The American Women's Almanac: 500 Years of Making History

By Deborah G. Felder

More than 300 biographies of history-making women

Explores 13 topical histories, including politics, religion, science, art, music, literature, sports, education, civil rights, and the military

Hundreds of history-making and inspiring events explored

From a scholar and researcher distilling and presenting the latest and most important information on the history of women in America

Clear organization makes finding information quick and easy

Fascinating storytelling

Historical insights and explanations

550 illustrations and photos bring the text to life

Each entry includes addresses, phone numbers, and websites for easy visitation

Helpful bibliography

Thoroughly indexed

Authoritative resource

Ideal for anyone seeking a better understanding of the oversized role of women in American history

publicity and promotion aimed at websites

promotion targeting more mainstream book review media and websites

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promotion targeting history and educational magazines and regional newspapers

• Language: English
• Publisher: Visible Ink Press
• Release date: Feb 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781578597116

Deborah G. Felder

Deborah G. Felder is a graduate of Bard College, where she studied drama and literature. She worked as an editor at Scholastic, Inc., and has been a freelance writer and editor for over 30 years. She is the author of more than 20 publications, including fiction and nonfiction books, and articles for middle grade, young adult, and adult readers. She has also written book reviews for The New York Times Book Review, Kirkus Reviews, and Publishers Weekly. She resides with her husband, Daniel Burt, in South Chatham, Massachusetts.

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INTRODUCTION

"T he past," writes historian Gerda Lerner in Why History Matters: Life and Thought , becomes part of our present and thereby part of our future. From the moment women arrived in what would become the United States of America, they began to make a history that was uniquely their own. This book attempts to present that history and to enhance it with the stories of American history’s most remarkable women.

The story of American women begins, like all human history, with exploration and migration, settlement, and the building of communities with their own cultures and social norms. For the vast majority of non-indigenous women during America’s colonial era, the observation of these norms meant physical, social, and legal submission to the authority of the religious and secular patriarchy under which they lived. For enslaved African women, it meant submission to their male and female white owners. But the era also included women who were able to challenge and transcend these strictures; for example, the adventurous Isabel de Olvera, the daughter of a black father and an Indian mother, who accompanied a Spanish expedition to Santa Fe, where she insisted on a legal document recognizing her status as a free woman of color; the courageous spiritual advisor Anne Hutchinson, who defied the established male clergy in Puritan New England by teaching and preaching the scriptures, a practice forbidden to women; and Phillis Wheatley, a Massachusetts slave emancipated shortly after the publication of her volume of poetry, the first book published by an African American woman. While the lives of most colonial women were confined to house, farm, or plantation, there were women who worked alongside their husbands as shopkeepers and innkeepers, ran their own businesses, and were landowners. Some women pursued careers in literature and the fine arts.

When Patience Lovell Wright found herself widowed with four children to support, she turned her hobby of molding figures from wax and clay into a successful profession, becoming the first Americanborn sculptor. Susanna Rowson was an actor, playwright, and author of Charlotte Temple, the first bestselling novel in American history.

During the American Revolution (and again, during the Civil War), women served as nurses, and in combat, as spies, and as message-bearers. Much has been made of America’s Founding Fathers, but the Founding Mothers, from the first women settlers in the thirteen American colonies and those who began to venture westward to the frontier, to such well-known colonial women as Martha Washington and Abigail Adams, proved equally influential in the early history that would result in the founding and formation of the Republic.

Despite the rights enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, the status of women remained largely unchanged for many years. The women of the new nation were encouraged—in fact, expected—to be the Mothers of the Republic, whose primary function was to train sons to be good citizens and nurture daughters to be good wives and mothers. The social and legal dictates of the nation meant that the vast majority of American women were prohibited from pursuing equal educational and professional opportunities. They could not own property in most cases, they were subordinate to the will of fathers and husbands, and they were denied that most basic of citizenship rights: the right to vote. Then, during the first half of the nineteenth century, a critical minority of American women joined the abolitionist cause to press for the freedom of enslaved Africans who possessed no citizenship at all. Women’s lack of equal participation with men in the abolitionist movement would reveal in glaring detail their status as secondclass citizens, and this set in motion what has always been, in my view, the most important aspect of American women’s history: the impressive capacity of women to individually and collectively advocate on behalf of equal rights for themselves, as well as for social, economic, legal, and political justice for all.

The long and hard-fought battle for women’s rights, a campaign whose earliest proponents were the abolitionist sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimké, began with women establishing their own antislavery organizations and continued with the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848: the seminal event that would usher in the women’s rights movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that is also called first-wave feminism. Thanks to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who prepared the convention’s Declaration of Rights Sentiments and insisted upon including in it a demand for votes for women, woman suffrage would become a major focus of first-wave feminism. The nineteenth amendment guaranteeing a woman’s right to vote would take nearly a century to achieve, and over the decades it required the indefatigable efforts of Stanton and women like Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, Carrie Chapman Catt, and the firebrand of the group, Alice Paul. Left out of the white mainstream women’s suffrage movement, African American women organized on their own behalf and featured such civil rights campaigners and suffragists as journalist and anti-lynching activist Ida Wells-Barnett.

At the same time the suffragists were working to achieve the vote for women, other movements developed in which women played a central role, and there was slow but steady progress for women in education and the professions. Although secondary schools for girls date from the eighteenth century, the nineteenth century saw the first institutions of higher education for women, the first co-ed colleges, and more women working in education, nursing, medicine, business, and the law, despite the prevailing social construct that maintained that only men were entitled to the pursuit of the latter three professions. The profession of social work and the emphasis on public and workplace health initiatives began with the settlement house movement, founded by women such as Jane Addams and Lillian Wald, to address the social, educational, and health needs of the large number of immigrants who had escaped famine and persecution in the Old World and were endeavoring to adapt to life in American cities, often living with their families in overcrowded, poorly constructed tenement apartments. Living as residents of settlement houses deepened the commitment of such well-to-do and professional women as Eleanor Roosevelt, labor activist Florence Kelley, and physician Alice Hamilton who strove to improve the lives of the working poor.

