SODERLUND
April
discipline and relief for the poor, their experience is considered extraordinary. Commentators point to the religious egalitarianism of Friends,
but dismiss it as a phenomenon of the fringe. Thus, Quaker dominance
in Pennsylvania women's history fuels New England hegemony in
women's history as a whole. Beyond their special role within the
church, however, the Pennsylvania Quaker women who appear on the
pages of our studies seem very much like their Puritan counterparts—
generally affluent and literate, and active in benevolence and religious
affairs.
In fact, except for Marylynn Salmon's study of the law, analysis of
Quaker women's status outside the meetinghouse is scanty. In her
analysis of women's property rights in Pennsylvania and elsewhere,
Salmon demonstrated that Quaker politicians erected a legal structure
essentially like that of other colonies: throughout Anglo-America married women were disqualified from controlling property or earnings.
Pennsylvania's provision for feme sole trader status for women whose
husbands were absent, however, and its singular mandate that creditors
of a husband's estate should be paid from the widow's dower if the
personal estate was insufficient (thus making the widow equally responsible for family debts) suggest that Quaker lawmakers assumed
at least a limited involvement of women in economic activities and
financial decisions.12
Scholarship on the family in Pennsylvania has been limited almost
entirely to Quakers and has emphasized comparisons with the Puritans.
J. William Frost described the Quaker family within the context of
Friends' theology and showed how parents nurtured their children
within the religion. Barry Levy, on the other hand, emphasized wealth
as well as religious beliefs in determining family success in keeping
sons and daughters within the meeting.13 To date no one has conducted
research on the authority of Pennsylvania women within the family
in a way that permits comparison among religions and ethnic groups.
12
Marylynn Salmon, Women and the haw of Property in Early America (Chapel Hill, 1986),
especially 48-49, 163-68; Salmon, "Equality or Submersion? Feme Covert Status in Early
Pennsylvania," in Berkin and Norton, eds., Women of America, 92-113; Salmon, "Republican
Sentiment, Economic Change, and the Property Rights of Women in American Law," in
Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, eds., Women in the Age oj the American Revolution
(Charlottesville, 1989), 447-75.
13
Frost, Quaker Family \ Levy, Quakers.
1991
A MODEL OF DIVERSITY
171
To evaluate the extent of Quaker exceptionalism, studies specifically
comparing the status of Quaker women with that of other women both
inside and outside the meeting are required.14
The third theme in American women's history, the American Revolution as bench mark in women's experience, has had a more ambiguous role in relegating Pennsylvania women to the periphery than either
the dominance of New England or the focus on Quakers. Both Mary
Beth Norton and Linda Kerber have utilized the sources of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and nearby repositories in their influential
studies of women during the Revolutionary age. Pennsylvanians are
central to their analyses, from Mary Hayes, the Carlisle woman mythologized as "Molly Pitcher," who joined a gun crew at the Battle of
Monmouth, to Benjamin Rush, who articulated the role of republican
mother.15 Journals and correspondence of Elizabeth Drinker, Sally
Wister, Grace Galloway, Nancy Shippen, and Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson provide a wealth of information about women's experiences in
war and peace.16
In Norton's analysis of the Pennsylvania materials, as in her evaluation of New England and (a few) southern sources, well-to-do women
figure prominently. From diaries and letters of the articulate, Norton
constructed a normative and homogeneous experience: the Revolution,
in her view, empowered women by forcing them to choose political
allegiances and fend for themselves. The struggle with Great Britain
politicized American women for the first time; and although full
participation in the polity eluded them, the promise of the Declaration
of Independence inspired later efforts for women's rights.17 Norton's
14
My current project on women, religion, and reform in the Delaware Valley from 1680
to 1860 should partially fill this gap.
