This paper argues that nineteenth-century American women viewed work as having a moral nature, and believed this idea extended to public advocacy. The latter is true in two senses: 1) that public advocacy also had a moral nature, and 2) that at times a relationship existed between the moral nature of their work and that of their activism. Private work could be seen as a moral duty or an evil nightmare, depending upon the context, and different women likewise saw activism as either right and proper or unethical and improper. More conservative women, for instance, did not support the shattering of traditional gender roles in the public sphere, the troubling efforts of other women to push for political and social change, no matter the justification. Abolition, women’s rights, and Native American rights, if worth pursuing at all, were the purview of men. Reformist women, on the other hand, saw their public roles as moral responsibilities that echoed those of domestic life or addressed its iniquities. While the moral connection between the two spheres is at times frustratingly tenuous and indirect, let us explore women’s divergent views on the rightness or wrongness of their domestic work and political activity, while considering why some women saw relationships between them. In this context, “work” and its synonyms can be defined as a nineteenth-century woman’s everyday tasks and demeanor — not only what she does but how she behaves in the home as well (as we will see, setting a behavioral example could be regarded as crucial a role in domestic life as household tasks).

In the 1883 memoir Life Among the Piutes, Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins (born Thocmentony) expressed a conviction that the household duties of Piute women and men carried moral weight.^[1] She entitled her second chapter “Domestic and Social Moralities,” domestic moralities being proper conduct regarding the home and family.^[2] “Our children are very carefully taught to be good,” the chapter begins — and upon reaching the age of marriage, interested couples are warned of the seriousness of domestic responsibilities.^[3] “The young man is summoned by the father of the girl, who asks him in her presence, if he really loves his daughter, and reminds him, if he says he does, of all the duties of a husband.”^[4] The concepts of love, marriage, and becoming a family were inseparable from everyday work. The father would then ask his daughter the same question. “These duties are not slight,” Winnemucca Hopkins writes. The woman is “to dress the game, prepare the food, clean the buckskins, make his moccasins, dress his hair, bring all the wood, — in short, do all the household work. She promises to ‘be himself,’ and she fulfils her promise.”^[5] “Be himself” may be indicative of becoming one with her husband, or even submitting to his leadership, but regardless of interpretation it is clear, with the interesting use of present tense (“fulfils”) and lack of qualifiers, that there is no question the woman will perform her proper role and duties. There is such a question for the husband, however: “if he does not do his part” when childrearing he “is considered an outcast.”^[6] Mothers in fact openly discussed whether a man was doing his duty.^[7] For Winnemucca Hopkins and other Piutes, failing to carry out one’s domestic labor was a shameful wrong. This chapter, and the book in general, attempts to demonstrate to a white American audience “how good the Indians were” — not lazy, not seeking war, and so on — and work is positioned as an activity that makes them ethical beings.^[8] And ethical beings, it implies, do not deserve subjugation and brutality. True, Winnemucca Hopkins may have emphasized domestic moralities to garner favor from whites with certain expectations of duty — but that does not mean these moralities were not in fact roots of Piute culture; more favor could have been curried by de-emphasizing aspects whites may have felt violated the social norms of work, such as men taking over household tasks, chiefs laboring while remaining poor, and so on, but the author resists, which could suggest reliability.^[9]

Like tending faithfully to private duties, for Winnemucca Hopkins advocacy for native rights was the right thing to do. A moral impetus undergirded both private and public acts. White settlers and the United States government subjected the Piutes, of modern-day Nevada, to violence, exploitation, internment, and removal; Winnemucca Hopkins took her skills as an interpreter and status as chief’s daughter to travel, write, petition, and lecture, urging the American people and state to end the suffering.^[10] She “promised my people that I would work for them while there was life in my body.”^[11] There was no ambiguity concerning the moral urgency of her public work: “For shame!” she wrote to white America, “You dare to cry out Liberty, when you hold us in places against our will, driving us from place to place as if we were beasts… Oh, my dear readers, talk for us, and if the white people will treat us like human beings, we will behave like a people; but if we are treated by white savages as if we are savages, we are relentless and desperate; yet no more so than any other badly treated people. Oh, dear friends, I am pleading for God and for humanity.”^[12] The crimes against the Piutes not only justified Winnemucca Hopkins raising her voice — they should spur white Americans to do the same, to uphold their own values such as faith, belief in liberty, etc. For this Piute leader, just as there existed a moral duty to never shirk domestic responsibilities, there existed a moral duty to not turn a blind eye to oppression.

