Women of the “best poor man’s country,” even mistresses of the household, worked in the field in the course of their daily lives. Like the seventeenth-century Chesapeake women who labored beside their husbands and fathers, Pennsylvania farm women took part in the harvesting of the crop, wielding the sickle alongside the men. Women pulled flax as well; indeed, this plant was harvested exclusively by females.

  Working with and under these Pennsylvania farm wives were a variety of free and bound female laborers. The wives and daughters of tenant farmers, more numerous than historians once realized, were hired for both harvesting and household chores. “Inmate” women—whose husbands had contracted their family labor in exchange for a place to stay on a landholder’s farm—were obligated by the terms of the contract to help with harvesting, dairying, and the care of domestic animals. On the wealthiest farms, slave women were also part of the work force that the household mistresses commanded. Between 1729 and 1758, there were 104 slaves in Chester County alone, and most of them were owned by Quakers. Even after the Revolution, when the Quaker emancipation policy created a small community of free rural blacks, young black girls continued to work as indentured servants in Quaker farmhouses. And although indenture and slavery were on the decline in many counties by the mid-eighteenth century, a steadily growing and cheap supply of female labor remained to be drawn from the tenant, inmate, and landless families of the colony.

  The carefully kept records of commercially minded Pennsylvania farmers give us our best glimpse of these rural working women’s lives. Benjamin Hawley of the Brandywine Valley, a wealthy eighteenth-century farmer, kept records of both the wages paid and the tasks assigned to his many female employees. “Rachel Seal came here paid her a Quire of paper is for making 3 caps & 2 hoods & 6d for Bleeding Betsy make total in Cash 3s.” In the same year Hawley paid Mary Mullen to wash and Mary Lion to bake and wash. Other farmers hired local women to spin, reap, sow, pull flax, and gather apples, to wash, make shirts, and turn hay. And women often earned money from the sale of their products, marketing butter, cheese, eggs, candies, stocking yarn, and even featherbeds.

  There were many women, however, who were unable to sustain themselves through their labor or a skill. The ranks of the poor grew throughout the countryside in the eighteenth century, and relief policies were often as humiliating as they were charitable. Anyone receiving relief in the Brandywine Valley region was required to wear a red or blue badge marked with a P on the upper right sleeve, along with the first letter of the county or city providing the relief. The penalty for failure to wear this badge was the loss of assistance, imprisonment, whipping, or hard labor. Women seeking public charity could be forced to work, and poor children of either sex could be bound out to an employer at any age.

  Poor women of the cities fared no better than these women of the countryside. More often than not, those who began in need ended in desperation: women servants in eighteenth-century Philadelphia were more likely to follow a downward path to the poorhouse or a city hovel than enjoy even modest comfort or prosperity. And because Philadelphia lacked industry well into the nineteenth century, there was no factory alternative to domestic or menial jobs for women.

  Throughout most of the colonial period female servants were less desirable than male ones. While men could be employed in construction, at the docks, and in crafts, the demand for white female servants rose only as the city’s elite expanded and slavery became unfashionable in the wealthy Quaker households. In 1745 less than one-fifth of the city’s servants were women; by the end of the century, they were 40 percent of that work force. Scarce or numerous, these women struggled on the margins of society.

  Domestic servants were peripatetic, moving from job to job as work became available or leaving a household because of abuse or conflict. Many jobs were understood to be temporary. Poor women were hired for a day or a week for spring cleaning, kitchen work, or when guests in a household strained the resources of the permanent staff. Others offered—or demanded—steady employment; for the indentured servant, this often meant being on call twenty-four hours a day, six days a week.

  The discipline or punishment a woman servant might face depended on the terms of employment. A hired servant could be lectured, complained to—or fired. Bound laborers could be physically disciplined. Whippings were common occurrences within Quaker as well as non-Quaker households. The laws regulating indentured servitude, however, showed some sensitivity to both the employer and the servant. Servants were forbidden anything that interfered with their work obligations, including sexual activity, drinking, or marriage. Masters, on the other hand, were denied the right to harm a servant’s future life by selling her out of the colony without her consent or failing to pay her freedom dues at the end of the indenture.

  Resistance also depended on the servant’s status. Free, hired labor simply quit, but bound servants ran away. Masters and mistresses most often blamed a servant’s flight on pregnancy and the weak and sinful character this reflected, but pregnant runaways were often seeking to rejoin their husbands. Other servants fled because of abuse or insult. Whatever the motive, the price for failure was high: here, as in most colonies, the courts extended the term of service if a runaway was captured.