15
Mary Beth Norton, Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience oj American Women,
1750-1800 (Boston, 1980); Linda K. Kerber, Women oj the Republic: Intellect and Ideology
in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill, 1980), especially 227-29; Kerber, " 'History Can Do
It No Justice': Women and the Reinterpretation of the American Revolution," in Hoffman
and Albert, eds., Women in the Age oj the American Revolution, 13-16.
16
Elaine F. Crane is preparing a modern edition of Elizabeth Drinker's diaries; see Crane,
"The World of Elizabeth Drinker," Pennsylvania Magazine oj History and Biography (hereafter,
PMHB) 107 (1983), 3-28. Kathryn Zabelle Derounian, ed., The Journal and Occasional
Writings oj Sarah Wister (Rutherford, 1987); Norton, Liberty's Daughters, 306-14.
17
Norton, Liberty's Daughters, 155-227, 359. For an alternative view, namely that the
Revolution had little impact on women's lives and indeed could not reverse long-term
economic and demographic changes that affected women adversely, see Joan Hoff Wilson,
"The Illusion of Change: Women and the American Revolution," in Jean E. Friedman et
172
JEAN R. SODERLUND
April
heavy reliance on wealthy Quaker women and wives of Loyalists in
Pennsylvania, however, undercuts her thesis of empowerment by the
Revolution—because the religious background of Friends could have
prepared them for assertive action—and at the same time obscures the
more typical experience of less affluent Pennsylvanians. The state that
adopted the most radical constitution in Revolutionary America seems
dominated by wealthy Loyalists and pacifists. Although Norton brings
mid-Atlantic women to the heart of her analysis, the individuals whose
experiences she describes were hardly representative of women of
Pennsylvania or the rebellious colonies as a whole.
We need an account of Pennsylvania women in the American
Revolution that places Quakers and the wives of Loyalists in the
context of a community of women of differing circumstances and
political viewpoints.18 Granted, evidence is elusive, but Wayne Bodle's
article on Jane Bartram demonstrates the impressive results of tenacious research about a formerly obscure person by a historian sensitive
to historiographical issues.19 Further biographical and prosopographical
research that forces newspapers, court documents, deeds, immigration
lists, probate records, correspondence, business ledgers, military files,
and church records to yield information about the lives of both husbands and wives will elucidate the Revolutionary era activities of a
wide range of Pennsylvania women.
In the field of early American women's history, then, the New
England paradigm continues to reign. The prevailing image of the
"colonial woman" is one of English Puritan descent. Her community
al., eds., Our American Sisters: Women in American Life and Thought (4th ed., Lexington,
1987), 76-95.
18
Norton urged scholars to investigate "differences as well as similarities in colonial
women's attitudes toward themselves, their lives, and the world around them . . . to ask
questions about how women's race, ethnicity, religion, age, economic status, place of residence,
and so forth affected their lives and attitudes during the Revolutionary era." See Norton,
"Reflections on Women in the Age of the American Revolution," in Hoffman and Albert,
eds., Women in the Age oj the American Revolution^ 491-92.
19
Wayne Bodle, "Jane Bartram's 'Application': Her Struggle for Survival, Stability, and
Sejf-Determination in Revolutionary Pennsylvania," PMHB 115 (1991), 185-220. For an
excellent discussion demonstrating the uses and abuses of biography, see Edith B. Gelles,
"The Abigail Industry," WMQ 45 (1988), 656-83. Susan Heller of Northern Illinois
University is researching the political activities of Pennsylvania women during the Revolutionary era.
1991
A MODEL OF DIVERSITY
17 3
was homogeneous in ethnicity and religion\ it underwent change as a
result of economic diversification and increasing land scarcity rather
than from contact with other cultures. Legally and politically disadvantaged, this colonial woman held a primary responsibility in domestic
production; her chief public roles were to act as an intrusive but
supportive neighbor and quiet pillar of the church. Only with the
Revolution did she engage in political activity—as Molly Pitcher she
filled in when her husband collapsed, as Abigail Adams she pointed
out how natural rights principles should apply to women as well as to
men—but the architects of the new government soon made clear that
her role in politics would be constrained.