Women’s involvement in the nineteenth-century labor movement was represented collectively by the strike initiatives of the Mill Girls, who labored in the textile mills of the Northeast, and individually by Irish immigrant and self-described hell-raiser Mary Harris Mother Jones in her fight to improve conditions for coal miners and to call attention to the abuses of child labor. During the first decade of the twentieth century, a relatively short but intense women’s labor movement addressed the problem of women working long hours in nonunionized, lowpaying, shirtwaist-making jobs in New York City sweatshops run by owners more dedicated to profit than providing a living wage and ensuring workplace safety. The solution was to strike. Led by women garment workers, some of whom have earned a place in American history as the era’s greatest labor activists, the fight for the right of women garment workers to form a local union in order to better working conditions for themselves resulted in a spectacular strike during the freezing winter of 1909–1910. Often called the Uprising of the 20,000, the women on the picket line bravely stood their ground despite beatings and clubbings by police and company-hired thugs. While women garment workers were fighting for better wages and shorter hours, a visiting nurse named Margaret Sanger was attending poor women in the New York City slums who were struggling with multiple pregnancies and sometimes dying from self-inflicted abortions. In defiance of the law, Sanger and social activist Emma Goldman provided women with information on contraception, thus beginning the birth control movement. In 1915, in response to the world war raging in Europe and the possibility that the United States would join the conflict, social reformer Jane Addams and other pacifist women founded the Woman’s Peace Party, which would become the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.

Once the vote was achieved, the impetus for women to come together in large numbers in order to effect social change was lessened; instead, smaller organizations such as the League of Women Voters and the National Council of Negro Women worked to encourage the participation of women in civic, political, economic, and educational life. The United States Women’s Bureau focused on women’s working conditions in factories and in household employment. Suffragist Alice Paul’s 1923 proposal for an equal rights amendment would not inspire collective activism until the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s. After serving their country on the home front and abroad as nurses and ambulance drivers during World War I, many young women entered the work force during the economically booming 1920s, as office workers and salesgirls in the large new department stores: stereotypical women’s work to be sure, but for the single New Woman of the era, such jobs meant autonomy, as well as a paycheck, and a certain white-collar status that factory work could never offer them. The era also saw more young women athletes competing in intercollegiate sports and Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) and Olympic games, including the versatile Babe Didrikson, who is still considered one of the greatest athletes of all time.

The 1920s featured some of the most enduring women writers and performers in American history: Harlem Renaissance author Zora Neale Hurston; modernist Gertrude Stein; the witty poet, critic, and satirist Dorothy Parker; blues great Bessie Smith; singer and comic actor Fannie Brice; and film stars Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish.

It was the rare woman teacher, office worker, or salesgirl who continued to work outside the home once she was married. But when the Great Depression of the 1930s saw massive unemployment among men, many wives went to work to help supplement their family’s income. During World War II, an unprecedented number of women worked in wartime industries at home and as nurses in military hospitals in war zones. Women also served in all branches of the military in auxiliary corps, one of the most famous of which were the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs). WASPs such as Jacqueline Cochran were trained pilots who tested and ferried aircraft and trained other pilots. After the war ended, women began to seek careers in the military. Over the next several decades and into the twenty-first century, women gained entry to military colleges, worked their way up the chains of command, and were allowed to serve in combat. By 2019, Major Laura Yeager of the Army National Guard had become the first woman assigned to lead an infantry division.

Women who had helped to build bombers and other war materiel were let go to make room for returning soldiers who needed jobs. Many women willingly went back to homemaking and producing the first children of the Baby Boom generation; some resented losing their jobs, however; a sizable cohort of single women found jobs in offices, stores, and schools. During the postwar 1950s and early 1960s, more women were pursuing college degrees but frequently leaving college to marry or marrying soon after graduation. Housewives, including those with advanced college degrees, were perceived in a manner not unlike the earlier Mothers of the Republic: glorified and ostensibly satisfied by marriage and motherhood, a state of being reinforced by advertisers and on screen. But the era was both constrictive and progressive: Although marriage and motherhood were primary goals, Baby Boom girls were also expected to excel in school and in sports. Math and science were important subjects for girls as well as boys during the early Space Age, and, although women’s history was not yet a subject in college, many young women grew up knowing about the achievements of such women as Jane Addams and Clara Barton; Harriet Tubman, the heroine of the Underground Railroad; Frances Perkins, the first woman cabinet member; Jeanette Rankin, the first woman elected to the U.S. Congress; and Amelia Earhart, the first woman aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic. They were exposed to news concerning desegregation in the Jim Crow South, the Civil Rights Movement, and the promise of the Peace Corps. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy initiated the President’s Commission on the Status of Women, chaired by another icon in women’s history, the remarkable Eleanor Roosevelt. Intended to address inequality and gender bias in the workplace through legislation, the findings of the commission would be realized in a more concrete fashion with the various Civil Rights Acts and Titles within the acts that followed.

In 1963, the mothers and older sisters of Baby Boom girls were introduced to a book that would change the lives of many of them: The Feminine Mystique, written by journalist Betty Friedan to explore the discontent experienced by middle-class women in their primary roles as wives, mothers, and homemakers. The book would spark a second women’s movement from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, also known as second-wave feminism. Often called the Women’s Liberation Movement, second-wave feminist leaders such as Betty Friedan, journalist Gloria Steinem, politician Bella Abzug, presidential advisor Catherine East, and writers Kate Millet and Robin Morgan focused on a series of gender inequities and stereotyping at home, in the workplace, and in society at large; woman’s reproductive rights, most prominently the right to have safe, legal abortions; and passage and ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. Many of the movement’s aims were achieved through campaigns, protests, and legislation, but one of the movement’s most significant accomplishments was the absorption into the collective consciousness its condemnation of gender stereotyping, questions concerning the essence of feminism, and its call for equality.

