Colonial "women's work" was hard, physical labor. In the South, the urgency of farming crops for export stretched a woman's workday from sunrise to sunset. It was not much different in New England, though the goal was more often to maintain the family and set aside enough to...
The story of colonial settlement is often told as if men were the only actors, but women--as wives, agricultural workers, domestic servants, members of religious congregations, community builders, and mothers of a new generation--were crucial to European settlements just as women...