The consumer revolution undoubtedly affected all colonists to some degree. But perhaps its greatest impact was the increasing division between the material life of the wealthy and that of the less prosperous. The wealthy were no longer identified by their possession of sufficient ordinary goods but by their attainment of elaborate and ritualized luxury. Visitors from abroad were struck by the fact that Southern planters took pains to fill their homes with elegant furniture, china, and silver before they had even completed the construction of their house. By mid-century, couches and upholstered chairs, japanned chests and elegant mahogany tables, sideboards, buffets, screens, and clocks furnished the parlors and dining rooms, and family portraits decorated the walls.

  For the women of prosperous families, a new set of burdens offset the enjoyment of this “sweeping train of luxury,” since each genteel experience required considerable behind-the-scenes preparation. Walnut chests of drawers had to be dusted; cutlery had to be polished; pots, cups and saucers, jugs for cream, bowls for sugar, tongs, and teaspoons had to be washed, filled, and cleaned in order for tea to be a gracious ceremony. Where once a table could be laid with a tankard and a few earthenware bowls, now a proper meal required clean linen for the table, glasses for wine, cider, and beer, and plates and serving bowls—each sparkling and needing to be cleaned again after meals. Simple, one-course meals gave way to an elaborate procession of courses, provided from the garden, the oven, and the commissary skills of housewives as they went in search of shellfish, eggs, and poultry. This meant new domestic strategies: more planning of the garden and the orchard; more storing, pickling, and preserving of fruits and vegetables; more baking; and, especially in the cities, careful shopping and cultivation of relations with suppliers. As eating became dining, simple recipes handed down from mothers and grandmothers were no longer adequate. Cookbooks replaced custom in the kitchens of the genteel, and soup kettles, stewpots, saucepans, cake pans, and tart molds replaced the spartan kitchenware of the past. These demands on time and energy were adding to, rather than replacing, the demands of motherhood and household production. Still, such new domestic rituals had their rewards: like the young Eliza Lucas, genteel women sat down to preside over meals that had evolved into family social events rather than the hasty refuelings of the past.

  The personal and social meaning of these lifestyle changes were perhaps as important as the changes themselves. The possession of individual glasses and plates could reinforce a person’s new sense of individuality in other arenas. (Here, perhaps, is a clue to Eliza Lucas Pinckney’s own keen sense of her self.) And, when these daily items were not shared with others, a different connection to “things” may well have emerged. At the same time, ownership of luxury goods helped signal a person’s social standing to friends and particularly to strangers outside the home. An ideal of gentility, involving both a new self-image and a new encoding of social hierarchy, was being born.

  But possessions alone would not mark a man or a woman as “genteel,” especially since falling prices in the eighteenth century made manufactured goods more available to many colonists. Fancy clothing had to be coupled with the new manners, rituals, and social conventions that combined to express gentility. Thus, gentlemen and gentlewomen were able to recognize each other by their manners at the tea table and their civility in public places as much as by the silver buckles on their shoes and the decorative buttons on their sleeves. When Eliza Lucas left the isolation of Wappoo Creek for the intense sociality of Charleston, her evident familiarity with the rituals of tea ceremonies, formal dinners, balls, and the never-ending round of social visits marked her as a true member of South Carolina’s genteel society.

  A commitment to the genteel life redefined the priorities of a wealthy matron’s daily work routine. Even without this new social ideal of gentility, however, the prosperity enjoyed by the urban and planter elite was likely to produce subtle but significant shifts in the education and training of their daughters. While farm daughters learned and engaged in domestic skills in order to contribute to their family’s welfare, and poorer urban girls mastered specialized skills in order to bring income into the home, the daughters of the wealthy were not expected to contribute to the family economy through housewifery. Instead, their training was oriented toward the future, toward their married role as household mistresses. A very different constellation of accomplishments was added to their training, for young ladies were expected to have some familiarity with foreign languages, fancy stitching, dancing, and music. Many of these accomplishments required formal instruction, but mothers relied on exposure and experience to teach their daughters the arts of the tea table and the rules of “visiting.” Farm girls, accustomed to rising with the sun and working until bedtime, would have marveled at the pace of an elite urban daughter’s day. For, as one historian put it, these girls were the first American leisure class, rising late in the morning and finding time during the afternoon for socializing and reading novels. The widening differences between the experiences of daughters of the poor and the wealthy in a city such as Philadelphia can be captured vividly in their sewing tableaus: While poor girls sewed for income, alone or in the homes of employers, the daughters of the rich gathered in one another’s parlors, stitching while one member of the group read aloud to her friends, turning sewing into a social event.

  For eighteenth-century daughters of all social classes, marriage remained what it had been in the previous century: the female rite of passage into adulthood. While no law required that a woman marry, what colonists referred to as spinsterhood was still a decidedly undesirable condition for most girls. Daughters of prosperous Southern planters might fare well enough if land or ample support was provided for them in their spinsterhood, but the majority of unmarried adult women faced a lifetime of domestic tasks performed in someone else’s home.