By the mid 1970s and the 1980s, large numbers of women were pursuing advanced degrees and careers in higher education, law, medicine, business, politics, government, and nonprofit organizations. The era saw the first African American woman, Shirley Chisholm, elected to Congress, and Sandra Day O’Connor become the first woman appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Professional women continued to face challenges, however. The glass ceiling prevented women from reaching the top echelons of business, and women with children were viewed with suspicion that they were on the mommy track, distracted from their jobs because of motherhood. Tasked with domestic duties after work, many women also felt torn between their jobs, their children, and their spouses, and they wondered, in the argot of the 1980s, if it was really possible to have it all. Flexible workplace hours to facilitate motherhood might mean fewer opportunities for advancement and even the disappearance of a job when women returned from maternity leave or after spending the first years of motherhood at home. There were women who made the choice to use day care or to become stay-at-home mothers, if such choices were financially viable. For single mothers and the working poor, then as now, few options were available.

During the politically conservative 1980s, women experienced what author Susan Faludi called a backlash against feminist advances, with some representatives of the media suggesting that the women’s liberation movement was to blame for the unrealistic expectations of women in the workplace. However, by the 1990s, women were so firmly ensconced in every aspect of public life that the media’s harangues against feminism seemed irrelevant. In fact, the ever-opportunistic media dubbed 1992 the Year of the Woman, after an unprecedented number of women were elected to Congress.

The twenty-first century has continued to see progress for women. Although there have been influential women in the sciences since the twentieth century, including mathematician Katherine Johnson, computer programmer Grace Hopper, and such Nobel Prize recipients as physicist Rosalyn Yalow and cytogeneticist Barbara McClintock, more attention has been paid to young women who want to pursue careers in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines. In 2016 Hillary Clinton became the first woman in American history to be named the candidate of a major political party for the highest office in the nation. Two years later, a second Year of the Woman was proclaimed, this time with an even greater number of women of color, as well as women of LGBTQ communities, elected to Congress. The Me Too and other resistance movements in the wake of the presidential election of 2016, and the revelations of sexual assault and harassment by men of influence in every sphere of society, have prompted women to courageously speak out and show their willingness to organize on behalf of social change once again.

Like the abolitionists, the suffragists, and the women who formed the backbone of the Civil Rights Movement and fought for equality in the Women’s Liberation Movement, the women of the twenty-first century will not remain silent when faced with injustice and inequality because they know that the price paid for silence is too high.

The list of influential women in American history is long and could fill volumes. There is no question that all the women mentioned in the history covered in this book, and more besides, deserve recognition. However, for the biographies featured here, I chose to concentrate on the stories of women, who, in my view, best represent the historical trajectory of women in America. There are icons, trailblazers, and in some cases, pioneering outliers, all of whom have much to tell us about where we have been, where we are now, and what we might become.

THE ARRIVAL OF WOMEN IN AMERICA

The first women in the area of North America that would become the United States were members of the many indigenous groups and tribes that populated the continent. The arrival of European women, who lived in patriarchal societies and were largely consigned to the private rather than public sphere, generally followed the explorations of the Spanish conquistadores (conquerors) and the appropriation of land and resources that began in the West Indies in the late fifteenth century and continued throughout the Americas in the sixteenth century as well as the first European attempts at colonization, particularly by the Spanish, English, and Dutch in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The wars and religious rivalries occurring in Europe at this time would spill over into North America as nations and religious communities strove to gain footholds there. Women, initially thought to be too frail to endure the dangers and hardships of a journey to the New World and therefore considered too much of a hindrance in colonization efforts, would prove to be necessary to the survival of the settlements that were eventually established in North America.

Some Native Americans accepted the presence of the Europeans, offered aid, and chose alliances with the European explorers and settlers; many others aggressively rejected their intrusion. The violence resulting from European attempts to acquire and colonize territory, together with diseases the explorers and first colonists brought with them from Europe, led to large declines in indigenous populations throughout the Americas. Confrontations with and displacement of Native Americans in the United States would continue well into the nineteenth century as the nation continued to expand its territory in accordance with the principle of Manifest Destiny.

WOMEN AND THE FIRST EUROPEAN SETTLEMENTS

Histories of the age of exploration have traditionally focused on the men who made those explorations and first attempted to colonize the lands they conquered. However, the presence of women in Florida, the Southeast, and the Southwest in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries predate the founding of the more well-known Roanoke Colony and the early seventeenth-century settlements of Jamestown, Plymouth, and New Amsterdam.

1539: Francisca Hinestrosa and Ana Mendez

It is most likely that the first European women to set foot in what would become the continental United States accompanied Spanish explorer and conquistador Hernando de Soto (c. 1495–1542) on his expedition to Florida and the Southeast. In 1539, de Soto and a large number of ships, men (including soldiers, priests, craftsmen, engineers, farmers, and merchants), horses, and supplies sailed from Spanish-held Cuba to present-day Florida (which he named Espíritu Sancto, Holy Spirit) and the Southeast to settle the land and claim it for Charles V of the Spanish and Holy Roman empires. De Soto’s wife, Doña Isabel de Bobadilla, remained in Cuba with nine Castilian women and female slaves, although some sources claim that de Soto’s wife and family, as well as the families of some of his men, also made the crossing to Florida. What is more clearly documented is the presence of Ana Mendez, the servant of Doña Isabel, and Francisca Hinestrosa on the expedition. Little information exists on Francisca Hinestrosa and even less on Ana Mendez. Hinestrosa was most likely the member of an influential Cuban family, and she may have been married to Luis de Inostrosa or Hernando Bautista, both from Seville, or she was the wife of one of de Soto’s unnamed soldiers. Hinestrosa made the journey disguised as a male soldier; sources differ on whether the deception was revealed early on, afterward working as a nurse and a cook for the company, or she was identified as a woman only after her death. Hinestrosa was with de Soto and his company as they traveled throughout the Southeast, including present-day Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi. In each area, the expedition established winter camps in deserted or commandeered Native American villages.

While traveling to the Gulf of Mexico to meet ships from Havana with fresh supplies, de Soto and his Spaniards suffered numerous casualties and the loss of most of their possessions as the result of a battle led by Chief Tuskaloosa at the Native American fortress of Mabila in southern Alabama. De Soto moved inland and, in the early spring of 1541, set up a camp near a Chickasaw village in Mississippi in the area around present-day Tupelo. De Soto demanded porters from the village leader as well as women for domestic and sexual labor. The Chickasaws refused and attacked de Soto’s camp during the night, burning huts and killing somewhere between a dozen and forty Spaniards. Among the dead was Francisca Hinestrosa, who was either unable to leave her hut because she was pregnant and in labor or, according to some sources, escaped but went back to the hut to collect her pearls. Ana Mendez survived the attack and later described her experiences with the expedition to a Spanish commission.