Enslaved women like Harriet Jacobs understood work in a different way. The nature of her domestic labor was decidedly immoral.^[13] In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), she wrote “of the half-starved wretches toiling from dawn till dark on the plantations… of mothers shrieking for their children, torn from their arms by slave traders… of young girls dragged down into moral filth… of pools of blood around the whipping post… of hounds trained to tear human flesh… of men screwed into cotton gins to die…”^[14] Jacobs, a slave in North Carolina, experienced the horrors of being sexual property, forced household work, and the spiteful sale of her children.^[15] Whereas Winnemucca Hopkins believed in the rightness of her private work and public advocacy, related moral duties to the home and to her people, Jacobs had an even more direct connection between these spheres: the immorality of her private work led straight to, and justified, her righteous battle for abolition. Even before this, she resisted the evil of her work, most powerfully by running away, but also by turning away from a slaveowner’s sexual advances, among other acts.^[16]

After her escape from bondage, Jacobs became involved in abolitionist work in New York and wrote Incidents to highlight the true terrors of slavery and push white women in the North toward the cause.^[17] Much of her story has been verified by (and we know enough of slavery from) other sources; she is not merely playing to her audience and its moral sensitivities either.^[18] One should note the significance of women of color writing books of this kind. Like Winnemucca Hopkins’ text, Jacobs’ contained assurances from white associates and editors that the story was true.^[19] Speaking out to change hearts was no easy task — prejudiced skepticism abounded. Jacobs (and her editor, Lydia Maria Child) stressed the narrative was “no fiction” and expected accusations of “indecorum” over the sexual content, anticipating criticisms that could hamper the text’s purpose.^[20] Writing could be dangerous and trying. Jacobs felt compelled to use pseudonyms to protect loved ones.^[21] She ended the work by writing it was “painful to me, in many ways, to recall the dreary years I passed in bondage.”^[22] Winnemucca Hopkins may have felt similarly. In a world of racism, doubt, reprisals, and trauma, producing a memoir was a brave, powerful act of advocacy.

Despite the pain (and concern her literary skills were inadequate^[23]), Jacobs saw writing Incidents as the ethical path. “It would have been more pleasant for me to have been silent about my own history,” she confesses at the start, a perhaps inadvertent reminder that what is right is not always what is easy. She then presents her “motives,” her “effort in behalf of my persecuted people.”^[24] It was right to reveal the “condition of two millions of women at the South, still in bondage, suffering what I suffered, and most of them far worse,” to show “Free States what Slavery really is,” all its “dark…abominations.”^[25] Overall, the text is self-justifying. The evils of slavery warrant the exposé (Life Among the Piutes is similar). Jacobs’ public advocacy grew from and was justified by her experience with domestic labor and her moral values.

These things, for more conservative women, precluded public work. During the abolition and women’s rights movements of the nineteenth century, less radical women saw the public roles of their sisters as violating the natural order and setting men and women against each other.^[26] Catherine Beecher, New York educator and writer, expressed dismay over women circulating (abolitionist) petitions in her 1837 “Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, with Reference to the Duty of American Females.”^[27] It was against a woman’s moral duty to petition male legislators to act: “…in this country, petitions to congress, in reference to the official duties of legislators, seem, IN ALL CASES, to fall entirely without [outside] the sphere of female duty. Men are the proper persons to make appeals to rulers whom they appoint…”^[28] (This is an interesting use of one civil inequity to justify another: only men can vote, therefore only men should petition.) After all, “Heaven has appointed to one sex the superior, and to the other the subordinate station…”^[29] Christianity was the foundation of the gender hierarchy, which meant, for Beecher, that women entering the political sphere violated women’s divinely-decreed space and responsibilities. Women’s “influence” and “power” were to be exerted through the encouragement of love, peace, and moral rightness, as well as by professional teaching, in the “domestic and social circle.”^[30] In other words, women were to hint to men and boys the proper way to act in politics only while at home, school, and so forth.^[31] This highlights why domestic “work” must reach definitionally beyond household tasks: just as Winnemucca Hopkins and Jacobs were expected to maintain certain demeanors in addition to completing their physical labors, here women must be shining examples, moral compasses, with bearings above reproach.