  By mid-century, daughters of every social class seemed to enjoy the right to refuse a matrimonial candidate. The evidence we have suggests that girls did not resent but often solicited their parents’ advice on the critical matter of choosing a husband. The stakes were high: from her husband a woman acquired her social standing, the quality of her material life, the position of mistress in a household, the opportunity to become a mother, and perhaps even a degree of companionship and affection. Often the criteria set by parents and daughter were different. For example, genteel girls declared that the men they sought must have high moral character, show respect for wife and family, and be dutiful sons and brothers. Frequently they spoke of romantic love as a necessity. Their mothers usually stressed mutual esteem and respect as essential requirements. For their fathers, practical matters held sway. Most parents hoped to ensure that marital candidates came from the same social class as their daughters (and, in some cases, had the same religious background and ethnicity). Like George Lucas, planter and merchant fathers found the sons and nephews of their peers more “suitable” as sons-in-law than other men. Indeed, in the Chesapeake, marriages among cousins helped sustain and strengthen the exclusive ties of a small, elite planter class. But compromise was possible. In the southern Piedmont, in frontier towns, and in areas where the demographics favored men, girls and their families seemed willing to choose grooms from lower social ranks rather than no grooms at all.

  Courtship took place in different settings for members of genteel and ordinary society. For young women with Eliza Lucas’s background, males and females met at dances, musical evenings, barbecues and formal dinners, and during the endless round of social visits to the homes of their peers. The majority of young men and women, however, met at events such as harvest frolics, country dances, races, or at church. In courtship, gentlemen avoided direct references to sexuality or physical attraction. They wrote and spoke instead of a romanticized affection for the woman they desired. Poorer men spoke more bluntly of the physical appeal of a woman’s body. They spoke more bluntly as well about the pleasures of passion and the pains of delayed gratification. “Your coldness to me I am afrade will cause me to run Crasey,” wrote one farmer to a woman who would not agree to intimacy. Another boldly asked the girl he courted to sleep with him, saying, “Let not your chiefest glory be immurd in the nice casket of a Maidenhead.”

  Ending a marriage, on the other hand, was far more difficult than embarking on one. Absolute divorce was rarely permitted by the courts, although legal separations, called divorce a mensa et thoro, were granted on grounds that varied from extreme brutality to de facto desertion to male impotence. Many colonial couples who wished to end a marriage settled the matter outside the law, separating by agreement rather than by decree. Most often, disgruntled parties simply deserted their mates. What defined a failed marriage depended, of course, on the expectations a man and woman carried into it. The evidence we have suggests that, for most colonists, marriage continued to be seen as an economic arrangement, a union to which men and women brought their gender-defined skills and work roles as well as their financial resources. A marriage was generally deemed successful if the partners lived up to their differing marital obligations. To be a good husband, a man was expected to provide for his wife according to his means, show her respect in public, acknowledge her and her children as his legitimate family, and cohabit with her. A good wife was expected to obey her husband’s orders, manage her household efficiently and frugally, and perform her domestic and sexual duties.

  There were, however, some signs that for certain eighteenth-century colonists the definition of a good marriage was changing. The new set of expectations did not appear to be centered on romantic love, however, but on companionship. Eliza Lucas Pinckney, for example, chose to marry a man who was first and foremost a friend and an intellectual companion. Over the years, her letters suggest that this companionship remained crucial to her satisfaction in marriage. The valorizing of companionship did not replace but was added to the older understanding of marriage as an economic institution, for it did not break down the gendered divisions of labor or alter the obligations and duties of wife and husband. Nor did it require the family hierarchy to be altered. Indeed, a commitment to a companionate marriage did not disturb the patriarchal privileges of the head of the household, for he continued to control the family’s resources, determine where it resided, retain legal custody of the children, and enjoy the family’s only legitimate voice in the political and legal spheres. A wife continued to address her husband with the respectful “my dear Mr.—,” while her husband responded using her Christian name. Finally, this tendency toward a companionate marriage did not carry an endorsement of strong emotions or spontaneous affection between wife and husband.

  Companionate marriage did not become the norm in the decades that remained to America as a colonial society, probably not even among the genteel classes, where it was most likely to emerge. It remained an ill-defined ideal, its contradiction not yet resolved. What is likely, however, is that its meaning was perceived differently by husbands and wives, and its power to alter the traditional privileges and disadvantages allotted to men and women in marriage was probably contested.

  No matter how a woman fared in “the important crisis upon which our fate depends,” once married, she would soon embark on another critical phase of her life: motherhood. Some soon-to-be wives were already well on their way to motherhood. Prenuptial pregnancy seems to have risen steadily throughout the entire colonial period: before 1680, only 3.3 percent of all brides had children within six months of their wedding; by 1761, the number was moving toward its 1800 peak of 16.7 percent. In part, this number reflects the fact that many colonists considered sexual intercourse legitimate as soon as a couple had published their banns, or intention to be married; in part, the statistic itself cannot distinguish between a child conceived before marriage and one born prematurely after marriage. Nor can the historian discover how many women miscarried children conceived before marriage vows were exchanged. What is known for certain, however, is that most white women could expect to be pregnant twelve months after taking their vows.