This statue that was once atop the Castillo de la Real Fuerza in Havana, Cuba, is said by locals to represent Doña Isabel de Bobadilla, who was the Spanish governor of Cuba from 1539 to 1543 as well as the wife of explorer Hernando de Soto.

1564: The French Huguenot Women of Fort Caroline

Women were also among the colonists at the short-lived French settlement of Fort Caroline. The persecution of the Huguenots (Reformed Protestants) in Catholic France, which culminated in the French Wars of Religion (1562–1598; also known as the Huguenot Wars), led to greater attempts to colonize territories in the Americas where French Protestants might find refuge. The Huguenots failed to establish settlements in Brazil (1555–1567; destroyed by the Portuguese) and on Parris Island in present-day Georgia (1562; abandoned the following year). In 1564, Huguenot explorers Jean Ribault and René Goulaine de Laudonnièrre founded a third settlement in Florida on the banks of the St. John’s River near present-day Jacksonville. Named Fort Caroline after the French king Charles IX and intended at first as a commercial venture and expansion of the French empire, which had begun to establish a presence in Canadian America in the early sixteenth century, the settlement ultimately served as a safe haven for Huguenots. Some three hundred settlers, including Huguenot women, were brought from France to Fort Caroline, and French soldiers and artisans built a village and fort with the help of a local Indian tribe, the Timucuans. Jean Ribault was pleased with the look and demeanor of the settlers, whom he described as very gentle, courteous, and of good nature and the women especially well favored and modest.

By the spring of 1565, the settlers at Fort Caroline faced starvation, mutiny, and Indian attacks when relations with the Timucuans deteriorated. The colony was on the verge of collapse when Jean Ribault returned from France with fresh supplies, several hundred soldiers, and more women as well as children. In August 1565, a Spanish fleet captained by Pedro Menéndez de Avilés landed up the coast from Fort Caroline and founded St. Augustine, a fort that would become the first permanent European colonial settlement in what is now the continental United States (women would arrive in St. Augustine the following year). Determined to drive out the French, considered heretics as well as a threat to Catholic Spain’s claim on all of La Florida, Menéndez marched on Fort Caroline with about five hundred troops. The French fleet had run aground near St. Augustine during a storm, and the few soldiers who had stayed behind at the fort could not hold off Menéndez’s soldiers, who massacred the majority of Fort Caroline’s men and later killed Jean Ribault and his soldiers except for those who claimed to be Catholic, some impressed Breton sailors, and four artisans who were sent to St. Augustine. The site became known as Las Matanzas (The Slaughters). About twenty-six men, including René Goulaine de Laudonnièrre, managed to escape. The Spanish spared about fifty to sixty women and children, who were taken prisoner and sent to Havana. Their fate remains unknown.

A drawing of the early French settlement near Jacksonville, Florida, Fort Caroline, which was established by French Huguenots, including some of the first women settlers from Europe.

1587: Virginia Dare and the Roanoke Colony

The first sixteenth-century English women colonists arrived at Roanoke Island in present-day North Carolina in July 1587. Named after the Roanoke Carolina Algonquian people who inhabited the island, Roanoke Colony is often referred to as the Lost Colony because of the mystery that has surrounded its disappearance. Sponsored by England’s queen, Elizabeth I, and organized by soldier, explorer, and courtier Sir Walter Raleigh, the Roanoke Colony followed two voyages in 1584 and 1585. The earlier voyages were intended to first explore the area, which Raleigh named Virginia for Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen, and then establish a permanent English presence that would challenge the commercial and religious dominance of Spain in North America. According to the charter granted to Raleigh, the mission was to discover, search, find out, and view such remote heathen and barbarous Lands, Countries, and territories … to have, hold, occupy, and enjoy. An attempt to fortify and colonize Roanoke during the second voyage failed, but the 1587 voyage brought some 117 men, women, and children to the site of the 1585 settlement. Among the colonists was artist John White, a veteran of the second voyage and the colony’s governor, and White’s daughter and son-in-law, Eleanor (also spelled Elinor and Elenora) and Ananias Dare. In August, Eleanor gave birth to a healthy baby girl, who was named Virginia in honor of England’s new territory. One of two children born in the colony in 1587, Virginia Dare was the first and only female infant and the first English child born in the Americas.

The relationship between the colonists and the Croatan Indians and other local tribes John White had encountered on his previous voyage was for the most part friendly. However, by the end of the month, the Roanoke colonists’ food supplies had begun to run out. Worried that they might not survive the winter since any supply ships would land at the colony’s first intended site in the Chesapeake Bay area, the colonists insisted that John White return to England to inform Walter Raleigh of their situation and to ask for supplies and other necessaries. The governor proved reluctant and demanded that the colonists put their request in writing as a decision made with one minde. Women as well as men signed the letter, an unusual occurrence in an era when women were expected to confine themselves to domestic opinions. White, accompanied by the colony ship’s pilot Simon Fernandez and his crew, sailed for England in late 1587. The inability of White to find a ship that would cross the Atlantic in winter, together with the Spanish Armada’s attempted invasion of England in 1588 and the Anglo–Spanish War that followed, delayed White’s return to Roanoke for three years. White was finally able to gain passage to Roanoke aboard a privateer ship. When he reached the colony on August 18, 1590—his granddaughter’s third birthday—he found his belongings, which had been buried and hidden, and the word CROATAN carved into a post of the fort. The buildings had been dismantled, and no trace of the colonists or sign of a struggle was found. After a fruitless attempt to find them, John White returned to England, never to see his daughter and granddaughter again.

An 1876 illustration depicts the 1587 baptism of Virginia Dare, the first Englishperson born in the New World. Unfortunately, she was born in the colony of Roanoke whose settlers all mysteriously disappeared.