Clearly, direct calls and organizing for political and social change were wrong; they threatened “the sacred protection of religion” and turned woman into a “combatant” and “partisan.”^[32] They set women against God and men. Elsewhere, reformist women were also condemned for speaking to mixed-sex audiences, attacking men instead of supporting them, and more.^[33] Beecher and other women held values that restricted women to domestic roles, to “power” no more intrusive to the gender order than housework — to adopt these roles was moral, to push beyond them immoral. The connection between the ideological spheres: one was an anchor on the other. (Limited advocacy to keep women in domestic roles, however, seemed acceptable: Beecher’s essay was public, reinforcing the expectations and sensibilities of many readers, and she was an activist for women in education, a new role yet one safely distant from politics.^[34]) Reformist women, of course, such as abolitionist Angelina Grimké, held views a bit closer to those of Jacobs and Winnemucca Hopkins: women were moral beings, and therefore had the ethical responsibility to confront wrongs just as men did, and from that responsibility came the inherent social or political rights needed for the task.^[35]

The diversity of women’s beliefs was the product of their diverse upbringings, environments, and experiences. Whether domestic labor was viewed as moral depended on its nature, its context, its participants; whether engagement in the public sphere was seen as the same varied according to how urgent, horrific, and personal social and political issues were regarded. Clearly, race impacted how women saw work. The black slave could have a rather different perspective on moral-domestic duty than a white woman (of any class). One historian posited that Jacobs saw the evils of forced labor as having a corrosive effect on her own morals, that freedom was a prerequisite to a moral life.^[36] A unique perspective born of unique experiences. Race impacted perspectives on activism, too, with voices of color facing more extreme, violent motivators like slavery and military campaigns against native nations. Factors such as religion, political ideology, lack of personal impact, race, class, and so on could build a wall of separation between the private and public spheres in the individual mind, between where women should and should not act, but they could also have a deconstructive effect, freeing other nineteenth-century American women to push the boundaries of acceptable behavior. That domestic work and public advocacy had moral natures, aligning here, diverging there, at times connecting, has rich support in the extant documents.

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^[1] Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, Life Among the Piutes (Mount Pleasant, SC: Arcadia Press, 2017), 25-27.

^[2] Ibid., 25.

^[3] Ibid. 25-26.

^[4] Ibid. 26.

^[5] Ibid.

^[6] Ibid., 27.

^[7] Ibid.

^[8] Ibid.

^[9] Ibid., 27-28.

^[10] Ibid., 105-108 offers examples of Winnemucca Hopkins’ advocacy such as petitioning and letter writing. Her final sentence (page 107) references her lectures on the East coast.  

^[11] Ibid., 105.

^[12] Ibid., 106.

^[13] “Slavery is wrong,” she writes flatly. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. Jennifer Fleischner (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2020), 95.

^[14] Ibid., 96.

^[15] Ibid., chapters 5, 16, 19.

^[16] Ibid., 51 and chapter 27.

^[17] Ibid., 7-18, 26.

^[18] Ibid., 7-9.

^[19] Ibid., 26-27, 207-209.

   Winnemucca Hopkins, Piutes, 109-119.

^[20] Jacobs, Incidents, 25-27.

^[21] Ibid., 25.

^[22] Ibid., 207.

^[23] Ibid., 25-26.

^[24] Ibid., 26.

^[25] Ibid.

^[26] Catherine Beecher, “Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, with Reference to the Duty of American Females,” in Kathryn Kish Sklar, Women’s Rights Emerges within the Antislavery Movement, 1830-1870 (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2019), 109-110.

^[27] Ibid.

^[28] Ibid., 110.

^[29] Ibid., 109.

^[30] Ibid.

^[31] Ibid., 110.

^[32] Ibid., 109-110.

^[33] “Report of the Woman’s Rights Convention Held at Seneca Falls, N.Y.,” in ibid., 163.

“Pastoral Letter: The General Association of Massachusetts Churches Under Their Care,” in ibid., 120.

^[34] Beecher, “Duty,” 109.

^[35] Angelina Grimké, “An Appeal to the Women of the Nominally Free States,” in ibid., 103. See also Angelina Grimké, “Letter to Theodore Dwight Weld and John Greenleaf Whittier” in ibid., 132.

^[36] Kathleen Kennedy (lecture, Missouri State University, April 12, 2022).

