We have assumed that genteel women were circumscribed by and identified with the domestic sphere, that they focused their energies on such private matters as raising children, and were more invested in appropriately feminine accomplishments than publicly acknowledged achievement and activity. If the Eliza Pinckney who studied French, learned to dance, and served as amiable hostess at the dinner table of her father and her husband affirms this gentility, the Eliza Pinckney who managed plantations, hired and fired overseers, discoursed on Locke, and laid claim to the future profits from an oak plantation does not. Perhaps this is only to say that ideals and lived lives are rarely the same; perhaps it is to say that gentility, like most social ideals, was more contradictory and less rigid for those who laid claim to it than for those who try to reconstruct it as history.

  It is clear that Eliza Lucas Pinckney lived within the magic circle of prestige and privilege enjoyed by her father, her husband, and later her sons. In itself, the existence of such a social hierarchy was not new. In the seventeenth century the men and women of Hannah Duston’s world deferred to the ministers and magistrates who honored her after her captivity. What is new is the fact that Pinckney’s social status was accompanied by a range of material comforts, luxuries, resources, and the opportunity to deploy them that went far beyond those available to most colonists. These resources separated the Lucases and the Pinckneys dramatically from other colonists, even if those of more modest means shared in the valorizing of the “genteel life.” Thus, to understand Eliza Lucas Pinckney and the women of her era we must look closely at eighteenth-century society and at the distinguishing marks of its social classes. If we ask what had changed or was changing in the first half of the eighteenth century that made social space for a woman like Eliza Lucas Pinckney, we must also ask to what degree social class had become a determinate of behavior and norms, just as race, religious community, or even region had long been.

  By the eighteenth century the line of settlement the English called the frontier had moved many miles west of the Atlantic coast. Changes in the physical landscape along the coast were striking. Where dense forests once stood there were now acres of cultivated farms and plantations and scores of towns and cities stretching from New England to the Carolinas. These signs of what the English would call civilization were moving steadily westward as quickly as land could be purchased or seized from Indian tribes and protection from England’s European rivals could be ensured.

  The sheer size of the colonial population distinguished the eighteenth century from the earlier decades of initial settlement and growth. Both natural increase and immigration in the early eighteenth century had wrought this transformation. Between 1688 and 1775, the white population of the colonies went from 225,000 to over 2.5 million. (The African-American population would reach 500,000 by the eve of the Revolution.) Every region experienced this astonishing increase in men, women, and children: New England’s population rose from 170,000 in 1720 to over 570,000 in 1770; the middle colonies from 102,000 to 560,000; and the Southern colonies from over 192,000 to 700,000. Eliza Lucas came of age in the midst of a population explosion that even the economist-demographer Thomas Malthus found impressive.

  Greater diversity was a striking feature of this growth. Thousands of immigrating Scots-Irish, Irish, and Germans made their way from their landing sites in Philadelphia, New York, and Charleston to the farmlands of Pennsylvania and to the Southern backcountry. Colonies such as Connecticut remained more homogeneous than New York or Pennsylvania, yet not even New England remained untouched. In addition to this increased ethnic and religious diversity, every colony was also becoming multiracial. African-American slaves were imported into the mainland colonies by the thousands each year, and although most were sold in the Southern colonies, New York City had a sizable slave population, and wealthy families in Newport, Boston, and Philadelphia purchased black men and women as household servants. Small free black communities were scattered throughout the colonies as well, and Indian communities still existed despite the decimation of the New England wars and the colonists’ ever-increasing claims on Indian lands.

  A diversity of population may seem an ironic characteristic for the colonies to share. Yet other forces also began to connect colonial men and women. Some were simply improvements in transportation, as the networks of busy roads that colonists traveled by horse or wagon, in carriages or on foot, helped to shrink local distances. Others arose from the complex web of intercolonial associations that included everything from shared military experience in the imperial wars to male friendships formed in college or through marriage ties. Expanding intercolonial trade, however, was probably the primary connecting link, making Rhode Island slavers and South Carolina rice planters regular business partners and establishing interdependence among the regions. Distinctive regional economies did continue, of course. Trade, lumbering, and fisheries dominated in New England, while wheat production and trade sustained the middle colonies. The South continued to build its prosperity on the production of agricultural staples such as tobacco, rice, and wheat. Perhaps even more distinctive were the regional labor systems: slavery now fueled the Southern plantation economy while in the middle colonies and New England free and tenant labor were prevalent. Nevertheless, as the eighteenth century progressed, several once significant distinctions among the regions were fading. For example, New England’s “Puritan way” gave way to a “Yankee” entrepreneurship similar to the commercially minded ideology of New York or Philadelphia, and demographic changes narrowed the differences in family structure from North to South.

