Twenty months after the death of her first husband, Margaret Hardenbroeck married Frederick Philipsen. Philipsen was a carpenter by training but, like many countrymen and women of Margaret’s circle, a trader by choice. By the terms of the traditional Dutch usus marriage contract, Margaret preserved both her legal identity and her financial prerogatives, an arrangement as routine under Dutch law as it was unusual to seventeenth-century English marriage codes.

  There are no clues as to the emotional quality of Margaret’s second marriage, but there is much evidence of its continuing success as an economic partnership. Frederick and Margaret became partners in the acquisition of property and in diversifying and expanding the inventories of their trade. Together they built a transatlantic packet line, including in this fleet two ships that carried their own Christian names.

  The conquest of the colony by the English in 1664 did little to disrupt the thriving Philipsen-Hardenbroeck business. Indeed, Frederick was sanguine about the altered political fortunes of his colony—as well he might be, for his own career flourished under the new regime. He willingly swore allegiance to the King of England in 1664 and again in 1674, and showed his openness to acculturation by Anglicizing his name. When the governor of New York, Edmund Andros, appointed him to the colonial council in 1674, he entered the political records as Frederick Philipse.

  Margaret Hardenbroeck’s experience was less satisfactory. She remained the aggressive, parsimonious businesswoman she had always been, yet she felt the constraints of English domination. The autonomy of a married woman in matters of trade and profit, common enough to escape comment in Dutch society, was an anomaly within English culture. The limitations forced on her under a system of law which did not recognize the custom of usus marriage and defined her instead as feme covert were disturbing to her. Although she could continue to act as legal agent for her husband, Margaret Hardenbroeck could no longer transfer power of attorney to him. Under English law, she had no such power to delegate. Nor could she continue to purchase or hold real property in her own name. To add to her properties in New Jersey, Margaret had to have her husband buy and claim title to the land. The transformation of New Netherlands into New York did nothing to deter this Dutch couple’s accumulation of wealth and prestige. Yet from the English conquest until her death in 1691, Margaret Hardenbroeck found herself steadily relegated to her husband’s mate rather than his partner, forced to rely on him as an intermediary in matters she had proved herself more than competent to manage directly.

  Margaret Hardenbroeck’s story might be used to illustrate the cultural diversity of the middle colonies. Here, in what became Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and Delaware, Swedish and Dutch settlements preceded the English, and the Society of Friends, or Quakers, a marginal religious sect within English society, became a dominant force in the formation of this Middle Atlantic region. The middle colonies’ seaports had, from the beginning, the cosmopolitan air associated with transatlantic trade and commerce: Jews and French Huguenots found homes in New York City, and German immigrants were accepted in Philadelphia without restriction. Thus, distinctive patterns of worship, family organization, and formal and informal legal and value systems of various ethnic and religious groups met in the middle colonies on a competitive, though never entirely equal, ground. The history of their intersections has been well told and carefully traced by colonial scholars. The historians have documented the process by which the Swedish settlers of Delaware or the early Irish Quakers of Pennsylvania became part of the dominant English culture through intermarriage. They have charted the slow, unevenly paced acculturation of the Dutch in New York after the conquest of New Netherlands in 1664. And they have distinguished the legacies of the Pennsylvania Quakers, who dominated the political and economic landscape for a significant period and sustained their power to define themselves even when their hegemony was lost.

  The lives of women within these Middle Atlantic colonies were accordingly diverse. As Margaret Hardenbroeck could surely testify, the boundaries of a woman’s life were culturally constructed, and their perimeters were made clearer in the contrast and clash of the legal and ideological assumptions and expectations of immigrants from different European traditions. For Hardenbroeck, the transition from Dutch to English norms was restrictive. For the historian of the period, it is opportune: it allows us to add counterpoint to point and variations to theme in composing women’s experience.

  In 1581 the states of Holland abandoned their allegiance to the King of Spain and began a forty-year struggle for independence. Their political rebellion was no more spectacular than their economic revolution: even before independence, the Dutch had wrought a remarkable transformation of their economy, based on commercial expansion. By the end of the sixteenth century, Amsterdam—with its wealthy entrepreneurs and its skilled artisans—was the center of an aggressive global trading network, its merchant class seeking new markets and new products in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The Dutch republic into which Margaret Hardenbroeck was born, with its decentralized political structure and its powerful commercial oligarchies, was the greatest trading nation in the world.

  The Dutch empire in North America was, however, modest. Henry Hudson’s voyage in the Half Moon in 1609 established the Dutch claim to the Hudson River Valley area. The Dutch East India Company (which had sponsored Hudson’s exploration) was too busy with other enterprises to pursue the matter further. When, a dozen years later, the newly chartered Dutch West India Company acquired the rights to exploit the North American regions, its directors were more interested in the profits to be made from their monopoly in the West African trade.

  Thus, the colony of New Netherlands grew fitfully. A post at Fort Orange (Albany) and another on Manhattan Island were established. But at the end of the 1620s, there were only 270 white settlers, almost all company employees. A new charter in 1629 granted land to voluntary colonists and bonuses to those who sponsored others. But with little unemployment in Holland, and little religious persecution there either, the impetus to relocate in America was not strong. The Dutch reached out to less satisfied neighbors, inviting English, Norwegian, and German settlers to their colony. From the beginning, therefore, New Netherlands was the most heterogeneous of all the North American colonies, producing what one critic called a “Babel of Confusion.”

