The+Common+People's+Experience

**Settler Relationships** 

Although few histories of the European settlements in North America in the seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies have acknowledged it, women played a key role in the development of the North American colonies. The first European outposts (St. Augustine, Jamestown, Quebec, Montreal, New Amsterdam) were composed exclusively or primarily of men. Since these settlements were envisioned as military or trading ventures, that fact is hardly surprising, but the absence of a substantial number of European women among the first settlers had a lasting impact on those societies' subsequent histories. In colonies such as New France, where European men lived in close contact with large numbers of Native Americans, sexual liaisons between white men and Indian women were common. These unions gave rise to the métis, mixed-race people who became cultural, political, and economic mediators between Europeans and natives. In other colonies, however, the absence of European women meant that migrants had great difficulty sustaining their societies. Either those colonies fell to stronger powers, as New Netherland did to England in 1665; or they required constant infusions of immigrants to survive, as did Virginia and Maryland, where demographic problems caused by the absence of women were compounded by high mortality rates. By contrast, the European settlements that included large proportions of women from their beginnings--New England, Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey--quickly reproduced themselves through natural increase. They did not need continued migration from Europe to sustain or expand their settlements, in part because New England and the middle colonies were very healthy places to live by seventeenth-century standards. Thus marriages were long and fertility rates higher than in either England or the Chesapeake.

**Native American Women** For Native American women, the arrival of Europeans was devastating to their culture and society. In much of eastern North America, women had been the agriculturalists, responsible for planting and tending crops. But English settlers refused to acknowledge Natives' claims to the soil, and their farms and plantations intruded onto Indian women's fields. Smallpox and other diseases such as dysentery and influenza decimated the populations of many villages. Catholic priests and nuns in New France and New Spain pressed Indian women and men to convert to Christianity (the Protestants of English America were less energetic in this regard), enforcing new ideas of morality--for example, condemning the premarital sexual freedom common in many Indian cultures--while at the same time offering female Indian converts the role model of the Virgin Mary, which many of them found inspiring. Europeans also encouraged Native women to adopt "proper" (i.e., European) gender roles by confining their activities to cooking, child care, and other "feminine" tasks such as spinning, rather than continuing to work in the fields. By 1800 the remaining Native American women in the eastern third of the continent had largely succumbed to these pressures, primarily because it was impossible for Indian people to sustain traditional ways of life--which involved expansive hunting territories and seasonal migrations--in the midst of European settlements.

**African Women ** After about 1680, African women were also essential to the success of the colonies. Enslaved women provided invaluable field labor to the tobacco and rice plantations of the mainland and to the sugar plantations of the Caribbean islands. The conditions of slavery were so harsh and the sex ratio so skewed (men composed the vast majority of slaves) that only after about 1740 and then only in the Chesapeake colonies did the African American population expand through natural increase rather than repeated importations.

**White Women ** In European households during this period, white women were the chief manufacturers of goods for consumption or sale; men provided the raw materials, women processed those components into useful commodities--clothing, butter and cheese, cured meats, and other foodstuffs. The sexual division of labor was so pronounced that when households lacked female members, those tasks were not accomplished. Historians once regarded the colonial period as a "golden age" for white women because of their significant contributions to the economy and their employment as widows in a wide variety of occupations, but this interpretation ignored women's lack of access to education, dependent legal status in marriage, and lives of hard work, frequent childbearing, and--especially in the Chesapeake--early death. Now historians assess white women's lives more realistically, recognizing that their labor contributions did not necessarily translate into control over resources and that most of their lives were spent as subordinates to fathers or husbands. Moreover, the older interpretation overlooked the experiences of female Africans, who endured lives of brutality and exploitation, and Native Americans, who suffered the destruction of their ancient ways of life.

**Stono Rebellion**  The Stono Rebellion occurred on September 9th, 1739. It happened on a Sunday morning, and started with a group of about 20 slaves. They marched from South Carolina all the way down to Florida gathering about 100 slaves by the time the sun went down. The real cause of the rebellion was not exactly clear, but the most likely reason for the march to "//freedom//" was because many run away slaves had made their way to Florida and lived there without masters. The rebellion started early in the morning when about 20 slaves gathered in front of a shop that sold guns and ammunition. They banned together and killed the two men manning the shop and stole the weapons, igniting their rebellion. After the slaves left the house, they then made their way to the house of a man named Mr. Godfrey and burned it down, killing both the man and his daughter. After that they went to Wallace's Tavern and proceeded to kill inhabitents of another six houses. More and more slaves joined the rebellion, until they marched in a group of about 50 people, and killed any whites they encountered. At about for in the afternoon, around 20 to 100 whites chased after the slaves. They killed thirty rebels, while thirty more escaped, only to be later found and executed. As a response to the Stono rebellion, The Negro Act was put into place, limiting the rights of slaves.They could no longer grow their own food, assemble in groups, learn to read, or even make their own money.


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