The women’s rights movement of mid-nineteenth century America grew out of the preceding and concurrent abolitionist movement because anti-slavery women recognized greater political power could help end the nation’s “peculiar institution.” The emancipation of women, in other words, could lead to the emancipation of black slaves. This is seen, for example, in the writings of abolitionist activist Angelina Grimké. “Slavery is a political subject,” she wrote in a letter to a friend on February 4, 1837, summarizing the words of her conservative critics, “therefore women should not intermeddle. I admitted it was, but endeavored to show that women were citizens & had duties to perform to their country as well as men.”^[1] If women possessed full citizen rights, Grimké implied, they could fully engage in political issues like slavery and influence outcomes as men did. The political project of abolishing slavery necessitated political rights for the women involved in and leading it.

Other documents of the era suggest this prerequisite for abolition in similar ways. Borrowing the ideas of the Enlightenment and the national founding, abolitionists positioned the end of slavery as the acknowledgement of the inalienable rights of enslaved persons — to achieve this end, women’s rights would need to be recognized as well. In 1834, the American Anti-Slavery Society created a petition for women to sign that urged the District of Columbia to abolish slavery, calling for “the restoration of rights unjustly wrested from the innocent and defenseless.”^[2] The document offered justification for an act as bold and startling (“suffer us,” “bear with us” the authors urge) as women petitioning government, for instance the fact that the suffering of slaves meant the suffering of fellow women.^[3] Indeed, many Americans believed as teacher and writer Catherine Beecher did, that “in this country, petitions to congress, in reference to the official duties of legislators, seem, IN ALL CASES, to fall entirely without [outside] the sphere of female duty. Men are the proper persons to make appeals to rulers whom they appoint…”^[4] It would not do for women to petition male legislators to act. In drafting, circulating, and signing this petition, women asserted a political right (an inalienable right of the First Amendment) for themselves, a deed viewed as necessary in the great struggle to free millions of blacks. (Many other bold deeds were witnessed in this struggle, such as women speaking before audiences.^[5]) 

Beecher’s writings reveal that opponents of women’s political activism understood abolitionists’ sentiments that moves toward gender equality were preconditions for slavery’s eradication. She condemned the “thirst for power” of abolitionists; women’s influence was to be exerted through the encouragement of love, peace, and moral rightness, as well as by professional teaching, in the “domestic and social circle.”^[6] The male sex, being “superior,” was the one to go about “exercising power” of a political nature.^[7] Here gender roles were clearly defined, to be adhered to despite noble aims. The pursuit of rights like petitioning was, to Beecher, the wrong way to end the “sin of slavery.”^[8] Yet this castigation of the pursuit of public power to free the enslaved supports the claim that such a pursuit, with such a purpose, indeed took place.

Overall, reformist women saw all public policy, all immoral laws, within their grasp if political rights were won (a troubling thought to Beecher^[9]). In September 1848, one Mrs. Sanford, a women’s rights speaker at a Cleveland gathering of the National Negro Convention Movement, summarized the goals of her fellow female activists: they wanted “to co-operate in making the laws we obey.”^[10] The same was expressed a month before at the historic Seneca Falls convention.^[11] This paralleled the words of Grimké above, as well as her 1837 demand that women have the “right to be consulted in all the laws and regulations by which she is to be governed…”^[12] Women saw themselves as under the heel of immoral laws. But as moral beings, Grimké frequently stressed, they had the responsibility to confront wrongs just as men did, and from that responsibility came the inherent political rights needed for such confrontations.^[13] If a law such as the right to own human beings was unjust, women would need power over lawmaking, from petitioning to the vote, to correct it.

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^[1] Angelina Grimké, “Letter to Jane Smith,” in Kathryn Kish Sklar, Women’s Rights Emerges within the Antislavery Movement, 1830-1870 (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2019), 93.

^[2] The American Anti-Slavery Society, “Petition Form for Women,” in Kathryn Kish Sklar, Women’s Rights Emerges within the Antislavery Movement, 1830-1870 (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2019), 85.

^[3] Ibid.

^[4] Catherine Beecher, “Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, with Reference to the Duty of American Females,” in Kathryn Kish Sklar, Women’s Rights Emerges within the Antislavery Movement, 1830-1870 (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2019), 110.

^[5] “Report of the Woman’s Rights Convention Held at Seneca Falls, N.Y.,” in Kathryn Kish Sklar, Women’s Rights Emerges within the Antislavery Movement, 1830-1870 (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2019), 163.

^[6] Beecher, “Duty,” 109.

^[7] Ibid.

