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Colonial history of the United States

Women's roles[ edit]

The experiences of women varied greatly from colony to colony during the colonial era. In New England, the Puritan settlers brought their strong religious values with them to the New World, which dictated that a woman be submissive to her husband and dedicate herself to rearing God-fearing children to the best of her ability. There were in fact some women who chose to preach themselves though they did not challenge the current political authority.

There were ethnic differences in the treatment of women. Among Puritan settlers in New England, wives almost never worked in the fields with their husbands. In German communities in Pennsylvania, however, many women worked in fields and stables. German and Dutch immigrants granted women more control over property, which was not permitted in the local English law. Unlike English colonial wives, German and Dutch wives owned their own clothes and other items and were also given the ability to write wills disposing of the property brought into the marriage. Women in early colonial America became politicized due to their importance in the process of boycotting British goods and making their own.

By the mid-18th century, the values of the American Enlightenment became established and weakened the view that husbands were natural "rulers" over their wives. There was a new sense of shared marriage.[cition needed] Legally, husbands took control of wives' property when marrying. Divorce was almost impossible until the late eighteenth century.


 * 1) Billington, Louis. “Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740-1845/Women and Religion in Early America, 1600-1850…”Journal of American Studies, vol.35,2001,pp.340-342,
 * 2) O’Dowd, Mary. “POLITICS, PATRIOTISM, AND WOMEN IN IRELAND, BRITAIN AND COLONIAL AMERICA, C. 1700-1780.” Journal of Women’s history, vol.22, no. 4, 2010, pp. 15-38,329,

Quote 1: "Although motivated by a common conviction that they were called by the Holy Spirit to transcend social and religious conventions to exhort and preach the gospel, women evangelists never represented a continuous tradition or shared a collective past."

Quote 2: "The use of the consumer boycott as a political tool is commonly associated with pre revolutionary colonial America and has been identified by historians as an important means through which American women were politicized."