Annotated Bibliography: Women In The Colonial Era

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"Women in the Colonial-Era" Annotated Bibliography

Brown, Kathleen M. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Brown is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who focuses on gender and race in early America, and I believe that due to that and the advanced language used in this text that it is geared towards scholars. Brown chooses to narrow her focus to solely colonial Virginia, although she begins her text in Elizabethan England to trace some of the ideological views that were present in colonial Virginia. She draws an interesting line between the treatment of the Irish from the English to the treatment of Africans and Native
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This is the newest of all the texts used for this study and there was not much that Miller added to the knowledge on the subject as a whole. She utilized Ulrich 's work heavily for her text. Where Miller 's text stands out is her discussions on Native American women and individual women 's stories. Where other authors just discussed popular women of the colonial era such as Pocahontas and Anne Hutchison (who Miller discusses also), Miller discusses less commonly known women such as Cecily Johnson, who 's broken engagement caused the first breach of promise case in America (38). She also increases the reader 's knowledge of Native American women who were not Pocahontas, and where other author 's begin (and focus) their text on solely white, European women, Miller begins her text discussing Native American women and their culture (also showing how similar they were to their European counterparts). She also adds to the knowledge of indentured servants and female African slaves. She also adds more to knowledge of the consequences of interracial relationships between free white women and slaves- something no other author seemed to discuss (93). Miller offers no introduction for her text but breaks it up into eight chapters. Miller offers no argument for her text, …show more content…
She addresses this in her preface stating that she is a resident of Northern New England and therefore that was the sources that she had access to (xiii,xiv). She also states in her preface that her intent is to not only educate, but entertain her audience as well about women outside of the "outcasts and witches" that are normally associated with colonial women, implying that she is reaching out to more than just scholars (xiii,xiv). She focuses on a variety of roles that women played with each chapter such as: deputy husband, housewife, mother, neighbor, consort, etc.; all while keeping the religious ideals in the background of the story breaking the text into three parts named after three famous women of the Bible: Part One "Bathsheba," Part Two "Eve," and Part Three: "Jael." She utilizes the papers and works of numerous North New England historical societies, diaries, archives, and probate records, along with several secondary sources to gain not only the primary viewpoints of that era, but to also explore what others have said about the era. There was actually some contradiction from Holliday 's work, but that could have been due to the fact that Ulrich was working with a limited geographical area. Ulrich stated that women tended to marry around age 16 and worried their parents if they were still not married at 18, while Ulrich

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