  In the struggle for control over a servant’s personal life, the servant was frequently outmatched by her employer. So Sally Brant learned in the years she spent in the wealthy Quaker household of Henry and Elizabeth Drinker. Elizabeth Drinker was no stranger to the role of mistress, for fifty different women worked for her family over forty years. Only eight remained for more than a year. One of these was Sally Brant. When Sally Brant became pregnant, Drinker was visibly upset. She was particularly disturbed by Brant’s apparent lack of remorse; as Drinker noted in her diary, the young servant “appears to be full of Glee as if nothing ailed her.” Drinker felt embarrassment enough for two, and when the household moved to their country home for the summer, Drinker forced Sally to remain in that rural retreat until her delivery. The experience of motherhood was slowly taken away from Sally Brant. The Drinkers insisted on naming the baby Catherine and refused to even consider the mother’s request that the little girl bear her father’s surname. Instead, the Quaker couple chose Clearfield, the name of their country house. When Joe, the baby’s father, tried to visit Sally Brant or see his daughter, Henry Drinker prevented it. Joe never saw Catherine, nor did Sally Brant ever see her child again. The baby was left at Clearfield with a wet nurse, and there she died.

  Sally Brant paid dearly for her brief experience of motherhood. She was required to pay, in the form of added service, for the expenses of her pregnancy, the time lost while she recovered from the birth, and for the wet nurse’s salary. The emotional cost is not known, for she kept no diary, as her mistress did. Elizabeth Drinker’s feelings were preserved, however; she was, she recorded, “sad” about the death of the infant, yet it is her offended propriety that dominates her diary account.

  Sally Brant left the Drinkers a year later. What became of her we do not know. But we do know that many of Elizabeth Drinker’s other ex-servants returned to her home over the years, coming to her door as beggars rather than employees. Their stories were similar. Married to other former servants, many of them had sunk into the deep poverty known to widows with children. The records of the Guardians of the Poor confirm Drinker’s personal knowledge that women were a disproportionate number of the desperately poor. Two-thirds of the residents of the almshouse were female; some resided there temporarily in order to give birth; others, homeless or ill, stayed longer. Many would have understood the hopelessness of Mary Johnson, whom the constable brought to the poorhouse just as she was about to “Drown her Child on Sunday.”

  Perhaps in no region of colonial America did race, religion, ethnicity, and social class crisscross with gender in more striking patterns than in the middle colonies. Surrounded by so many different expressions of women’s proper work roles, family and community roles, and legal rights and restraints, few communities in this region were able to deny that alternative notions of womanhood existed. Some, like the Quakers, tried to isolate themselves from the competing values around them; others, like the Dutch, willingly or hesitantly abandoned traditions and ideas which defined women within their culture. The price of self-assertion was high for servants and slaves. We know from Elizabeth Drinker’s own diary that her servant lost all control over her marital and maternal life when her actions offended her mistress. We do not know how African-American women negotiated gender in the rural world of Pennsylvania that kept them isolated, limited their access to motherhood, and assigned them work roles without any reference to their own cultural divisions of labor. It is not so much that this competition to define womanhood was unique to the middle colonies; it is the number of competing models—the “Babel of Confusion”—that is striking.

  5

  THE RHYTHMS OF LABOR: AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMEN IN COLONIAL SOCIETY

  MARY CAME TO VIRGINIA aboard the Margrett and John in the spring of 1622, soon after the Powhatan Indians launched an attack on the English tidewater settlers. She entered a community still reeling from the violent death of 350 colonists killed in a single morning. That the slaughter took place on Good Friday added to the horror these colonial survivors felt, but the day carried no special meaning for Mary. She was, after all, neither English nor Christian. She was one of a handful of Africans brought against her will to this struggling Chesapeake colony.

  We can say very little about Mary; her age when she arrived in Virginia, her physical appearance, her temperament, her abilities are all unknown. Yet her experiences before arriving in Virginia could not have differed greatly from those of other Africans wrenched from their homeland and carried to America. The accounts we have of the brutality of the slave traders, from both black and white witnesses, of the painful forced march to the Atlantic coast of Africa in which women and men were chained together, of the humiliation of branding, and of the horrors of the “middle passage” allow us to envision her distress even if we lack her personal testimony on such matters. The knowledge we have of her adjustment to America—mastering a foreign tongue, adapting to a new climate, to strange clothing and food, a new physical environment, and a culture whose customs and values were alien—make the loneliness and isolation of her situation certain even if it is undocumented. Her circumstances, then, are more vivid than her personality.

  Mary was taken to Richard Bennett’s large tobacco plantation on the south side of the James River. Here she witnessed the full consequences of hostile relations between the English and the Indians, for only five of the fifty-seven servants who worked Bennett’s Warresquioake plantation had survived the Good Friday assault. Although her English master needed every able-bodied worker he could muster, Bennett may not have set Mary to work in the tobacco fields. His culture identified agriculture with masculinity, and in these earliest decades of Chesapeake society, some masters may have been unwilling to overturn the gendered division of labor they held to be natural. Mary surely demurred from such notions, for in most West African societies women dominated agriculture. These very different traditions produced a surprising harmony in the matter of slave importation. Faced with demands for captives, African villages preferred to surrender up their males and protect their female agriculturists; faced with a need for fieldworkers, Europeans preferred to purchase men.

  What we do know of Mary’s life in the colonies is that she had good fortune. Despite the scarcity of Africans of either sex in the Chesapeake, one of Warresquioake’s five lucky survivors of the Good Friday attack was a black man named Antonio. Mary took him as her husband, in fact if not in English law. In a society where early deaths routinely interrupted marriages, Mary and Antonio enjoyed a forty-year relationship. Together they made the transition from bound service to freedom, although how and when is unclear, and together they raised four children, whom they baptized in the Christian faith.