Quaker women, who represent the mid-Atlantic region in this
model, were the exception that proved the rule. They too were of
English (or vaguely British) stock, of comfortable means, and devoted
to their religion. They assumed a vocal and authoritative role in meeting affairs, however, and so they appeared more influential in religion,
though not in other aspects of their lives, than their Puritan sisters. As
pacifists, Quakers could not be patriots, but when their husbands were
absent, the Revolution forced them as well to take initiative in dealing
with the vagaries of war.
This model has obvious attractions. It complements the Whig interpretation of the Revolution as the culmination of colonial history and
so permits integration of women into the existing framework of United
States history with relative ease. More important, research emphasizing
the Revolution underscores the centrality of women's place in the past,
in winning independence and helping to define the new republic.
Linda Kerber, in her study of the ideology of the Revolutionary era,
offered a convincing analysis of both the impact of the Revolution on
women's lives and the nature of women's participation in the new
republic. The Revolution did indeed politicize women, but as "republican mothers" rather than as full-fledged participants in civic affairs.
They could not vote (except in New Jersey until 1807) or hold office.
Women would influence politics only from their homes, through the
guidance they gave to their sons about public duty and virtue. Thus,
middle- and upper-class women, including many in Philadelphia who
had access to widening educational opportunities in the postwar years
and whose sons could be expected to become civic leaders, experienced
an expansion in their own public roles. Still, the role of republican
mother kept women outside the center of power: in Kerber's words,
174
JEAN R. SODERLUND
April
"they were still on its edges." But the most valuable part of her work
is in showing the centrality of the image of republican motherhood
in republican ideology. "It is a measure of the conservatism of the
Revolution," she wrote, "that women remained on the periphery of
the political community; it is possible to read the subsequent political
history of women in America as the story of women's efforts to accomplish for themselves what the Revolution had failed to do." The
same could be said, of course, for African Americans. Thus, Kerber
demonstrated that in creating a marginal role for women in the political
life of the new nation, the founding fathers determined the nature of
the Revolution. Republican ideology was defined by who was left out
of the polity as well as by who was brought inside.20
Yet we are brought back to the question of whose ideology is this?
And, indeed, whose Revolution? When we are mindful of the women
whose sons would play no role in the politics of the infant republic
because they were propertyless, or when we consider Native Americans, African Americans, new immigrants, and sectarians who viewed
the struggle with Great Britain as irrelevant or even inimical to their
interests, the "normative" ideology appears less pervasive.
In United States women's history the overarching purpose is to
articulate both women's central role in American society and the
diverse experiences of women of different regions, classes, races, nationalities, and religions. Often this goal seems unattainable, as each
of its components takes us in opposite directions when the common
ideology or conditions we describe for women in general mask an
underlying complexity experienced by particular groups. Investigation
of mid-Atlantic women, in New Jersey, New York, and Delaware as
well as in Pennsylvania, could help to remove this apparent contrariety.
For in studying the mid-Atlantic region, we examine a society whose
foundation is diversity.
20
Kerber, Women of the Republic, quotations on p. 12. See also Jan Lewis, "The Republican
Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic," WMQ 44 (1987), 689-721; Ruth H.
Bloch, "The Gendered Meanings of Virtue in Revolutionary America," Signs: Journal of
Women in Culture and Society 13 (1987), 37-58; Joan R. Gunderson, "Independence, Citizenship, and the American Revolution," ibid., 59-77; Jacqueline S. Reinier, "Rearing the
Republican Child; Attitudes and Practices in Post-Revolutionary Philadelphia," WMQ 39
(1982), 150-63.
1991
A MODEL OF DIVERSITY
175
Indeed, work done by many scholars on early Pennsylvania women
is grounded in the conviction that differences in economic activity,
class, marital status, ethnic background, and religion affected their
social condition and can help to explain their behavior and world view.
