Colonial Dames and Good Wives Book Reviews

Colonial Dames and Good Wives by Alice Morse Earle Book Summary

In the early days of the colony of Massachusetts Bay, careful lists were sent back to old England by the magistrates, telling what “to provide to send to New England” in order to ensure the successful planting and tender nourishing of the new settlement. The earliest list includes such homely items as “benes and pese,” tame turkeys, copper kettles, all kinds of useful apparel and wholesome food; but the list is headed with a most significant, a typically Puritan item, Ministers. The list sent to the Emigration Society by the Virginian colonists might equally well have been headed, to show their most crying need, with the word Wives.

The settlement of Virginia bore an entirely different aspect from that of New England. It was a community of men who planted Jamestown. There were few women among the early Virginians. In 1608 one Mistress Forrest came over with a maid, Anne Burraws, who speedily married John Laydon, the first marriage of English folk in the new world. But wives were few, save squaw-wives, therefore the colony did not thrive. Sir Edwin Sandys, at a meeting of the Emigration Society in London, in November, 1619, said that “though the colonists are seated there in their persons some four years, they are not settled in their minds to make it their place of rest and continuance.” They all longed to gather gold and to return to England as speedily as possible, to leave that state of “solitary uncouthness,” as one planter called it. Sandys and that delightful gentleman, the friend and patron of Shakespeare, the Earl of Southampton, planned, as an anchor in the new land, to send out a cargo of wives for these planters, that the plantation might “grow in generations and not be pieced out from without.” In 1620 the Jonathan and the London Merchant brought ninety maids to Virginia on a venture, and a most successful venture it proved.

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