Whether the Warrens had a satisfying marriage or a troubled one we do not know. But their marriage was unusual among Chesapeake colonists in one respect: it was the only one Mary Cole or Ignatius Warren ever had. Unlike her brothers Edward and Robert, who were twice married, Mary Cole never found herself at the center of the complex family of stepparents and half brothers and sisters typical of the Chesapeake. Actually, we have no record that Mary Cole Warren had any children at all.

  Ignatius Warren lived a long life for a Chesapeake native, dying at the age of fifty-eight. He earned his living planting tobacco, running an inn, and dabbling in commerce, while Mary was known simply as a planter’s wife. Poor judgment or bad luck brought about Ignatius’s financial ruin later in life, and although the date of Mary’s death is unknown, we do know that she did not live to see her husband’s downfall.

  In the end, what we know about Mary Cole Warren does not make for a compelling biography. Our knowledge is largely a matter of genealogy, with Mary a modest branch on a family tree. Like most women of the early colonial Chesapeake, she speaks to us only briefly and with too distant a voice to make her story clear. The collective voice of Chesapeake women is, however, more powerful and more rich. From wills, court testimony, ship’s logs, and plantation records, from baptismal certificates and tombstones, from household inventories and archaeological remains, from careful attention to community ceremonies and rituals, we can reproduce the female world in which Mary Cole Warren moved.

  We can also reconstruct in some detail the larger society that the Mary Cole Warrens of the seventeenth century inhabited. We know that this early Chesapeake culture deviated from traditional English norms and also that, by English standards, many of the region’s critical social institutions were unstable. As a result, women like Mary Cole Warren often found gender roles more ambiguous and fluid than women in other colonial regions did. Whether this proved to be an advantage or a burden for the women of Maryland and Virginia, historians have not yet been able to agree. But understanding these variations in women’s work roles, family roles, and in their relationship to property and wealth is yet another way to bring Mary Cole Warren and her Chesapeake sisters to life.

  Few seventeenth-century English immigrants failed to be shocked by the alien nature of the Chesapeake. With its intricate mazes of waterways, its vast, unbroken forest, its hot, humid summers, it bore no resemblance to the tilled fields and tamed woodlands of England. There were no towns and no manufacturing centers. The native population was at best exotic and at worst dangerous, and the variety of dialects and accents among the colonists themselves was disquieting to men and women used to the comforting sameness of parish or village life.

  Society itself seemed out of joint. Whole tiers of the English social structure were missing. Immigrants accustomed to locating themselves within an old, established hierarchy could not fail to note the absence of gentry and aristocracy as well as artisans of most trades. But what surely must have struck any Englishwoman orienting herself to this strange Chesapeake society was the simple fact that it was a male world. Men outnumbered women by six to one in the earliest decades and three to one as late as the 1680s.

  The explanation for this skewed sex ratio lay in the region’s obsession with tobacco. Although many free immigrants were young married couples, Chesapeake planters recruited thousands of workers to plant and harvest their tobacco crops. For these planters the ideal farm laborer was young—and male. Thus, between 1630 and 1680, one-half, perhaps three-quarters, of the 75,000 indentured servants transported to the region fit this description.

  The consequences of such a sex ratio were as dramatic as the imbalance itself. Chesapeake men found themselves locked into more than a competition over land, tobacco, and prosperity; they struggled to wed as well. The situation prompted one Maryland planter to remark that his colony was a “paradise for women.” But was it? Indeed, unmarried women were certain to find husbands, although marriage often was delayed by the terms of indenture. A planter eager to set up his household might buy his bride-to-be’s contract, but most immigrant women were not legally free to become wives until their mid- or late twenties. From that point on, their lives were consumed by childbirth and field and household labor, and certainly followed by an early death.

  The short and often brutish life these immigrant women faced was not a uniquely female experience. For men as much as women a life of difficult fieldwork complicated by local diseases such as malaria produced a near-century of demographic disaster. Perhaps a quarter of all indentured servants died before their terms of labor came to an end. Male survivors could expect to live only until their mid-forties; women until about thirty-nine. These few years of difference in life expectancy—small to the demographer but significant to the colonist—were related to childbearing. Women’s fecundity and mortality were ironically linked, for women’s resistance to viral disease was dangerously weakened during pregnancy. Age was more critical than sex, however, since infants and small children were most vulnerable to infectious diseases. Perhaps one-quarter of all children who survived birth died in their first year. Forty to fifty-five percent of all white children born in the Chesapeake died before their twentieth birthday. Taken together, late marriage, early adult death, and high infant mortality meant that this Anglo-Chesapeake population could not even reproduce itself through the 1690s. Only the steady flow of new immigrants each season ensured that the tobacco colonies would continue to grow.