Even so, much more research must be done before we can understand
the forging of a pluralistic and relatively tolerant society, but also one
in which race, nationality, class, and gender determined status and
power.21
Of historians of early Pennsylvania, demographers have been most
attentive to differences among groups. In fact, Susan E. Klepp has
observed that "the work in Philadelphia demography" is notable even
among demographic histories for "the extent to which class, race,
ethnicity, and religion are conceived to be integral to the study of
population."22 Wide disparities have been found in fertility rates,
celibacy rates of men and women, and levels of mortality and morbidity. Differences in the demographic experience of urban and rural
residents, and within Philadelphia variations by class and race, were
especially striking. Demographers, and especially Klepp herself, more
than any other group of Pennsylvania scholars, have structured their
investigations in comparative frameworks and rooted their studies in
specific places and times.23
Historians who have researched topics as diverse as work, inheritance, marital discord, and infanticide have also been sensitive to
the specific circumstances in which women lived. Carole Shammas,
focusing on two Philadelphia wards in 1775, explored the intersection
of class and gender in an urban setting. She found that many women
(45 percent in affluent Chestnut Ward and 21 percent in working-class
Mulberry Ward) were hired or bound servants or slaves. And while
21
For an important essay advocating an approach to historical inquiry that investigates "the
inter-relatedness of the various aspects of the system of patriarchal dominance" over one that
regards "class, race, and gender dominance as separate though intersecting and overlapping
systems," see Gerda Lerner, "Reconceptualizing Differences A m o n g W o m e n , " Journal of
Women's History 1 ( 1 9 9 0 ) , 106-22 (quotation o n p. 116).
22
Susan E . Klepp, "Demography in Early Philadelphia, 1690-1860," in special issue o n
"Symposium on the Demographic History of the Philadelphia Region, 1600-1860," Proceedings oj the American Philosophical Society 133 ( 1 9 8 9 ) , 9 1 . This volume provides an excellent
introduction to the demographic literature on early Pennsylvania.
23
Susan E . Klepp, "Fragmented Knowledge: Questions in Regional Demographic History," ibid., 223-33.
176
JEAN R. SODERLUND
April
the urban occupational structure allowed some female heads of household, who comprised about 10 percent of women in both wards, to
hold such positions as schoolmistress, retailer, and mantuamaker, the
majority of female heads of household were so poor that they were
exempted from paying taxes. Most were widows, of whom many had
"no visible means of support." Shammas concluded from this dreary
scenario that, despite coverture, married women in Philadelphia experienced more favorable circumstances, both economically and in household authority, than their unmarried counterparts.24
Claudia Goldin picked up the investigation of the economic status
of women in Philadelphia in 1790, specifically addressing the debate,
fueled by Mary Beth Norton, over whether women's participation in
the labor force increased or declined from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century.25 Using evidence from city and business directories
and the decennial census, Goldin found a decline in labor force participation of female heads of household over the period from 1790 to
1860, but not enough change "to justify terming the early period a
golden age for women." Throughout the period the participation of
women in the labor force was quite substantial—an average of about
44 percent of female heads of household.26
24
Carole Shammas, "The Female Social Structure of Philadelphia in 1775," PMHB 107
(1983), 69-83 (quotation on p. 75). See also Shammas, "Early American Women and Control
Over Capital," in Hoffman and Albert, eds., Women in the Age of the American Revolution^
134-54; Sharon V. Salinger, " 'Send No More Women': Female Servants in EighteenthCentury Philadelphia," PMHB 107 (1983), 29-48; Farley Grubb, "Immigrant Servant
Labor: Their Occupational and Geographic Distribution in the Late Eighteenth-Century
Mid-Atlantic Economy," Social Science History 9 (1985), 249-75; Grubb, "Servant Auction
Records and Immigration into the Delaware Valley, 1745-1831: The Proportion of Females
Among Immigrant Servants," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 133 (1989),
154-69 (especially 167).