^[8] Ibid., 111.

^[9] Ibid., 110.

^[10] “Proceedings of the Colored Convention,” in Kathryn Kish Sklar, Women’s Rights Emerges within the Antislavery Movement, 1830-1870 (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2019), 168.

^[11] “Seneca Falls,” 165.

^[12] Angelina Grimké, “Human Rights Not Founded on Sex,” in Kathryn Kish Sklar, Women’s Rights Emerges within the Antislavery Movement, 1830-1870 (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2019), 135.

^[13] Angelina Grimké, “An Appeal to the Women of the Nominally Free States,” in Kathryn Kish Sklar, Women’s Rights Emerges within the Antislavery Movement, 1830-1870 (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2019), 103. See also Angelina Grimké, “Letter to Theodore Dwight Weld and John Greenleaf Whittier” in ibid., 132.

Early New England history cannot be properly understood without thorough examination of the ways in which women, or the representations of women, threatened or maintained the gender hierarchy of English society. This is a complex task. Documents written by women and men alike could weaken or strengthen the ideology and practice of male dominance, just as the acts of women, whether accurately preserved in the historical record, distorted in their representation, or lost to humankind forever, could engage with the hierarchy in different ways. (The deeds of men could as well, but that falls beyond the scope of this paper.) This is not to say that every act or writing represented a conscious decision to threaten or shore up the gender order — some likely were, others likely not — but for the historian the outcome or impact grows clear with careful study. Of course, this paper does not posit that every source only works toward one end or the other. In some ways a text might undermine a social system, in other ways bolster it. Yet typically there will be a general trend. Uncovering such an overall impact upon the hierarchy allows for a fuller understanding of any given event in the English colonies during the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. (That is, from the English perspective. This paper considers how the English saw themselves and others, yet the same analysis could be used for other societies, a point we will revisit in the conclusion.)

Let us begin with a source that works to maintain the gender order, Mary Rowlandson’s 1682 The Sovereignty and Goodness of God. Rowlandson was an Englishwoman from Massachusetts held captive for three months by the Narragansett, Nipmuc, and Wompanoag during King Philip’s War (1675-1676). Her text, which became popular in the colonies, carefully downplays the power of Weetamoo, the female Pocassett Wompanoag chief, whose community leadership, possession of vast land and servants, and engagement in diplomacy and war violated Rowlandson’s Puritan understanding of a woman’s proper place in society.^[1] As historian Lisa Brooks writes, “Throughout her narrative, Rowlandson never acknowledged that Weetamoo was a leader equal to a sachem [chief], although this was common knowledge in the colonies. Rather, she labored to represent Weetamoo’s authority as a pretension.”^[2] In contrast, Rowlandson had no issue writing of “Quanopin, who was a Saggamore​ [chief]” of the Narragansetts, nor of “King Philip,” Metacom, Wompanoag chief.^[3] It was appropriate for men to hold power.

That Rowlandson presented Weetamoo’s authority as an act is a plausible interpretation of the former’s lengthy depiction of Weetamoo dressing herself — this “proud Dame” who took “as much time as any of the Gentry of the land.”^[4] She was playing dress-up, playing a part, Rowlandson perhaps implied, an idea that grows stronger with the next line: “When she had dressed her self, her work was to make Girdles of Wampom…”^[5] The gentry do not work; the powerful do not labor. How can a working woman have authority? Further, Rowaldson ignored the fact that wampum “work” was a key part of tribal diplomacy, attempted to portray her servitude as unto Quinnapin rather than Weetamoo (giving possessions first to him), and later labeled the chief an arrogant, “proud gossip” — meaning, Brooks notes, “in English colonial idiom, a woman who does not adhere to her position as a wife.”^[6] Rowlandson likely felt the need, whether consciously or not, to silence discomforting realities of Native American nations. Weetamoo’s power, and a more egalitarian society, threatened the English gender order, and it would thus not do to present dangerous ideas to a wider Puritan audience.

“Likely” is used as a qualifier because it must be remembered that publication of The Sovereignty and Goodness of God had to go through male Puritan authorities like clergyman Increase Mather, who wrote the preface.^[7] It remains an open question how much of this defense of the gender hierarchy comes from Rowlandson and how much from the constraints of that hierarchy upon her: under the eyes of Mather and others, a narrative that did not toe the Puritan line would simply go unpublished. But the overall impact is clear. Rowlandson, as presented in the text, held true to the proper role of women — and thus so should readers.