  In 1664, when the English ships aimed their guns at startled New Amsterdam residents, there were 9,000 colonists in New Netherlands. Margaret Hardenbroeck was a prosperous entrepreneur, wife, and mother when Peter Stuyvesant surrendered the colony to Richard Nicolls. She represented, even if she did not typify, the possibilities for Dutch women given the economic and cultural contours of their society. She was the product of an entrepreneurial ethos that did not distinguish too rigidly between male and female capacities for economic activity. Her education had prepared her, just as it had prepared her brothers, for a role in trade and commerce. And, most important, the Dutch legal system did not force Margaret to choose between marriage and the marketplace; it allowed her to pursue success in both.

  In part, Margaret Hardenbroeck could claim a civil identity after marriage because Dutch law, unlike English law, was based on the Corpus Juris Civilis, or the Justinian Code of the sixth century. But Dutch women also retained their civil identity because marriage was interpreted as a partnership of equals. English marital laws confirmed women as dependents upon their husbands, placing their material well-being and their property into their husbands’ hands and making their husbands responsible for their maintenance even in widowhood. Dutch law, however, carried the logic of marriage as a “community of goods” and considered marriage partners equally responsible caretakers and developers of family wealth.

  Thus, in Dutch marriages, partners had equal claim to their original combined wealth and to any wealth later acquired, claims made good by the custom of writing joint or mutual wills. On the death of husband or wife, the widowed partner was entitled to half of the entire estate and had the right to administer the remaining half for the heirs. Dutch widows were not mere custodians of their deceased husband’s property, nor did they continue in widowhood as in marriage to be maintained by their husband’s sense of affection or obligation. No one knew this better than Margaret Hardenbroeck, who had, after all, made excellent use of her first husband’s wealth when he died.

  In marriage, Dutch women could continue to function as buyers and sellers of goods and property. They could contract debt and earn income. They could determine the heirs who would benefit from their industry. The chasm between feme sole and feme covert, sometimes bridged in English society but never filled, did not exist for Dutch women, who could choose a usus marriage that preserved intact these critical legal rights. Thus, until the English conquerors arrived—and changes in her social context were set in motion—Margaret Hardenbroeck faced neither categorical exclusion from the public sphere because of assumptions about “natural roles” for men and women nor formal exclusion because legal and familial structures demanded that women choose between marriage and economic autonomy. She viewed the conquest much as any important property holder and trader might, having as much to lose as her husband or her male peers. It was not until later that Margaret Hardenbroeck would realize she faced other risks specific to her gender.

  The 1664 Articles of Capitulation signed by Nicolls and Stuyvesant were reassuring to the Dutch of New Netherlands: all inhabitants, regardless of nationality, would remain “free denizens” and enjoy claim to their lands, houses, inventories personal and commercial, and to their ships as well. They were guaranteed freedom of conscience, and their inheritance laws were to remain intact. Nevertheless, a slow but persistent process of acculturation began for the Dutch communities within this now English colony. Rural farmers and traders were perhaps less ready to Anglicize their names or their customs than Frederick Philipsen, but he was far from atypical within the prosperous merchant class of New York City. Old family names disappeared; intermarriage between Dutch and English became more common; children learned English as their first and sometimes only tongue. By 1743, Cornelius Van Horne could observe with regret that “the Dutch tongue Declines fast amongst us Especially with the Young people … All Affairs are transacted in English and that Language prevails Generally amongst Us.”

  The tempo of change varied, of course, as did the perception within Dutch and English communities of the meaning and significance of some changes. Acculturation was not always a gendered process, for there were certainly areas of adaptation that affected men and women in the same ways. Yet the question remains: why did the life of Margaret Hardenbroeck change so radically?

  The Dutch were not immediately receptive to the English notions of gendered obligations and privileges. Not until the early eighteenth century did the practice of mutual wills disappear among Dutch New Yorkers. Yet the notion of a community of goods that propelled fifteen of the twenty-three New Amsterdam men who made wills with their wives before the English conquest had already weakened drastically by the 1680s. By the eighteenth century, women’s role in the dispensation of property had shifted from the formal arena to the informal realm of influence and suggestion.

  Wives steadily lost ground in other ways as well. Where once a couple’s estate was divided into two equal parts, with one half going to the surviving spouse and the other divided equally among sons and daughters, eighteenth-century Dutch husbands and fathers began to adopt English patterns that restricted widows both in the amount they received and in their entitlement to their inheritance. Margaret Hardenbroeck did not lose any of Pieter DeVries’s wealth when she remarried less than two years after his death, but a Dutch widow in New York in the 1730s was likely to encounter a will that made her forfeit all of her first husband’s property should she marry again. By mid-century, even if a woman did not remarry, her widow’s share had become not one-half but one-third of her husband’s estate.