25
N o r t o n , Liberty's Daughters\ Norton, " E v o l u t i o n of W h i t e W o m e n ' s Experience,"
593-95.
26
Claudia Goldin, " T h e Economic Status of W o m e n in the Early Republic: Quantitative
Evidence," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 16 (1986), 375-404 (quotation on p . 404). See
also Catherine M . Scholten, " ' O n the Importance of the Obstetrick Art': Changing Customs
of Childbirth in America, 1760 to 1 8 2 5 , " WMQ 3 4 (1977), 426-45; Patricia Cleary, " W o m e n
and Commerce in Philadelphia" (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American
Historical Association, N e w York City, 1990); Peter Thompson, " W o m e n Tavernkeepers in
Philadelphia, 1683-1750" (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Historical
Association, N e w York City, 1990); Frances M a y Manges, " W o m e n Shopkeepers, T a v ernkeepers, a n d Artisans in Colonial Philadelphia" ( P h . D . diss., University of Pennsylvania,
1958).
1991
A MODEL OF DIVERSITY
177
Lisa Wilson (Waciega), with evidence from probate records and
family papers, supported Goldin's findings on women's participation
in business for Philadelphia and extended the analysis to rural Chester
County. Wilson disputed the historiographical stereotype that middleand upper-class women knew little of their husbands' business dealings
with data showing that a substantial minority of widows were able
to increase the personal wealth that their husbands had left them.
"Successful 'men of business,'" like innkeeper Margaret Holman and
farmer Catharine Boothe, had participated in the family enterprise
before the deaths of their husbands, and then in widowhood had
"actually improved their economic circumstances and provided effectively for their children."27
In Loosening the Bonds, Joan Jensen made rural women her focus.
She too was interested in determining the economic status of women
during the century from 1750 to 1850. Women of the Brandywine
Valley, and perhaps of the mid-Atlantic region more generally, she
argued, contributed substantially to overall economic development by
fostering a considerable trade in butter. Her analysis is important in
underscoring the generally forgotten fact that domestic production,
which was counted in "women's sphere" and often invisible because
it was not listed in men's ledgers, was a major component of family
and regional income.28
The research of several scholars further elucidates the magnitude of
women's production, both in domestic work and in areas traditionally
considered male. Their work demonstrates the importance of identifying class and ethnic backgrounds. In a larger study of the rural work
force, Lucy Simler presented data showing that, in 1799, women and
girls comprised about 46 percent of the landless labor force of Chester
and Delaware Counties (not including adults or minors of landholding
27
Lisa Wilson Waciega, " A 'Man of Business': T h e W i d o w of Means in Southeastern
Pennsylvania, 1750-1850," WMQ 44 (1987), 40-64 (quotation on p. 64). Waciega, "Widowhood and Womanhood in Early America: The Experience of Women in Philadelphia and
Chester Counties, 1750-1850" (Ph.D. diss., Temple University, 1986).
28
Jensen, Loosening the Bonds, 79-113; Jensen, " 'You May D e p e n d She Does Not Eat
M u c h Idle Bread': Mid-Atlantic Farm W o m e n and Their Historians," Agricultural History
61 ( 1 9 8 7 ) , 29-46. See also Ulrich, "Martha Ballard," in Innes, ed., Work and Labor, 70-105.