Conflict with native tribes and captivity narratives held a central place in the colonial English psyche. One narrative that did more to threaten the gender order was that of Hannah Dustin’s captivity, as told by religious leader Cotton Mather, first from the pulpit and then in his 1699 Decennium Luctousum. Unlike his father Increase, Cotton Mather was in a bit of a bind. Dangerous ideas were already on the loose; his sermon and writings would attempt to contain them.^[8] Hannah Dustin of Massachusetts was captured by the Abenaki in 1697, during King William’s War. She was placed in servitude to an indigenous family of two men, three women, and seven children.^[9] Finding themselves traveling with so few captors, Dustin and two other servants seized hatchets one night and killed the men and most of the women and children.^[10] Dustin and the others scalped the ten dead and carried the flesh to Boston, earning fifty pounds, various gifts, and much acclaim. Mather’s representation of Dustin would have to confront and contextualize a seismic disturbance in the social order: women behaving like men, their use of extreme violence.

Mather first turned to the bible for rationalization, writing that Dustin “took up a Resolution, to imitate the Action of Jael upon Sisera…”^[11] In Judges 4, a Kenite woman named Jael hammered a tent peg through the skull of the (male) Canaanite commander Sisera, helping the Israelites defeat the Canaanite army. Mather’s audiences would understand the meaning. Puritan women’s subservient and submissive status was rooted in the bible, yet there were extreme circumstances where female violence was justified; being likewise against the enemies of God, Dustin’s gruesome act could be tolerated. Mather then used place as justification: “[B]eing where she had not her own Life secured by any Law unto her, she thought she was not Forbidden by any Law to take away the Life of the Murderers…”^[12] In other words, Dustin was in Native American territory, a lawless space. This follows the long-established colonizer mindset of our civilization versus their wilderness and savagery, but here, interestingly, the condemned latter was used as justification for a Puritan’s act.^[13] Being unprotected by Puritan laws in enemy lands, Mather wrote, Dustin saw herself as also being free from such laws, making murder permissible. However, the clergyman’s use of “she thought” suggests a hesitation to fully approve of her deed.^[14] He nowhere claims what she did was right.

Clearly, Mather attempted to prevent erosion of the gender order through various privisos: a woman murdering others could only be agreeable before God in rare situations, she was outside Puritan civilization and law, plus this was only her view of acceptable behavior. He was also sure to present her husband as a “Courageous” hero who “manfully” saved their children from capture at risk of his own life, as if a reminder of who could normally and properly use violence.^[15] Yet Mather could not shield from the public what was already known, acts that threatened the ideology of male superiority and social dominance. The facts remained: a woman got the best of and murdered two “Stout” men.^[16] She killed women and children, typically victims of men. She then took their scalps and received a bounty, as a soldier might do. Further, she was praised by men of such status as Colonel Francis Nicholson, governor of Maryland.^[17] Mather could not fully approve of Dustin’s actions, but given the acclaim she had garnered neither could he condemn them. Both his relaying of Dustin’s deed and his tacit acceptance presented a significant deviation from social norms to Puritan communities.

Finally, let us consider the diary of Martha Ballard, written 1785-1812. Ballard, a midwife who delivered over eight hundred infants in Hallowell, Maine, left a daily record of her work, home, and social life. This document subverts the gender order by countering the contemporaneous texts positioning men as the exclusive important actors in the medical and economic spheres.^[18] It is true that this diary was never meant for public consumption, unlike other texts. However, small acts by ordinary people undermine social systems, whether wittingly or not, and are never known to others. If this is true, surely texts, by their nature, can do the same. Either way, the diary did not remain private: it was read by Ballard’s descendants, historians, and possibly librarians, meaning its impact trickled beyond its creator and into the wider society of nineteenth century New England.^[19]