  Like most freed servants, Mary and her husband—known in their freedom as Mary and Anthony Johnson—migrated from Bennett’s plantation, seeking arable land of their own. The Johnsons settled on the Pungoteague River, in a small farming community that included black and white families. By mid-century, they had accumulated an estate of over 250 acres on which they raised cattle and pigs. In 1653, their good luck was threatened by a fire which ravaged their plantation and brought the Johnson family close to ruin. Mary’s neighbors responded with sympathy, and local authorities helped by granting the Johnsons’ petition that Mary and her two daughters be exempt from local taxes for their lifetimes.

  This considerate act by the courts is the first concrete evidence that race set Mary and her family apart from their English neighbors. In seventeenth-century Virginia, taxes were assessed on people rather than on possessions, and Virginia’s taxable citizens were those “that worke in the grounde.” Such a definition was intended to exempt the wives and daughters of Virginia planters, whose proper occupation was domestic. By the time of the Johnsons’ devastating fire, however, the earlier unity of gender had been severed by race and “Negro women” were denied this exemption. And yet the racial distinction was not so rigid, the practice was not so uniform that Mary’s neighbors could not embrace her as a proper woman if they chose.

  Whatever else race meant to Mary or her neighbors, it was not yet the basis, or the product, of a broad official policy of exclusion and hierarchy. Africans were clearly a minority, for no more than 300 black Virginians lived among the 15,000 white ones in the year the court granted the Johnsons’ appeal. The identity created by members of that minority could still draw on experiences shared by the English majority. Black men like Anthony Johnson made their appearances in court just as white ones did; white and black intermarried, and bound servants of both races found their way to freedom as Mary and Anthony had done. White masters left property to black servants, black masters hired white laborers, and black planters participated in the scramble for labor by purchasing the labor of newly imported Africans “for life.”

  In the 1660s, the Johnsons, like other eastern shore colonists, pulled up stakes and moved to Maryland in search of fresh land. The Johnsons may have arranged to have someone else finance their move, for they were claimed as the headrights of two wealthy planters. They were not, however, claimed as servants. Instead, Anthony was a tenant, leasing a 300-acre farm in Somerset County, Maryland, which he named Tonies Vineyard. Anthony and Mary’s now grown sons and daughters soon joined them in Maryland, establishing farms nearby. Thus when Anthony died shortly after the move, Mary Johnson was surrounded by her family.

  In 1672, when Mary sat down to write her will, a new generation of Johnsons was making its mark in this farming community. But a new generation of English colonists was making their task harder. Bad signs were everywhere: in a new colonial policy that forbade free blacks to employ white indentured servants, and in the Virginia and Maryland laws that lengthened terms for servants without indenture, a category to which almost every new African immigrant belonged. Mary’s grandchildren, to whom she lovingly willed her cows and their calves, would grow to adulthood in a strikingly biracial society, for the number of African immigrants was rapidly growing. But few of these Africans would enter the world of free men and women as Mary and Anthony had done. The society that had once found room for “Mary a Negro,” to become the matriarch of a comfortable family, could spare no such space for Mary’s descendants. If it was accidental, it is apt that when Mary’s grandson John died in 1706, the Johnson family disappeared from the historical record.

  Court and legal records allow us to piece together the general circumstances and some of the critical events in the lives of Mary Johnson and her family. Such records also survive for other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century African Americans, and to them historians have added other sources both written and material, formal and informal, and they have employed the methods and insights of such related disciplines as anthropology and linguistics in analyzing them. Much of our knowledge carries the bias of the sources from which it is drawn: slave masters and mistresses and the legal and political institutions of their dominant white culture. It is not only a bias of judgment but of affective content; we know more about the feelings of masters than slaves, more about the meaning of slavery to those who instituted it than to those who lived under it. Our scholarly interpretations of these sources carry bias as well, formed from our own assumptions about normative behavior, our adherence to particular political or social values, and from the culture-bound vocabulary within which we think and write.

  If we can rarely recapture the motivations or feelings of African-American women like Mary Johnson, we can at least delineate the conditions under which they made their life choices. A seventeenth-century English writer once declared that a woman—by nature, divine intention, and the rules of human society—must bend to her husband’s needs and wishes. She must look upon this circumstance as “Conjurers upon the Circle, beyond which there is nothing but Death and Hell.” Such were the direct and immediate constraints encircling any colonial woman by virtue of her gender. Yet there were other circles—especially social class—that held women captive. Mary Johnson made her choices in life within both these conjured circles of gender and class, and occasionally she found herself entrapped by yet another: race. This circle of race was both tighter and more constricting for the generations of colonial African-American women who came after her. Most of these women lived their lives in a bondage based on race, and the choices they made as they created families, established intimate relationships, defined and abided by community norms and values, practiced religion, engaged in work, and altered or adjusted to their material circumstances had to be made within these three powerful, overlapping, concentric circles.