17 8
JEAN R. SODERLUND
April
families).29 Women were hired for such domestic occupations as spinning, nursing, and buttermaking; but they also reaped, pulled flax,
butchered, and made hay—and were paid equivalent wages with
men.30
Simler's examples, which to the extent she could determine included
workers and employers of English, Welsh, and Scotch-Irish descent,
raise serious doubts about the validity of the commonplace that colonial
women avoided working in the fields. Strictly defined sex roles were
apparently a cultural ideal shared by sufficiently affluent yeoman
families of British descent, but such an ideal was not the actual experience or perhaps even the aspiration of lower-class Anglo-Americans
and women of other cultural backgrounds.31 Simler's evidence of
the diversified work of laboring women combined with Marianne
Wokeck's data that families, and thus women and girls, were a sizable
proportion of German settlers (who comprised about one-third of
Pennsylvania's population in the late eighteenth century) suggest that
a majority of rural Pennsylvania women performed a wide range of
household and agricultural tasks. According to Priscilla Waggoner,
German farm women reaped and raked in the fields, tended poultry
and gardens, cooked, pulled flax, spun, and controlled the processing
and marketing of butter, cheese, eggs, garden vegetables, and feathers.32 Sale advertisements of African-American slave women demonstrate that they too were expected to labor in the fields as necessary.
Indeed, typical of laboring women was the Chester County slave
woman who could "do town or country work, but [was] most suitable
29
Lucy Simler, "The Landless Worker: An Index of Economic and Social Change in
Chester County, Pennsylvania, 1750-1820," PMHB 114 (1990), 163-99 (percentage computed from Table 3). In 1799 all landless workers were 8,639 of a total labor pool of 21,452.
30
Ibid., 182-88.
31
On this issue, see C. Dallett Hemphill, "Women in Court: Sex-Role Differentiation in
Salem, Massachusetts, 1636 to 1683," WMQ 39 (1982), 164-67; Lois Green Carr and Lorena
S. Walsh, "The Planter's Wife: The Experience of White Women in Seventeenth-Century
Maryland," in Nancy F. Cott and Elizabeth H. Pleck, eds., A Heritage of Her Own: Toward
a New Social History of American Women ( N e w York, 1979), 2 9 , 40-42.
32
Marianne Sophia Wokeck, "A Tide of Alien Tongues: The Flow and Ebb of German
Immigration to Pennsylvania, 1683-1776" (Ph.D. diss., Temple University, 1983), 111-17;
Schwartz, "Mixed Multitude," 1; Priscilla Waggoner, "Producers and Participants: Women
in the Rural German Culture of Eighteenth-Century Pennsylvania" (paper presented at the
Millersville Early American History Conference, May 1981).
1991
A MODEL OF DIVERSITY
179
for the country, as she was brought up there, and is very handy and
active in tending cattle and horses, and can do many sorts of out-door
work."33
The research of Simler, Waggoner, Debra Newman, and others
demonstrates that ethnic differences must be considered in examining
gender roles in colonial society. In respect to African-American
women, a systematic analysis of the community of free black women
in Philadelphia and its hinterland, from 1780 to the Civil War, needs
to be done. No one has yet paid special attention to the decisions and
circumstances of Pennsylvania black women as they made the transition from slavery and servitude to freedom.34 Did many, as Suzanne
Lebsock found in Petersburg, Virginia, avoid marriage and begin to
accumulate property? Was this a conscious rejection of a new kind of
oppression represented by coverture or the result of a skewed sex ratio
and/or meager job opportunities for men?35 Cross-cultural studies
exploring all walks of life and including German, African-American,
Native American, English, Scotch-Irish, Swedish, and Dutch women
are required before we can attempt to generalize about the status of
women in Pennsylvania society.
Studies designed to measure Pennsylvania women's authority and
autonomy within the family and society by looking at inheritance
patterns focus on urban-rural differences and wealth, but not ethnicity
or religion. Since Lois Green Carr and Lorena S. Walsh presented
33
Pennsylvania Gazette, Jan. 1, 1 7 6 7 , quoted in Gary B . Nash a n d Jean R . Soderlund,
Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath ( N e w York, 1 9 9 1 ) , 3 7 .