Despite several hypotheses, the most prevalent of which is that the Roanoke colonists had become integrated into one or more of the Native American tribes in the area, evidence concerning their fate has never been conclusive. Little Virginia Dare became an object of American myth and folklore as a symbol of innocence and purity, revered as the first white child in America. To punctuate that description, her name was invoked during the era of women’s suffrage when an antisuffrage group in Raleigh, North Carolina, feared the extension of the right to vote to black women. In the 1980s, North Carolina feminists urged the state to pass the Equal Rights Amendment to honor Virginia Dare. In 1999, in a perverse use of the name of a vanished little girl who was the daughter and granddaughter of immigrants, Virginia Dare became the symbol of VDARE, an anti-immigration group with ties to white supremacist, white nationalist, and alt-right movements in the United States.

1600: Isabel de Olvera

The exploration and colonization of the American Southwest included people of African ancestry. Most were enslaved Africans, of which some, mainly soldiers, were able to gain their freedom. In 1542, the Spanish enacted the Nuevas Leyes (New Laws), which forbade the formal enslavement and mistreatment of indigenous people in the occupied territories of New Spain. While only partially successful and frequently ignored, the New Laws would influence the status of mixed-race people in Spanish America.

In 1598, following the failed expedition of explorer Francisco de Coronado, Spanish conquistador Juan de Oñate brought 129 soldiers, two of whom were black, and their wives and children to the upper Rio Grande river to colonize Nueva México Province near Santa Fe. Two years later, Juan Guerra de Resa, a wealthy relative of Oñate, led an expedition from Querétero, Mexico, to Santa Fe in order to further bolster Spanish claims there. One woman accompanied the Guerra de Resa party: Isabel de Olvera, the daughter of a black father and an Indian mother. Concerned that her status as a mixed-race free woman of color would be challenged and her safety compromised in a pioneer outpost, Olvera insisted on filing a deposition with the alcade (mayor) before she left Querétero. In Olvera’s deposition, she states that she has:

… some reason to fear that I may be annoyed by some individual … and it is proper to protect my rights in such an eventuality by an affidavit showing that I am a free woman, unmarried and the legitimate daughter of Hernando, a negro [sic] and an Indian named Magdelena … I therefore request your grace to accept this affidavit, which shows that I am free and not bound by marriage or slavery. I request that a properly certified and signed copy be given to me in order to protect my rights, and that it carry fully legal authority. I demand justice.

Isabel de Olvera’s deposition was signed by the mayor and three witnesses and notarized. It is perhaps the first recorded incidence of a woman receiving legal standing as a free woman of African ancestry in colonial America.

COLONIAL WOMEN IN AMERICA

After the arrival of women at St. Augustine in Spanish Florida in 1566, the history of nonindigenous American women in what would become the continental United States continues with their presence at the first permanent English and Dutch settlements in Virginia, Massachusetts, and New Netherland. The Virginia Company of London and the Dutch West India Company established two of these settlements: Jamestown in Virginia (1607) and New Amsterdam in New York (1624). The Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts (1620) was founded as a safe haven for Pilgrims—Puritan separatists who had fled England to escape the jurisdiction and perceived corruption of the Church of England and settled in Holland in 1607 before immigrating to North America—as well as a commercial enterprise for a group of investors calling themselves the Merchant Adventurers (also known as the London Company), who financed the Pilgrims’ crossing on the Mayflower, indentured them to the company for seven years after their arrival in the New World, and recruited some fifty non-Separatist colonists to join them. The establishment of these British- and Dutch-American settlements marks the beginning of the economy, politics, culture, and society that would shape and define the Thirteen Colonies and the nation that emerged from them.

1608: The Women of Jamestown

Jamestown is notable for being the first permanent English settlement as well as the first successful British commercial colonial enterprise. Women arrived at the Jamestown settlement after it was determined that the commercial ventures that initiated colonization would be capable of generating profit for the Virginia Company and to discourage the practice of male settlers returning to England after making their fortunes. The first settlers at Jamestown in 1607 were about one hundred men and boys who, regardless of social class, were indentured to the company. In October 1608, a supply ship brought an additional 198 men as well as one woman, Margaret Forrest, and her fourteen-year-old maid, Anne Burras. Much speculation but few definitive historical facts are known about Margaret Forrest. She made the crossing with her financier husband, Thomas, and is pictured with him in an 1840 painting by John Gadsby Chapman titled The Baptism of Pocahontas, which hangs in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol building. A description of the painting identifies Mr. and Mrs. Forrest, the lady being the first gentlewoman to arrive in the colony. Anne Burras married carpenter John Laydon a few months after her arrival in what was Jamestown’s first wedding, gave birth to four daughters, survived what the settlers called the Starving Time during the winter of 1609 to 1610, and was listed as living in Virginia as of 1625.

When colonist John Rolfe (the future husband of Pocahontas) successfully cultivated tobacco in 1611, the economic viability of Jamestown was assured but only if enough settlers were around to tend and harvest the crop. In 1618, the Virginia Company began to offer fifty-acre tracts of land, called headrights, to men over fifteen years of age as an inducement to settle in Virginia (established settlers received two headrights), but the company feared that, without wives, the single men of Jamestown might abandon the settlement, which would threaten its stability, permanence, and, by extension, the expansion of Virginia as an English colony. In 1619, the Virginia Company acted on a scheme proposed by its treasurer, Edwin Sandys, to find a fit hundredth … of women, maids young and uncorrupt, to make wives for the inhabitants and by that means to make the men there more settled and less movable. To make the scheme attractive to marriageable women, the company advertised incentives if they would choose husbands from among eligible suitors and immigrate to Jamestown to marry. These incentives included not only husbands but also a dowry of clothing, linens, and other furnishings; free transportation to Jamestown; free room and board while they decided on which man to choose; and a plot of land. Prior to Sandys’s plan to import wives, the Virginia House of Burgesses petitioned the Virginia Company to extend to women settlers the right to own and inherit land, a right that was denied to women in England. The company claimed that in a new plantation it is not known whether man or woman be the most necessary, and it made a similar request during the recruitment of the Jamestown wives. The men of Jamestown would be expected to reimburse the Virginia Company for its financial outlay in the form of 120 (later 150) pounds of good leaf tobacco. The advertised incentives proved appealing to many women, especially those of the working class, for whom the financial demands involved in setting up households meant that marriage was only attainable after years of toil in domestic service. In 1620, ninety young, English women arrived at Jamestown to become what were called Tobacco Wives; another fifty-seven followed in 1622.

