Summary Of Laurel Ulrich Thatcher's Good Wives

In Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England 1650-1750, Laurel Ulrich Thatcher works to create a study in role definition and provide a description of neglected aspects of daily life for colonial wives through a series of narratives. Thatcher presents many examples of stories and daily tasks performed by women in colonial times in order to pinpoint when changes in the role of wives came about. Thatcher says “Good Wives describes a diverse and changing world, but its major objective is neither to elaborate nor to explain change but to delineate certain broad patterns within which change occurred”(xiv). Thatcher uses a wide range of resources, such as court papers, letters, church records and the wills of colonial women and men. Through these primary sources with help from several colonial and state historical societies, Thatcher compiles a thorough and intelligent exhibit of the roles of colonial wives. Laurel Ulrich Thatcher diligently sifted through and recorded information from over 500 resources. Though …show more content…
The role of women in this time period is often overshadowed by the Salem Witch Trials and women of the devil. Good Wives gives a proper look at what happened to women in colonial society every day. Thatcher describes Good Wives as a book that has much about “small conflicts experienced by forgotten women, and about little triumphs that history has not recorded”(Thatcher, xiii). Good Wives supports other works such as Alice Morse Earle’s Colonial Dames and Good Wives, which also studied the daily life of women in colonial times. Despite the fact that Good Wives does look at a somewhat ignored piece of American history, the book itself, while paying close attention to various social classes, ignores both race and religion. The only wives described were white, Christian women. However, this is accounted for given the time period and location of the