  Colonists also shared the experience of what some historians call the eighteenth-century consumer revolution. Among the prosperous, an attention to English fashion and to genteel amenities grew, but even families of more modest means sought to purchase teapots, cutlery, and other consumer goods not considered essential for survival. While colonists still relied on European manufacturers for many of their needs and desires, there were local artisans, both slave and free, to supply some of these goods. In New York City alone, apprentices entered thirty-nine different trades between 1700 and 1730, and itinerant artisans carried craftwork to the most remote areas of every colony. The availability of consumer goods—from the mundane and necessary to the most luxurious—was greatest in urban areas. In cities like Philadelphia, Boston, and New York, streets were lined with shops offering everything from cloth to mutton chops, and hand-crafted silver to books and maps, while on the streets themselves men and women hawked fruit pies, farm eggs, and freshly churned butter.

  Finally, English and European ideas, like manufactured goods, began to make their way into the eighteenth-century society of Eliza Lucas Pinckney. Frequent transatlantic travel had become commonplace for the colonists engaged in international business and politics. The children of the rich, including Eliza Lucas Pinckney’s sons, often took their schooling in England, where they became familiar with the latest fashions, both intellectual and sartorial. Private libraries grew in number in every colony. Local newspapers carried accounts of everything from English politics and European diplomacy to the use of feathers or fur in hats. If the colonies were still “the provinces,” by the eighteenth century they were no longer so hopelessly provincial in attitudes and taste.

  The colonial world Eliza Lucas Pinckney knew as a girl and a young wife had ceased to be a society that could be characterized by religious refugees, speculative ventures, or political experiments (although Georgia, founded as a haven for debtors in 1752 by philanthropists, briefly continued along these lines). The colonies of the eighteenth century were now viable members of the British Empire’s transatlantic community. Historians speak of these decades as a time of colonial maturation, using terms that suggest transitions—“from puritan to yankee” or from a “moral economy to capitalism”—or in terms that suggest evolution—the rise of the assembly, the formation of a slave culture, the consumer revolution, or the Anglicization of colonial law. Whether these are signs of maturation or not, they provide evidence to explain the chasms between the lives of Hannah Duston and Eliza Lucas Pinckney.

  How did these changes and developments affect women’s lives? Such a question requires us to take a closer look at white women’s experience in terms of geography, social class, and the age cycle. The starting place for this examination is not difficult to find: the household, which remained the primary setting for white women’s activities in the eighteenth century.

  The majority of white women in the colonies still lived in rural, agricultural settings. Although fewer worked in the fields, there were notable exceptions. In Pennsylvania, for example, the wives and daughters of landless “cottagers” and tenant farm wives could still be called on for fieldwork, including sickling wheat and rye. And on the modest plantations or backcountry farms of the South, as on the outer edges of settlement everywhere, the whole family was likely to labor in the fields at critical moments of the season. The sharp decline of white female fieldwork could be best accounted for by the shift from white indentured servants to enslaved Africans and African Americans on the larger Southern plantations, and by the tendency of farmers who prospered in every colony to exclude wives and daughters from agricultural labor.

  However, white farm women were still responsible for the care of young children and the cultivation of the family garden. Like their mothers and grandmothers, these colonists were also expected to prepare and process food, sew and mend, and perform one or several—though rarely all—of the essential steps in manufacturing household necessities. The scale of these activities, of course, differed from family farm to large plantation. On Eliza Lucas Pinckney’s plantation, laundry was apt to take a week rather than a day, and sewing, even of the rough and shapeless clothing provided to slaves, was a task involving more hours than even the most industrious Pennsylvania housewife could imagine. In the Northern and middle colonies, rural women continued to rely on their daughters for domestic assistance or on servants or poorer local women, hired to complete particular tasks such as laundering or dairy work. Female slaves were used as domestic servants in the prosperous farmlands of Pennsylvania, especially among Quaker families, and some Southern planters probably allowed their wives to put young or elderly female slaves to work in the kitchen; laundry, or garden and, later in the era, in the production of cloth and clothing. The number of assistants a housewife had thus depended upon her own fecundity, the availability of hired or enslaved help, her husband’s prosperity, and his willingness to allocate resources to her for domestic duties.

  These eighteenth-century white farm women and their assistants probably did more household manufacturing than their mothers or grandmothers. For most of the seventeenth century, colonial families lacked the resources, or the male head of household would not allocate the funds, to purchase the equipment necessary to churn butter, mold candles, make soap, or complete the cloth-making process. In Eliza Lucas’s lifetime such equipment began to show up more frequently in household inventories. Not every housewife was a mistress of all trades. Nor did she need to be. Within their communities, women developed specializations and created informal networks of trade and exchange. Butter was churned by some; soap made by others; candles by still a third group of housewives. And where itinerant or locally based artisans were available, housewives often relied on their skills to provide some of the steps in the manufacture of needed goods. General stores, hubs of trade in Southern rural areas, brought English manufactured goods into homes, and household supplies also came from skilled slaves. Thus, while there were more churns and more spinning wheels and looms in the eighteenth century, this did not mean that every home boasted a full complement of the tools of “housewifery.”

