More Power than You think

The lives of women in Colonial America were not always as bleak and powerless as many of us imagine. When I was writing my first novel, which features a woman living in the 1740s, one of my first questions to myself was, “What could a woman of that era get away with? Did she have any freedom or power at all?” The answer, I discovered, is: she had quite a lot.

Many American women in the mid-1700s had surprising amounts of freedom. Among the Iroquois, for example, women ran the villages, elected local leaders, and even decided on when to go to war. French-American women could run businesses independently and pass on their wealth to sons and daughters equally (unlike what we’ve seen with English women on shows like Downtown Abbey).

Dutch women in New York were educated to run businesses such as hotels and tap rooms, breweries, bakeries and laundries until Dutch influence began to fade in the late 1600s. Carol Berkin’s excellent book, First Generations, describes these stories and discusses Quaker and African-American women as well.

Luckily for me, in creating the main character for my first novel, I had plenty of room to maneuver. Because in Colonial America, a surprising number of women had room to maneuver as well.