Written by men, doctors’ papers and merchant ledgers of this period were silent, respectively, on midwives and women’s economic functions in towns like Hallowell, implying absence or non-involvement, whereas Ballard’s diary illuminated their importance.^[20] She wrote, for example, on November 18, 1793: “At Capt Meloys. His Lady in Labour. Her women Calld… My patient deliverd at 8 hour 5 minute Evening of a fine daughter. Her attendants Mrss Cleark, Duttum, Sewall, & myself.”^[21] This passage, and the diary as a whole, emphasized that it was common for midwives and women to safely and skilfully deliver infants, not a man or doctor present.^[22] Further, her documentations such as “I have been pulling flax,” “Dolly warpt a piece for Mrs Pollard of 39 yards,” and “Dolly warpt & drawd a piece for Check. Laid 45 yds” made clear that women had economic responsibilities that went beyond their own homes, turning flax into cloth (warping is a key step) that could be traded or sold.^[23] Women controlled their labor, earning wages: “received 6/ as a reward.”^[24] Though Ballard’s text presents everyday tasks of New England women of her social class, and had a limited readership compared to Rowlandson or Mather’s writings, it too presents dangerous ideas that might bother a reader wedded to the gender hierarchy: that women could be just as effective as male doctors, and that the agency and labor of women hinted at possibilities of self-sufficiency.

The events in this essay, the captivity of English women during war and the daily activities of many English women during peace, would look different without gender analysis, without considering how the acts of women and representations of events related to the gender order. Rowlandson would simply be ignorant, failing to understand who her actual master was, Weetamoo’s position, and so on. Dustin’s violence would be business as usual, a captive killing to escape, with all of Mather’s rationalizations odd and unnecessary. Ballard’s daily entries would just be minutiae, with no connection to or commentary on the larger society from whence they came. Indeed, that is the necessary project. Examining how the gender hierarchy was defended or confronted provides the proper context for a fuller understanding of events — from an English perspective. A future paper might examine other societies, such as Native American nations, in the same way. Clearly, the acts of indigenous women and the (English) representations of those acts influenced English minds, typically threatening their hierarchy. But how did the acts of indigenous women and men, those of English women and men, and indigenous representations of such things engage with Native American tribes’ unique gender systems? We can find hints in English representations (Weetamoo may have been dismayed Rowlandson violated indigenous gender norms^[25]), but for an earnest endeavor, primary sources by native peoples will be necessary, just as English sources enabled this writing.

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^[1] Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), chapter one.

^[2] Ibid., 264.

^[3] Mary Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God by Mary Rowlandson with Related Documents, ed. Neal Salisbury (Boston: Bedford Books, 2018), 81.

^[4] Ibid., 103.

^[5] Ibid.

^[6] Brooks, Our Beloved Kin, 264, 270.

^[7] Rowlandson, Sovereignty, 28.

  Brooks, Our Beloved Kin, 264.

^[8] “The Captivity of Hannah Dustin,” in Mary Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God by Mary Rowlandson with Related Documents, ed. Neal Salisbury (Boston: Bedford Books, 2018), 170-173.

^[9] Ibid., 172.

^[10] Ibid., 173.

^[11] Ibid.

^[12] Ibid.

^[13] Kirsten Fischer, “The Imperial Gaze: Native American, African American, and Colonial Women in European Eyes,” in A Companion to American Women’s History, ed. Nancy A. Hewitt (Malden MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 3-19.

^[14] “Hannah Dustin,” 173.

^[15] Ibid., 171-172.

^[16] Ibid., 172.

^[17] Ibid., 173.

^[18] Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), 28-30.

^[19] Ibid., 8-9, 346-352.

^[20] Ibid., 28-30.

^[21] Ibid., 162-163.

^[22] See Ibid., 170-172 for infant mortality data.

^[23] Ibid., 36, 73, 29.

^[24] Ibid., 162. See also page 168.

^[25] Brooks, Our Beloved Kin, 265.

Historian John R. Gramm characterized Mary Rowlandson, an Englishwoman captured by allied Narragansett, Nipmuc, and Wompanoag warriors during King Philip’s War (1675-1676), as “both a victim and colonizer.”^[1] This is correct, and observed in what is often labeled the first American bestseller. Rowlandson’s narrative of her experience, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, is written through these inseparable lenses, a union inherent to the psychology of settler colonialism (to be a colonizer is to be a “victim”) and other power systems. Reading the narrative through both lenses, rather than one, avoids both dehumanization and a colonizer mindset, allowing for a more nuanced study.