  All women within the family, not simply wives, began to feel a disadvantage based on gender. The Dutch tradition of equal portions to sons and daughters was eroded over the last decades of the seventeenth century. Even the Dutch farmers of the Hudson Valley had abandoned the practice by 1750, choosing the now common English option of bequeathing the land to their sons and a cash settlement to their daughters.

  Did specific changes in family ideology or economic strategies precede and prompt this erosion of women’s power? Or did the transfer of political power to the English, despite the apparent tolerance for Dutch structures and values, make it impossible to sustain a dissenting cultural tradition? Historians are uncertain. They point to the practical effects of a change in government personnel: without officials trained in Dutch law, the drafting of mutual wills became an esoteric rather than a routine legal transaction. Thus, a loss of expertise may well have led to the abandonment of a practice. Other scholars believe they have found a shift, particularly among the Dutch urban merchant class, from a couple-centered marriage to a child-centered one. The commitment to launch children early and advantageously led men to siphon resources away from wives and widows. The English legal system conveniently gave them the mechanisms to do so. But these explanations are incomplete. Perhaps changes in the availability of land, the nature of economic enterprises, growing pressures by the English authorities to conform to their customs and codes, whether indirectly or out of convenience and efficiency, and the increasing complexity of credit and debt relationships—perhaps these variables led to the steady decline in Dutch women’s status within marriage and in the range of legitimate activity outside its sphere.

  One thing is clear: when Margaret Hardenbroeck died in 1691, she was a relic of an older tradition. Forty-six women traders had tested their skills in the commercial world of Albany in the decade before the English conquest. By 1700 not a single woman was identified among that city’s traders. The decline in New Amsterdam was even more striking, falling from 134 to 43 between 1653 and 1774, when Frederick Philipse shed his n and joined the colonial council. Women disappeared from the ranks of tapsters, brewers, launderers, and bakers, as the number of female proprietors of businesses shrank from fifty in the pre-conquest decade in New Amsterdam to seventeen in the decade that followed. Dutch women who, like the young Margaret Hardenbroeck, had appeared in court as both plaintiff and defendant for themselves and others dwindled in number after the English flag was raised at Fort Orange and at Manhattan’s Battery. In the four years from 1661 and 1664, 383 women sued or were sued in New Amsterdam courts; in 1673-74, only 50 had legal claims to press or deny. Perhaps the arrival of the English, and the growth in the colony’s population that resulted, left no space for the Margaret Hardenbroecks of an earlier era.

  As her community made the transition from a dominant to a marginal one within New York colony, Margaret Hardenbroeck focused her energies on sustaining a dying way of life. In neighboring New Jersey and Pennsylvania, however, Quaker women were busy helping to steer their marginal culture to a position of ascendancy.

  From its earliest days, Quakerism had gone against the grain of most English Protestantism. Like the Puritans, George Fox and his Society of Friends renounced the elaborate hierarchy of the Anglican Church and the role of the clergy as intermediaries between worshipper and God. But unlike the Puritans, the Friends did not believe that the Scriptures were the source of religious authority. The Bible was evidence of God’s presence but not the essence of His Spirit. That Spirit resided in every human soul, and it made every man and woman a potential member of the “priesthood of all believers.” Most seventeenth-century English Protestants rejected the radical implications of Fox’s argument, for Quakerism was too much a mystical religion to fit the intellectual climate of the times.

  The early Quakers earned a reputation as evangelicals, traveling across England, exhorting men and women to give up the sins and vanities of the world and listen to the voice of God within them. These injunctions to abandon the world of flesh and material comfort could be brushed aside by most who heard them. But as the fundamental tenets of Quakerism became known, their radicalism and potential for social disruption became less tolerable. Quaker insistence upon the equality of all men and women, which prompted the use of a “plain language” acknowledging no one person’s social superiority, grated against the accepted social hierarchy. Quaker commitment to the “simplicity of Truth,” which led them to refuse the double standard in truth-telling they saw in any judicial oath, disrupted legal and political affairs. Finally, the Quakers’ belief in the principle of peace, which produced a pacifist resistance to all military service, made them unreliable citizens in the eyes of many Englishmen and -women.

  Quakerism remained a marginal movement within English society, drawing most of its followers and proselytizers from among those whose poverty set them at the periphery of society. Yet the Society of Friends won the hearts and minds of a few influential and wealthy men, among them the son of Admiral Sir William Penn. In 1682 William Penn won a charter from the King of England to establish a colony in America. In Pennsylvania, the Quaker community would have its moment as a dominant culture.

  Quaker culture was centered on the family as a religious institution and around the pressing obligations of parents to ensure the orthodoxy of the next generation. For women, the task of transferring “holy conversation”—which entailed quiet receptivity to God’s Word—to sons and daughters was paramount in their life. This emphasis on the family within the Quaker movement was due as much to necessity as to doctrine, given the social class of most converts. In northwestern England, for example, the Quaker movement sank its deepest roots among the livestock-farming families untouched by the dramatic commercial development in the south. Because these Quakers were members of impoverished and widely dispersed agricultural communities, with few strong or influential institutions, movement leaders relied on the single vibrant institution, the family, to preserve orthodoxy and perpetuate what Quakers believed to be the “sacred life.”