34
Debra L . N e w m a n , "Black W o m e n in the Era of the American Revolution in Pennsylvania," Journal oj Negro History 61 ( 1 9 7 6 ) , 276-89; Jean R. Soderlund, "Black W o m e n in
Colonial Pennsylvania," PMHB 107 ( 1 9 8 3 ) , 49-68. See also Jacqueline Jones, "Race, Sex,
and Self-Evident Truths: T h e Status of Slave W o m e n during the Era of the American
Revolution," in Hoffman and Albert, eds., Women in the Age oj the American Revolution,
293-337; Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation oj Philadelphia's Black Community,
1720-1840 (Cambridge, 1988); Nash and Soderlund, Freedom by Degrees-, and Billy G. Smith
and Richard Wojtowicz, Blacks Who Stole Themselves: Advertisements jor Runaways in the
Pennsylvania Gazette, 1728-1790 (Philadelphia, 1989). E m m a Lapsansky and Julie Winch
have work in progress o n African-American elite women in nineteenth-century Philadelphia.
35
Suzanne Lebsock, The Free Women oj Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town,
1784-1860 (New York, 1984), 103-11. Available evidence about property-holding by Pennsylvania women may be too scanty to reach meaningful conclusions, but see Newman, "Black
Women," 285-87; Soderlund, "Black Women," 65-66; and Nash and Soderlund, Freedom
by Degrees, chap. 6.
180
JEAN R. SODERLUND
April
their pathbreaking research in "The Planter's Wife," many historians
have employed probate records to uncover attitudes of dying men
toward their wives.36 In these studies, decisions concerning executorship and division of real and personal property are correlated with a
number of attributes, which may include the decedent's stage in the
life cycle, wealth, occupation, family size, residence, ethnic group, and
religion, in ways that are often enlightening and suggestive. This
multitude of variables is welcome but makes comparison difficult, as
do disparity in beginning and end dates and variations in presentation
of data.
For Pennsylvania, as part of a study that crosses three centuries,
Carole Shammas, Marylynn Salmon, and Michel Dahlin presented
evidence from rural Bucks County for the period from 1685 to 1756.
They found that, in later decades, Bucks County testators, like those
in other colonies during the same period, became less generous toward
their wives and less likely to appoint them executors. With increasing
scarcity of land, decedents turned to strategies that kept the family
farm intact—joint ownership by several sons or provision for one son
to purchase the homestead from the others.37
Lisa Wilson evaluated probate data for Philadelphia and Chester
County for a later period, from 1750 to 1850, and discovered a
contrary trend. She found that over the century men in both places
generally became more liberal toward their widows, but that Philadelphia husbands were more likely than men in the countryside to leave
their entire estate to their wives. The trends of executorship diverged:
while an increasing percentage of Chester County men excluded their
widows from managing their estates, a lower and more stable proportion of urban decedents did so. Rather than interpreting these data
against a standard of women's autonomy and power, Wilson has emphasized the perspective of family strategy in which husbands and
wives established priority in "the overwhelming importance of family
36
Earlier New England studies had concentrated on fathers' bequests to sons. For a useful
review of the literature on inheritance, see Susan Grigg, "Women and Family Property: A
Review of U.S. Inheritance Studies," Historical Methods 22 (1989), 116-22. See also Trevor
Burnard, "Inheritance and Independence: Women's Status in Early Colonial Jamaica,"
WMQ 48 (1991), 93-114.
37
Carole Shammas, Marylynn Salmon, and Michel Dahlin, Inheritance in America From
Colonial Times to the Present (New Brunswick, 1987), 41-62.