  A rural white woman’s daily life, then, was shaped by her race, her social class, and by where she was in the socially defined life cycle. Only poverty and dependence could override the social conventions and, in some colonies, the legal restrictions that kept white women out of the fields. Prosperity, on the other hand, allowed some farm wives to be household managers and directors of other women’s labors. Whatever their economic circumstances, custom decreed that unmarried daughters, like servants, give assistance in a household that was ultimately not their domain. Thus, housewifery and household chores were the lot of all rural colonial white women, but not all of them were mistresses of the domestic sphere they inhabited.

  When these rural women speak to us through the rare diaries or letters we have found, they seem to speak in a single dismayed voice of the repetitive tasks that constituted the “sameness” that “reigns throughout the year.” They envied the variety of experience they saw in male work. Men’s fieldwork was hard labor, they conceded, but the chores were seasonal, and during work breaks, husbands and sons could enjoy a change of scene, taking trips to town or going off on hunting expeditions. By contrast, women’s work was constant, its cycle weekly, the days marked by a litany of chores: Monday washing, Tuesday ironing, Wednesday baking, and so on, until Monday came again. And the constant obligations of childbirth and child care kept these women bound to home. Most painful was the fact that there was little time to spare for niceties such as neatness or cleanliness, and no time at all for solitude. New England and Long Island farm wives seemed convinced that urban matrons did enjoy such niceties, imagining that all women in colonial cities and towns lived a Cinderella life of leisurely tidying up, making afternoon visits, and spending evenings reading or in quiet contemplation.

  It is impossible to know if the malaise expressed in these diaries was widespread. Most of the commentaries we have were not made in diaries but in “daybooks,” intended to keep track of daily chores. Perhaps complaints and comments were natural at the end of a long day, as a woman entered an accounting of tasks completed and those to be undertaken in the morning. There is usually no mention of children or of visits from relatives or friends. Thus, if these records capture genuine feelings of drudgery and boredom, they do not portray the entire range of the ordinary farm wife’s experiences.

  It is true, however, that urban and rural domestic routines were different. The difference arose from a city resident’s more reliable and steady access to processed goods and essential household supplies. Trips to the butcher shop, the fishmonger, the greengrocer, and to merchants’ establishments that sold cloth and other supplies were the common techniques of provisioning urban households in the eighteenth century—at least among those who could afford to purchase goods and services. Most townswomen continued to tend gardens and see to domestic animals, as indeed they would well into the nineteenth century, but other, tedious household chores fell to resident servants or to poorer women hired to do disagreeable tasks like washing, cleaning, and mundane rather than decorative sewing.

  It was clearly not the household tasks themselves that separated seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women’s experience. Yet the physical setting of many households probably would have surprised women of the earlier generations. By Eliza Lucas Pinckney’s day, a consumer revolution had begun to spread throughout the colonial world, even reaching into the countryside. It was transforming the material life of the colonial family. Some scholars mark the arrival of this consumer revolution in the early decades of the eighteenth century. Others consider it a late-eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century phenomenon. Still others view it as an ongoing social transformation, whose tempo and timing depended on the availability of goods and access to the discretionary capital that translated into purchasing power. We can assume that it, like other sea changes in society, was an uneven, erratic process, reaching some segments of the population before others. Yet a look at inventories of family possessions, or at advertisements in colonial newspapers of the arrival of imported goods, or at the architectural and related material evidence remaining from the era suggests that many free colonial contemporaries of Eliza Lucas Pinckney welcomed the opportunity to add to their worldly possessions whenever possible.

  While the consumer revolution affected males and females alike, new possessions most dramatically transformed the domestic sphere and women’s roles within it. Consider the changes Chesapeake scholars observe when they contrast planter homes in the seventeenth century with those of the eighteenth century. In the seventeenth century, historians have seen little to suggest that wealthy planter families lived in greater elegance than their poorer neighbors. True, a prosperous planter’s family sat on chairs to eat at a table, and they lay down each night to sleep on beds raised on frames rather than cots laid upon the floor. But luxuries were rare even among the most successful; perhaps the wealthy owned some crystal, a silver plate, or hung a picture on the wall. On the whole, however, a family with greater means possessed ordinary extras such as tableware and bedsteads rather than luxuries such as clocks, curtains, or family portraits. This “rude sufficiency,” as one scholar has called it, was not a temporary phase in the life of the large planter. Once the bare necessities entered the household, possessions that would have marked a higher standard of living failed to appear. What was true for the Chesapeake was true as well for rural Pennsylvania: in the seventeenth century, colonists demonstrated a homogeneity of material life that was spare by any standard.

  By the eighteenth century, however, such spartan existence was no longer acceptable to many white colonists. Where once entire households ate, worked, and slept in one room, these colonists of the eighteenth century showed great interest in constructing separate rooms for separate functions. Parlors were created, and heated to invite sociality. Kitchens no longer shared space with living areas. Multiple bedchambers, encouraging privacy, replaced the collective sleeping arrangements of the earlier decades. Even in the most modest homes, communal bowls of food gave way to individual servings on individual plates. Among the wealthy, rituals of table setting included the proper placement of individual wine and beer glasses. In rich homes and modest ones, the older custom of passing a single tankard around the table was vanishing.