Rowlandson as victim appears on the first page, with her town of Lancaster, Massachusetts, attacked by the aforementioned tribes: “Houses were burning,” women and children clubbed to death, a man dying from “split open…Bowels.”^[2] At the final page, after she was held against her will for three months, forced to work, and ransomed for twenty pounds, she was still elaborating on the “affliction I had, full measure (I thought) pressed down and running over” — that cup of divinely ordained hardships.^[3] Between war, bondage, the loss of her infant, and the elements such as hunger and cold, Rowlandson was a woman experiencing trauma, swept up in events and horrors beyond her control. “My heart began to fail,” she wrote, signifying her pain, “and I fell a weeping…”^[4]

Rowlandson knew she was a victim. She did not know she was a colonizer, at least not in any negatively connoted fashion. Also from opening to close are expressions of racial and moral superiority. Native peoples are “dogs,” “beasts,” “merciless and cruel,” marked by “savageness and brutishness.”^[5] She saw “a vast difference between the lovely faces of Christians, and the foul looks of these Heathens,” whose land was unadulterated “wilderness.”^[6] Puritan society was civilization, native society was animalistic. That Rowlandson’s views persist despite her deeper understanding of and integration with Wompanoag society could be read as evidence of especially strong prejudices (though publication of her work may have required toeing the Puritan line). Regardless, her consciousness was thoroughly defined by religion and what historian Kristen Fischer called the “imperial gaze.”^[7] Rowlandson’s town of Lancaster was in the borderlands, meaning more conflict with Native Americans; she was a prosperous minister’s wife, making religion an even more central part of her life than the average Puritan woman. (Compare this to someone like midwife Martha Ballard, whose distance from Native Americans and lower social class built a consciousness around her labor and relationships with other working women.^[8]) Not only is the distinction between herself (civilized) and them (beastly) clear in Rowlandson’s mind, so is the religious difference — though for many European Americans Christianity and civilization were one and the same. The English victims are always described as “Christians,” which positions the native warriors as heathen Others (she of course makes this explicit as well, as noted).

These perspectives, of victim and colonizer, cannot be easily parsed apart. Setting aside Rowlandson’s kidnapping for a moment, settler colonization in some contexts requires a general attitude of victimhood. If “savages” are occupying land you believe God granted to you, as Increase Mather, who wrote Rowlandson’s preface, stated plainly, that is a wrong that can be addressed with violence.^[9] Rowlandson is then a victim twofold. First, her Puritan promised land was being occupied by native peoples. Second, she was violently captured and held. To be a colonizer is to be a victim, by having “your” land violated by societies there before you, and by experiencing the counter-violence wrought by your colonization.

To only read Rowlandson’s captivity as victimhood is to simply adopt Rowlandson’s viewpoint, ignoring the fact that she is a foreigner with attitudes of racial and religious superiority who has encroached on land belonging to native societies. To read the captivity only through a colonizer lens, focusing on her troubling presence and views, is to dehumanize Rowlandson and ignore her emotional and physical suffering. When Chief Weetamoo’s infant dies, Rowlandson “could not much condole” with the Wampanoags, due to so many “sorrowfull dayes” of her own, including losing her own baby. She sees only the “benefit…more room.”^[10] This callousness could be interpreted as a belief that Native Americans did not suffer like full human beings, mental resistance to an acknowledgement that might throw colonialism into question.^[11] That is the colonizer lens. Yet from a victim-centered reading, it is difficult to imagine many contexts wherein a kidnapped person would feel much sympathy for those responsible for her captivity and servitude, the deaths of her infant and neighbors, and so on. Victim and colonizer indeed.

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^[1] John R. Gramm (lecture, Missouri State University, February 15, 2022).

^[2] Mary Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God by Mary Rowlandson with Related Documents, ed. Neal Salisbury (Boston: Bedford Books, 2018), 74.

^[3] Ibid., 118.

^[4] Ibid., 88.

^[5] Ibid., 76-77, 113-114.

^[6] Ibid., 100, 76.

^[7] Kirsten Fischer, “The Imperial Gaze: Native American, African American, and Colonial Women in European Eyes,” in A Companion to American Women’s History, ed. Nancy A. Hewitt (Malden MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 3-19.

^[8] Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (New York: Vintage Books, 1999). Ballard and her husband, a working middle-class woman and a tax collector, faced financial hardship and ended up living in “semi-dependence on their son’s land”; see page 265. Compare this to Rowlandson, Sovereignty, 15-16: coming from and marrying into large landowning families, Rowlandson did not need to work to survive. Given her background, her consciousness goes beyond women and work, to larger collective concerns of community, civilization, and faith.

^[9] Rowlandson, Sovereignty, 28.

  Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 11.

^[10] Rowlandson, Sovereignty, 97.

^[11] Brooks, Our Beloved Kin, 282.