  Women looked forward to the delivery of this first child, and every child for that matter, with dread, fearing “that evel hour” when their baby’s life and their own seemed to hang in the balance. Husbands waited anxiously outside the birthroom, where the midwife and female friends and relatives assisted their wife, aware that the events inside could lead to mourning rather than celebration. Although most women survived delivery, these fears were not irrational. Almost everyone in eighteenth-century colonial society knew of a mother who had died in childbirth.

  Safe deliveries did not always guarantee a mother’s health, for a host of postpartum problems were possible. And breast feeding, practiced for generations by ordinary colonial mothers and increasingly popular among the elite by mid-century, could cause additional physical problems as well. Women spoke frankly of the pain in their breasts, and concerned husbands recorded: “My wife distress’d with her Nipples.” Nursing mothers watched anxiously for signs of inflammation that could turn into abscesses. Mothers sometimes relied on practices that provided temporary relief. Through “courtesy wet nursing,” nursing female friends could take over the infant’s feeding for a day or two if the mother was sick, in pain, or if she had to go out of town on a short trip. Not every woman, however, was willing to endure the soreness, the possibility of infection, or the restriction on her movements until weaning. In cities like Boston, wet nurses did a thriving business.

  Pregnancies and infant care were not confined to an intense, limited period in a married woman’s life. In fact, eighteenth-century women, like their seventeenth-century predecessors, spent most of their adult years in some phase of the birth cycle—nursing, weaning, infant care, and child-rearing. Mothers arrived at their daughter’s childbed with infants of their own in their arms, and the children of a young matron played with those of her widowed mother at many a family reunion. The extent to which infant care was a constant part of daily life can be understood, for example, through the life of Massachusetts matron Hannah Parkman. Parkman provided “courtesy nursing” for her own son’s daughter when her daughter-in-law fell ill.

  Once again, social class played a role in determining a woman’s experience of childbirth and infant care. Wealthy and even comfortably situated mothers could “lie in,” or recuperate, for a month after giving birth, since servants could be called on to keep the household running. Most farm women and urban poor got up soon after their babies were born. More important, wealth allowed a woman to devote more focused and individualized attention to each child as it grew up. The hours Eliza Lucas Pinckney spent educating and inculcating her sons with what she deemed proper values and virtues were made possible by the servants, hired hands, or slaves working in her household.

  The domestic servants who were the silent partners of Eliza Pinckney’s gentility far outnumbered their mistresses. But women could be found as bound labor or as wage earners in other arenas as well. By the eighteenth century, the majority of these women were free rather than indentured servants, for bound white labor was declining in most colonies. In the South, for example, the number of female indentured servants had fallen steadily since 1700. In part, the problem was their availability, for as opportunities for work increased in England, migration to the American colonies diminished. Beginning in 1718, an average of only two women a year made the journey from London to the Chesapeake as bound labor, and the number did not increase until the end of the colonial period. The ratio of white servants to plantations shrank as well. In the 1690s, one in five plantation households included a white female servant, but by the middle of the eighteenth century, only one in twenty Chesapeake farms boasted such a servant. Most of these were drawn from England’s convict population. As slave labor grew more common, fieldwork became an unusual task for these servants, and they were assigned instead to assist the planter’s wife with domestic production. Female indentured servants had always been a small percentage of the bound laboring force in Northern cities. In Philadelphia, for instance, most indentured servants were men in the building trades. When, in the 1740s, a rise in demand for white household servants occurred, it was the result of the Quaker-dominated city’s growing uneasiness with slaveholding.

  It was free but poor women, therefore, who were regularly employed by their more prosperous urban or rural neighbors as domestic servants. For some of the Northern urban servants, this type of domestic employment was a transitional phase, coming in the years before marriage. For others, however, it was the mainstay of their existence, standing between them and the horrors of almshouses. In cities such as Boston, where the number of widows grew larger after each of the English imperial wars, reaching over 1,200 by 1742, the fear of abject poverty drove women not only to bind out their children to other families but also to place their daughters in domestic service. Poor women with young children at home earned what they could in these cities by providing specialized services such as wetnursing, midwifery, sewing, and millinery work to wealthier women.

  In the South, a white woman might be employed as a housekeeper on a large plantation, although such positions were rare. A rural Pennsylvania woman in need of work had more opportunities, since prosperous farmers of the area hired the wives and daughters of cottagers or non-landowning men to work in local mills, in harvesting, and as temporary domestic help. When these farmers’ wives acted as entrepreneurs, producing linen or dairy products for the market, they often relied on the labor of poorer, local women. The Pennsylvania farmers William Smedley and Benjamin Hawley provide glimpses of these employment patterns. Their records include payments to women for agricultural work such as reaping, sowing, pulling flax, and gathering apples, as well as domestic activities like spinning, sewing, baking, laundering, and nursing family members.