A replica of the ship Susan Constant, which some say was actually called the Sarah Constant. It was the largest of three ships that brought the first settlers to establish the colony of Jamestown. Only two of the two hundred settlers were women: Margaret Forrest and her maid, Anne Burras.

Life was not easy for the Jamestown wives. Because the cultivation of tobacco was labor-intensive work, women were expected to bear children as soon after marriage—and as often—as possible so that eventually, all members of a family could work the fields. Since few doctors or midwives were available, childbearing in the Virginia wilderness could be a dangerous process with only neighbors on hand to assist during childbirth. The prevalence of disease, as well as other complications during childbirth, meant that infant mortality was high, and it is estimated that one-quarter of the Jamestown babies died before their first birthdays.

However, the Jamestown brides had certain benefits accompanying the incentives that had attracted them to new lives in Virginia. Married women in England were not only forbidden to own their own land because of the rule of coverture—a legal term from English Common Law meaning covered woman—they were also legally prohibited from selling or inheriting property, making wills, or serving as executors without their husbands’ consent. The need for wives in Jamestown meant that the rules of coverture were largely ignored. If a husband should die early, widows would be provided for and not forced to remarry out of economic necessity. However, despite the relative liberation of the Jamestown wives, the colony, as it grew, adhered to a patriarchal social contract, which held that the husband was the head of the household and made all decisions pertaining to family and property. A wife was confined to management of the house and garden unless her husband was away from home due to business, politics, or military service, an especially frequent situation for men who owned large plantations. A wife would then become a deputy husband, or the oldest son would take on his father’s responsibilities regarding the family if he were old enough.

The need for wives in Jamestown meant that the rules of coverture were largely ignored.

Many poor women, as well as women convicts and prostitutes eager to escape a prison sentence, were encouraged to emigrate from England to Jamestown (and other colonial settlements) as indentured servants contracted to a landowner to work without wages, usually for four to seven years, in exchange for their passage to the New World. The Virginia Company agreed to pay for the transportation of indentured servants at first, but after the headright system was established in 1618, the company convinced tobacco planters and merchants to cover the cost with the promise of land. Indentured servants labored in the tobacco fields and did other agricultural work as well as household tasks. Some women married after their term of indenture was over; others were given clothing and some money, tobacco, or other salable or tradable commodity with which to start a new life.

Pocahontas

One of the most famous women in American history, Pocahontas (c. 1596–1617) has been the subject of numerous written and oral accounts for more than four hundred years. What we know, or speculate, about the life of the woman most associated with Jamestown comes from the writings of John Smith and other leaders of the Jamestown settlement, the oral history of Virginia’s Mattaponi Tribe, and through historical research. Pocahontas was the daughter of Wahunsenaca (called Chief Powhatan by the settlers), the mamanatowick (paramount chief) of the Tsenacommacah (also known as the Powhatan Chiefdom), an alliance of more than thirty Algonquin-speaking tribes that populated the Tidewater region of Virginia at the time Jamestown was founded. Named Amonoute, Pocahontas, as was the custom, was also given a private name, Matoaka (variously translated as Flower Between Two Streams or Bright Stream Between the Hills), for use on certain tribal occasions. Pocahontas (loosely translated as Playful One) was the child’s nickname. Written accounts of Pocahontas and Jamestown provide no details about her mother; historians have suggested that she may have been Wahunsenaca’s first wife, who was also named Pocahontas, and that she either died in childbirth or went to live in another village (probably her native village) after her daughter’s birth. If the latter is correct, then Pocahontas would have gone with her and returned to her father’s village once she was weaned. Her mother would then have been free to take another husband.

As the daughter of the mamanatowick, Pocahontas would have enjoyed a more privileged and protected life than other children, but, like other Powhatan girls, she was also expected to learn the work for which women were responsible in Powhatan society. In addition to bearing and rearing children, the tasks assigned to women were many and various: building thatched houses and making household items, planting and harvesting, identifying and collecting edible plants, cooking, fetching water, gathering firewood, and tending the fires.

Pocahontas’s interaction with the settlers at Jamestown began when she was a child of about eleven. According to popular history, the Jamestown leader was taken before Powhatan in his capital of Werowocomoco and forced onto the ground with his head laid upon two stones. When a warrior raised his club, ostensibly to smash in his head, Pocahontas rushed over to Smith and laid her head upon his, thus stopping the execution. Whether or not Pocahontas saved John Smith’s life has long been debated as has the true meaning of the event (the intervention of Pocahontas was not mentioned in Smith’s journals of 1608 and 1612, and it appeared in print for the first time in 1624 in his Generall Historie of Virginia). One theory suggests that the event was actually an adoption ceremony and that Smith’s life was not in danger (however, he likely would not have known this). Afterward, Powhatan declared that Smith was now a member of the tribe, esteemed as his son Nataquoud, and was given land in return for two great guns and a grindstone. When Powhatan sent gifts of food to the hungry settlers, Pocahontas, as the chief’s favorite daughter, accompanied the Indian envoys and in one case was sent to Jamestown to negotiate the release of Indian prisoners.

A statue of Pocahontas (born Amonute and also known as Matoaka) stands at Jamestown, Virginia. The legend of her life that was created by Captain John Smith and that survived four centuries is now being rewritten by historians seeking the truth.

By the winter of 1608–1609, relations between the settlers and the Powhatan Indians deteriorated after a summer drought severely reduced the tribes’ harvests. They were no longer willing to trade corn for beads and trinkets, and the English resorted to threats and burning villages to obtain food. John Smith’s narrative records that Powhatan lured him and his men to Werowocomoco with the promise of corn in exchange for such commodities as swords, guns, hens, copper, and beads. When negotiations between Powhatan and Smith and his men broke down, Powhatan and his family, including Pocahontas, disappeared into the woods. That night, Pocahontas returned to warn Smith that her father intended to kill him. Smith also later recorded Pocahontas’s efforts to save the life of Henry Spelman, who, with two other boys, ran away from the Powhatan village where they had been sent to learn native languages and serve as interpreters. In 1609, John Smith sailed back to England because of a gunpowder wound he sustained in an accident. Pocahontas and Powhatan were told that he had died during the voyage.