  In such a death-driven society, familiar institutions took on new forms. Marriage remained the setting for the creation of a family, yet marriages were truncated and families complex. A Chesapeake couple, wedded blissfully or despairingly, could expect that death would end their union within nine to twelve years. A new marriage soon followed, and frequently a third, resulting in a crazy quilt of family relationships, with children from different marriages living under one roof. A widow brought to her second husband the heirs of her first; if he was a widower, he, too, brought sons and daughters to the home. Together, they produced offspring, and on the death of one partner, the survivor’s next marriage added new children. With resiliency and flexibility, at least in their language, Chesapeake colonists spoke of their fathers’ “now-wives,” and mothers and fathers distinguished children in their care but not of their own blood as “sons- or daughters-in-law.”

  Mortality fractured every family relationship. Husbands and wives were separated abruptly, and the survivor had to be prepared to form new commitments and intimacies. Parents found themselves caring for the living as they mourned for the dead, and burying sons and daughters in their young adulthood. Few children grew to maturity under the eyes of both father and mother; those who were not orphaned were counted among the fortunate. Throughout most of the seventeenth century, there were not enough uncles, aunts, or older siblings to provide a sufficient safety net—economic or emotional—for orphaned boys and girls. The problem was so widespread that no one felt immune. Colonists in both Maryland and Virginia supported the creation of orphans’ courts to oversee the care, placement, and training of parentless minors, and to guard their material inheritances.

  How would men and women born in England view the seventeenth-century Chesapeake family? Had they been familiar with the vocabulary of twentieth-century sociologists, they might have remarked on the instability or deviance of family relations in the tobacco colonies. In England, a patriarchal, nuclear family had generally replaced an older, more open family based on broad and powerful kin relationships. In this newer nuclear family, the power and influence once diffused among lineal and collateral family members had become concentrated in the father’s hands. The position of women diminished accordingly. In the patriarchal family, a wife was expected to defer to her husband, and a husband was expected to direct the lives of wife and children alike.

  The Chesapeake family conformed neither to the older kinship model nor to the newer patriarchal one. In Maryland and Virginia communities, there were not enough kinship networks to make the older family configuration viable. Yet the newer patriarchal family could not take root in a setting where marriages were short and serial, and a man’s authority as father and husband was too temporary. Chesapeake fathers simply did not live long enough to control the crucial decisions in the lives of their sons and daughters. Some historians argue that women, as mothers, held a privileged place in these households of “now-wives and sons-in-law,” for they were often the single consistent thread in the complicated domestic weaving of stepparents and children. If nothing else, we have glimpses of the daily life of Chesapeake wives that suggest that submissive behavior was not the norm. Such was the case for Clove Mace, whose wife “threw [him] out of his own house in the course of a heated domestic argument.”

  Perhaps the constant element was the birth cycle itself. Immigrant women could expect to be pregnant every two years until they died or until menopause stopped the process. Among the creole, or native-born generations, the age of marriage and motherhood shifted dramatically, although sex ratio and mortality rates continued to shape women’s life cycle. The creole1 daughters of former servants, like the daughters of immigrant landholders, were born free. They could marry as soon as custom and physical maturation permitted. And marry they did—at sixteen and seventeen, and often enough at fifteen or fourteen for the rituals of puberty and matrimony to converge. Like their mothers, these creole girls married men considerably older than themselves and like their mothers, they became mothers almost as soon as they became wives. Many were on their way to parenthood even before they were married, just as their mothers had been. Pre-bridal pregnancy ran as high as 20 percent among immigrant and creole women, for the absence of parental supervision left them with only their own judgment and their own desire to guide them in sexual relations. Marrying earlier, creole women gave birth more often, producing nine to eleven children rather then their mother’s average of six.

  The complex families of the seventeenth-century Chesapeake often lived in material conditions that would have shocked the poorest members of English society. On Maryland’s lower western shore, it was common for parents, children, and servants to live together in two-, or at best three-, room houses. Even the most prosperous of these colonial planters built cramped six-room homes. Within these small, flimsily built, and sparsely furnished homes, families cooked, ate, made love, slept, sewed, read, played, and engaged in household manufacturing. Many colonists lay down at night on beds without bedsteads, bereft of linens, and without a chest in which to store their day’s clothing.

  Sparse material resources were matched by sparse human resources. As late as 1688, Virginia society could be described without exaggeration as “thinly inhabited; the Living solitary and unsociable.” Indeed, the entire population of St. Marys County, Maryland, in 1675 was no more than 2,000 souls. Yet Chesapeake men and women created what community they could. Settlers on the lower western shore of Maryland, for example, clustered in neighborhoods near creeks and streams. Ties and connections were formed, cemented by mutual assistance, whether grudgingly or graciously given. In the absence of strong or adequately responsive social institutions—government, church, or courts—colonists sustained one another. Men witnessed each other’s wills, appraised their neighbors’ estates, raised barns, shared tools and supplies, and protected families from Indian attack. Women linked their daily lives by visiting, attending at childbirth, nursing the sick, and exchanging household products. Lacking extended kinship networks, men and women unconnected by blood served as surrogates to family in their observation and celebration of the rituals of life—christenings, weddings, and burials.