1991
A MODEL OF DIVERSITY
181
and the welfare of the children after the death of a husband and
father." She suggested that urban-rural economic differences account
in large part for discrepancies in testamentary practices in the two
locales.38
Both of these studies were done thoughtfully and add to our understanding that a woman's authority within her family was determined
in part by family wealth and economic endeavor. We are nagged,
however, by the knowledge that other variables could explain evolutionary and regional differences. In particular, the decline of Quakers
(among whom women enjoyed some greater measure of authority) as
a proportion of the population throughout southeastern Pennsylvania
and differing ethnic profiles in Philadelphia and rural areas (and
indeed among various sections of the hinterland) bring into question
explanations that rest primarily on economics.39
Other topics explored by historians of women in early Pennsylvania
include marital discord and crime. Merril D. Smith used Philadelphia
and Chester County records to investigate marriages that ended in
divorce, separation, desertion, and escape. Looking at the break-ups
from the vantage of both husbands and wives, she found the source
of much discord in the differing expectations men and women took
to marriage; she shrewdly uncovered the idealistic hopes for marital
bliss from documents testifying to its woeful end.40 Employing an
urban-rural comparative model based on legal records from Philadelphia and ten Pennsylvania counties, G.S. Rowe detected changes over
the Revolutionary period in the rate and kinds of criminal prosecution
of women.41 Sharon Burnston, in seeking to explain the presence of
two infant skeletons in an eighteenth-century Philadelphia privy pit,
systematically exhausted other possibilities and concluded that the
38
Waciega, " A ' M a n of Business,'" 40-64; and Waciega, Communication, WMQ 4 4
( 1 9 8 7 ) , 835-39 (quotation on p. 8 3 9 ) . Deborah Mathias Gough, Communication, " A Further
Look at Widows in Early Southeastern Pennsylvania," ibid., 829-35.
39
For a comparison of Dutch and English testamentary practices, see David E . Narrett,
"Men's Wills and W o m e n ' s Property Rights in Colonial N e w York," in Hoffman and Albert,
eds., Women in the Age of the American Revolution^ 91-133.
40
Merril D . Smith, Breaking the Bonds: Marital Discord in Pennsylvania, 1730-1830 ( N e w
York, forthcoming).
41
G.S. Rowe, "Women's Crime and Criminal Administration in Pennsylvania, 17631790," PMHB 109 (1985), 335-68.
182
JEAN R. SODERLUND
April
babies had been born out of wedlock and either killed by their mother
(or an accomplice) or born dead and their birth and burial concealed.
Burnston's analysis explored women's motivation for such action and
suggested, given the paucity of privy pit excavations, that such behavior
could have been common.42
Obviously, there are as many more projects to be done on women
and work, family, religion, sexuality, crime, politics, and economics as
imagination and the sources will allow. Studies to date have been
shaped by a commitment to understanding differences arising from
class, economic circumstances, religion, and ethnic background, but
on several fronts we must work towards a more inclusive and analytical
strategy that places women at the center of Pennsylvania history, and
Pennsylvania at the center of early American women's history. At
some point—one would hope soon—historians will as a matter of
course seek to determine whether eighteenth-century Pennsylvania
was also "the best poor woman's country."
If we are to comprehend the differences among women, to explain
why the behavior and apparent beliefs of Pennsylvania women varied
among themselves and diverged from those of their counterparts in
New England and the Chesapeake, then we must pay stricter attention
to ethnic, religious, and class divisions. Even more, as Gerda Lerner
has suggested, we should go beyond investigating distinct though
overlapping experiences arising from gender, race, nationality, and
class to determine how these experiences interacted—to discover the
process by which a society's power structure is created from such
differences.43 Beyond knowledge of the lives and ideologies of different groups of Pennsylvania women, we want to know how they contributed to building a multiethnic, multireligious, and multiclass society.
It is within reason to predict that women's part in producing this
42
Sharon Ann Burnston, "Babies in the Well: An Underground Insight into Deviant
Behavior in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia," PMHB 106 (1982), 151-86. See also Cornelia
Hughes Dayton, "Taking the Trade: Abortion and Gender Relations in an EighteenthCentury New England Village," WMQ 48 (1991), 19-49.
43
Lerner, "Reconceptualizing Differences."
1991
A MODEL OF DIVERSITY
18 3
pluralistic, hierarchical society outstripped in importance any other of
their assigned public roles.
University of Maryland,
Baltimore County
JEAN R. SODERLUND