The relationship between the Powhatan Indians and the Jamestown settlers remained poor, and Pocahontas would not be mentioned again in English accounts until 1613. She had reached adulthood and marriageable age when she was about fourteen. Women in Powhatan society were free to choose their own husbands, and in 1610, after a courtship period, Pocahontas married the warrior Kocoum, who may have been a member of the Patawomeck Tribe. In 1613, when Captain Samuel Argall of Jamestown discovered that Pocahontas was living with the Patawomeck, he hatched a plan with the cooperation of Iopassus, the brother of the Patawomeck chief, to kidnap Pocahontas with the intention of holding her for ransom for the return of stolen weapons and English prisoners. Iopassus and his wife lured Pocahontas onto Argall’s ship to spend the night; the following morning, the Patawomeck couple left the ship with a copper kettle and some trinkets, but Pocahontas was not allowed to disembark. She was first brought to Jamestown, where she was put in the care of Sir Thomas Gates, who oversaw the negotiations between the English and Powhatan. Pocahontas was then sent to Henrico, an English settlement near present-day Richmond. There, she was taught the English language and English customs and given religious instruction from Reverend Alexander Whitaker. Powhatan agreed to many of Argall and Gates’s demands and, when it was clear that the English had no intention of releasing Pocahontas, did not attempt to retaliate, as his councilors advised, in order to ensure his daughter’s safety.

The relationship between the Powhatan Indians and the Jamestown settlers remained poor, and Pocahontas would not be mentioned again in English accounts until 1613.

English written history and Mattaponi oral history differ somewhat regarding what happened next. Both narratives record Pocahontas’s conversion to Christianity, her baptism with the name Rebecca, and her marriage to widower John Rolfe (best known as the successful cultivator of the lucrative tobacco crop) all in 1614. According to the English written history, the marriage led to the Peace of Pocahontas, a respite from the conflicts between the settlers and the Powhatan Indians. The English narrative also records that Powhatan agreed to the proposed marriage between his daughter and Rolfe and sent Pocahontas’s uncle to represent him at the wedding. Mattaponi oral history does not dispute the cessation of hostilities but maintains that Pocahontas, although cooperative for the good of her people and for her own survival, became deeply depressed when the English insisted that her father did not love her and continually repeated this fiction. When her sister, Mattachanna, arrived to care for her, Pocahontas confided to her sister that she had been raped at Jamestown. She later gave birth to a son, Thomas, whom the English narrative asserts was the son of Pocahontas and John Rolfe.

In 1616, Pocahontas, now known as Lady Rebecca Rolfe, her husband, and her son, accompanied by several Powhatan men and women, sailed for England. Their expenses were paid by the Virginia Company, which had funded the settling of Jamestown and was eager to encourage interest in Virginia. The Virginia Company decided that Pocahontas—a convert married to an Englishman—would be an excellent advertisement for the colony as well as for the company. After touring the country and attending a masque, where they sat near the king and queen, the Rolfe family settled in the rural town of Brentford. There, Pocahontas saw John Smith again and, according to English written history, reprimanded him for his treatment of Powhatan and her people and for the settlers’ report that he had died during the voyage to England after his accident. She told Smith that Powhatan had suspected that Smith had not died since your countrymen will lie much.

She told Smith that Powhatan had suspected that Smith had not died since your countrymen will lie much.

In March 1617, Pocahontas, her family, and the Powhatan Indians embarked upon the voyage back to Virginia. While traveling down the Thames River to the sea, Pocahontas became ill and died from an ailment historians believe may have been pneumonia or some form of dysentery (according to the Mattaponi oral history, the Powhatan Indians who traveled with them told Powhatan that she had been murdered and suspected the use of poison). On March 21, Pocahontas was buried at St. George’s Church at Gravesend, a town on the south bank of the Thames Estuary. John Rolfe left the sickly Thomas with relatives in England and sailed back to Virginia. The following year, Powhatan died.

Like Sacagawea, the Shoshone woman who accompanied Meriwether Lewis and William Clark during their 1804–1806 western expedition following the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, Pocahontas has been celebrated and mythologized in American cultural history as a symbol of the relationship between Native Americans and the Europeans who came to settle in what would become the continental United States.

1619: African Women in Jamestown

By the first decades of the sixteenth century, black slavery had been established at St. Augustine in Spanish Florida. The institution of slavery in what would become the Thirteen Colonies began at Jamestown and developed gradually in Virginia and the other colonies thereafter. In the summer of 1619, John Rolfe recorded that a Dutch warship arrived at Port Comfort in present-day Hampton, Virginia. In reality, the ship was an English privateer, the White Lion, which was carrying Dutch letters of marque allowing it to attack and loot any Spanish or Portuguese ships it encountered en route. On board the White Lion were twenty African slaves, including three women, who had been forcibly removed from a Portuguese slave ship that was attempting to deliver them to Mexico. Rolfe falsified his record in order to transfer any blame of piracy from the English to the Dutch, who also operated privateers in the area. The African slaves joined the Jamestown colony as indentured servants who worked in the tobacco fields and after their terms of indenture were freed and given some land. However, as more laborers were needed to cultivate tobacco in what was a burgeoning industry, the importation of Africans became routine.

By the 1630s, it had become customary practice in some instances to hold Africans in some form of service for life. What was practice became statutory law in 1640, when John Punch, a runaway indentured servant, was captured along with two white servants. The latter servants were ordered to serve one more year of indenture; Punch was ordered to serve his master for the rest of his life. In 1670, a Virginia law defined slaves for life as all non-Christian servants who had arrived in Jamestown by shipping. Further restrictions on the rights of Africans and the expansion of the rights of slave owners continued throughout the rest of the century, and any remaining rights for African slaves almost completely eroded by 1705 with the Virginia Slave Code, which codified the status of slaves as property. Similar laws would be enacted throughout the Thirteen Colonies.

Black slavery became more common after the beginning of the sixteenth century, leading to more African men and women being shipped to America to become indentured servants.