  On court days or Sunday afternoons, Chesapeake residents came together to socialize. Women as well as men smoked, drank, and played cards and games of dice. When a wedding or funeral gave these colonists an excuse to interrupt the monotony of toil, they threw themselves into celebration, feasting, dancing, and drinking cider, beer, and punch until the morning hours.

  Neighborliness had its price, however. Gossip exposed any misbehavior or deviance from community norms, and cooperation and assistance shaded easily into meddling, interference, and intervention in household affairs. Every woman felt her neighbors’ critical eye judging her treatment of servants, her domestic skills, her marital relations, and her sexual fidelity.

  Reputation counted for much in this society. The “small politics of everyone’s everyday life,” carried on largely through gossip, shaped the networks of trust and respect within Chesapeake communities. The reputations of the two sexes were made in different spheres and hinged on very different behaviors. For men, a reputation of reliability and honesty was critical, for they conducted much of their business by oral agreement. It was better, as Maryland planter Joseph Wickes well understood, to be known as a “whoremaster” than as a thief For women, the litmus test of character was sexual behavior. It was primarily in the control and expression of her physical desires that a woman was assumed to be responsible for herself

  Gossip was an important weapon for both men and women in the building and destruction of reputations. However, because women were locked out of the “large politics” of government, gossip was their most essential tool in establishing their social position and regulating the behavior of others. The records from slander and defamation cases in the Maryland courts between 1654 and 1671 reflect the community’s concern with men’s reputation in the marketplace and women’s in bed. It is in the charges and countercharges, fervent defenses and heated attacks, that we hear the voices of the men and women of the tobacco colonies.

  If men spoke of each other as “rogues” and “knaves,” women most often called each other “whores.” While both men and women felt free to question a woman’s marital fidelity, few women concerned themselves with a man’s honesty in his business dealings. Instead, a woman protected her reputation, and impugned the honor of a male, by accusing him of improper sexual behavior.

  Even in their manner of insult and gossip, men and women differed. Chesapeake men showed a marked preference for aggressive, public confrontation of their foes; women spread their damaging tales in private. Men defamed each other in general terms; women offered a wealth of specific details about the alleged transgression. Few women were simply “whores”; rather, they were guilty, as Jane Godson reported of Joan Balsey, of producing an “Eldest Son … not the son of Anthony Rawlins her former husband but She knew one at Maryland that was the father of him.” Godson added a flourish to her account by citing her source. She knew Balsey had committed this adultery because “Thomas Ward of Kent tould her Soe.”

  Demography and economic dependency influenced Chesapeake women’s concerns about morality. A married women had more at stake in protecting her sexual reputation than a single woman, as she was dependent on her husband for economic support. His respect—or lack of it—could translate easily into material comfort or deprivation. A single woman, even if she was accused of lying with a man “2 moonshiny nights under a walnutt tree,” was likely to find a husband in a society where there were three men for every available woman. And so a woman was better off “caught … with her Coates up … and his breeches downe” before she took her marriage vows.

  Woman’s work, like her familial relationships, was reshaped by the circumstances of life in the tobacco colony. By the seventeenth century, English custom drew a sharp distinction between women’s agricultural activity and men’s. Fieldwork was considered masculine, and only in the most extreme circumstances of poverty or crop-threatening weather was a wife or daughter called upon to cross this gendered line. Women’s domain was the garden, the dairy, and the household, the locales of significant economic productivity. This household production, or “housewifery,” transformed raw materials into usable domestic products, through spinning, butchering animals, food preparation and preservation, and manufacturing domestic supplies. The tools of wom–en’s trades included the spinning wheel and the churn, equipment which was as valued as the plow or the hoe. In England’s urban centers, many women also engaged in housewifery production for the marketplace and in sale and barter, as well as in the management of taverns, inns, and shops.

  Inventories of Chesapeake households show that housewifery was underdeveloped here. Although women did household chores such as cooking, sewing, and tending the garden, few households boasted spinning wheels or churns, and even rudimentary tools of production were missing from most kitchens and hearths. Many Chesapeake housewives must have spent more hours each week grinding corn for family meals than in such skilled tasks as cloth making or butter production. In the early decades of Chesapeake settlement, most immigrant women also spent a part of their productive hours toiling beside men in the tedious care of tobacco plants. Few bound servant women were taken from the fields to assist in household work, and few planter wives were able to escape fieldwork altogether either. Manpower was too scarce, competition too great, and tobacco cultivation too labor-intensive for the English division of male and female work spheres to be maintained.

  Court records also show that this departure from English labor norms was common. When the widow Mary Carleton recounted that “what was produced out of ye ground” was the result of “ye hard labor of her the said Mary,” her testimony was distinguished by her anger at her husband’s apparent idleness, not by her lot tending crops. Colonial legislation corroborates this break with tradition, for a distinct category for taxable labor included women servants engaged in fieldwork.