It is estimated that between 1700 and 1740, some forty-three thousand slaves were shipped to Virginia, the vast majority of whom were African men, women, and children. African women in Virginia—and throughout the South as colonies expanded and crops such as cotton were added to the lucrative southern agrarian economy—labored in the fields and as caretakers of white children in the households of their white mistresses, whether on large plantations or smaller, family-operated farms, but women slaves were especially valuable for the children they bore and who would, in turn, become an additional source of free labor.

Family life among the slaves could be tenuous: It was often common for children to be sold away from their mothers, mothers from their children, wives from their husbands, and husbands from their wives. The same was true in the case of African women with children born to white masters. In Solomon Northup’s Narrative of Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave (1853), Northup chronicles a slave, Eliza, who begs a planter to buy herself and her mixed-race daughter along with her son: But it was no avail.… The bargain was agreed upon, and Randall must go alone. Soon afterward, despite further pleading, Eliza is sold away from her daughter for $700. For white landowners throughout the colonies, black Africans existed only to be bought, sold, and worked to capacity. In a record of slave narratives commissioned by the Works Project Administration titled Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers Project 1936–1938, Abbie Lindsay, an ex-slave from Louisiana, describes the labor of slaves: They worked, in a manner of speaking, from can to can’t, from the time they could see until the time they couldn’t.

For white landowners throughout the colonies, black Africans existed only to be bought, sold, and worked to capacity.

THE ARRIVAL OF WOMEN IN NEW ENGLAND

They were a most unusual group of colonists. Instead of noblemen, craftsmen, and servants—the types of people who had founded Jamestown in Virginia—these were, for the most part, families—men, women, and children who were willing to endure almost anything if it meant they could worship as they pleased.

—Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower:

A Story of Courage, Community, and War

When the Mayflower Pilgrims, the earliest Europeans to permanently settle in New England, left Leiden in Holland in the summer of 1620 and landed on Cape Cod in November of the same year before establishing their colony at Plymouth, 102 passengers were on board, including eighteen women, all of whom were married. Three of the women—Susanna White, Mary Allerton, and Elizabeth Hopkins—were about six months pregnant. Only Susanna White would deliver a child—Peregrine White—who survived to reach adulthood. During the hard winter of 1620–1621, the women and children remained on board the ship while the men explored Cape Cod. The Mayflower then set sail again to settle in Plymouth, where the men built houses and storehouses in the new settlement. Legend has it that in March 1621, fourteen-year-old Mary Chilton became the first Mayflower passenger to step ashore at Plymouth.

The damp and crowded living quarters aboard the Mayflower most likely contributed to the spread of disease among the women and children and the high mortality rate among the women: Fourteen women died during the Pilgrims’ first fall and winter in the New World. Elizabeth Hopkins’s baby son, Oceanus, born while the ship was still at sea, did not survive the winter. According to the journal of William Bradford, the first governor of Plymouth Plantation, by the fall harvest of 1621, four married women, six adolescent girls, and four little girls were the last female survivors of the voyage. They included Susanna White, Elizabeth Hopkins, and two daughters of Mary Allerton, who had died in the spring of 1621 after giving birth to a stillborn son. Thirty-nine men and boys comprised the rest of the Mayflower survivors.

The Legal and Social Status of Colonial Women

The Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony and the seventeenth-century English colonists who came after them to settle in much of present-day New England, established as the Massachusetts Bay Colony (1628– 1686), generally adhered to the patriarchal, Puritan tradition regarding the proper status and role of women. God, it was believed, created women for the benefit of men, a belief instilled in women from girlhood and reinforced by a male-governed community in which family life dictated that men were the undisputed, lawful heads of households, and wives and children were obliged to obey them. Women were expected to dress modestly, to cover their hair and their arms, and to behave in a mild and courteous manner. They were not allowed to speak in church (where attendance was mandatory for all in the community) and, despite having been taught to read as girls in order to read the Bible, were forbidden to interpret the Scriptures, a proscription challenged in the 1630s by Puritan spiritual leader Anne Hutchinson. Women were denied a voice in the political and social decisions of the community and could not participate in town meetings or vote—a man cast his vote on behalf of his family unless he were ill, in which case his wife was generally allowed to vote in his place. Throughout the American colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, English civil Common Law (which became the basis for federal law after the American Revolution) and its rule of coverture meant that women were forbidden to own property, conduct business, or sign contracts, although young, Puritan women engaged to be married were party to a legally binding prenuptial agreement called a precontract or contraction. Widows who had not remarried were granted an exception to these laws, and if a widow did remarry, she retained exclusive control of the property she brought to the marriage.

The status of women in the Dutch colonies was different. From 1624 until 1664, Dutch colonists in New Netherland and New Amsterdam, which included settlements in the Hudson Valley area of present-day New York State and New York City, generally lived according to the laws of Holland (known as the Kingdom of the Netherlands after its unification in 1813). This meant that Dutch women experienced more autonomy and were officially accorded more legal rights than women in British America. Women kept their birth names when they married, and children were given their fathers’ first name as a surname for life. Women were legally entitled to keep any money or property they owned when they married; however, this entailed the choice of whether to marry according to Manus, in which a woman granted marital authority to her husband to legally represent her and become the administrator of her property, or Usus, in which she made a prenuptial agreement legally ensuring that she would retain sole control of her property. Women who were pregnant and unmarried could take the father to court to try to force him to marry her; if the father was already married, the woman could seek payment for childbirth costs as well as monetary support for her child.

Colonial Dutch women, who, like men, were taught a form of commercial arithmetic similar to algebra, conducted business, earned their living in various occupations, and were able to practice midwifery and medicine. Many did so while married and raising children. Examples include Sara Roeloef, a linguist who worked for several New Amsterdam businesses; Anneke Van Courtland, who oversaw the paving of the first cobbled street in the American colonies; and Margaret Philipse, who ran a shipping and import/export business.

In 1664, Charles II of England, vying with the Dutch for naval dominance, sent his brother James, the Duke of York, to claim the Dutch colonies for England. James’s fleet arrived in New Amsterdam in September 1664 and easily overcame the nearly nonexistent military force of the Dutch in both New Amsterdam and New Netherland. By the following year, Richard Nicholls, the first English