The Widows' Might

Widowhood and Gender in Early British America

Vivian Bruce Conger

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780814717110
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Primordi della storia americana

In early American society, one’s identity was determined in large part by gender. The ways in which men and women engaged with their communities were generally not equal: married women fell under the legal control of their husbands, who handled all negotiations with the outside world, as well as many domestic interactions. The death of a husband enabled women to transcend this strict gender divide. Yet, as a widow, a woman occupied a third, liminal gender in early America, performing an unusual mix of male and female roles in both public and private life.

With shrewd analysis of widows’ wills as well as prescriptive literature, court appearances, newspaper advertisements, and letters, The Widows’ Might explores how widows were portrayed in early American culture, and how widows themselves responded to their unique role. Using a comparative approach, Vivian Bruce Conger deftly analyzes how widows in colonial Massachusetts, South Carolina, and Maryland navigated their domestic, legal, economic, and community roles in early American society.

1

“Though She Were Yong, Yet She Did Not Affect a Second Marriage”

The Cultural Community and Widow Remarriage

In a revealing courtship ritual between two powerful widowed Bostonians, we see Madam Katherine Winthrop testing the boundaries of her power, independence, and self-identity as a wealthy woman, we see the extent to which she internalized as well as challenged the messages of prevailing advice literature, and we see how she—like other women—reconstructed ideas of widowhood through the contingencies of their lives and the choices they made. Throughout the give-and-take of this courtship, it became clear that the inducements for her to remarry would have to be great—ultimately greater than her suitor Samuel Sewall was willing to provide.¹ Between October 1, 1720, and November 11, 1720, Samuel Sewall, one of Boston’s richest merchants and Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Superior Court, recorded in his diary the details of his brief and ill-fated courtship of the widow of Waitstill Winthrop.² At the time of the courtship, Katherine Winthrop was fifty-six years of age, with two married daughters and a seventeen-year-old son. Sewall, sixty-nine, had five daughters and two sons.

A careful reading of Sewall’s description of this courtship reveals that colonial Americans’ convictions about remarriage involved much more than economics.³ Family, friends, neighbors, custom, age, and social expectation shaped the choice widows made between widowhood and remarriage.

Sewall began his courtship cleverly. He visited Madam Winthrop, seeking both her sympathy for the recent loss of his wife and her advice about courtship of a new wife. Although “She propounded one and another for me,” he insisted “none would do.”⁴ Several visits later, Sewall expressed his hope that his visits would not be “disagreeable” to her daughter Noyes and his concern that her son, the “Chaplain of the Castle,” lived with her. Sewall finally admitted that he wished she would “be the person assign’d for” him. She turned down his proposal, explaining that she could not leave her children. He asked her to think about it and continued the courtship.

Sewall gave her books, sermons, and cakes as enticements to marriage. Winthrop kept “harp[ing] upon the same string,” adamantly maintaining that she must take care of her children and her business and “could not leave that House and Neighbourhood where she had dwelt so long.” He countered that “she might doe her children as much or more good by bestowing what she laid out in Hous-keeping, upon them.” Sewall next suggested that because her son would soon come of age and marry, “it might be inconvenient for her to dwell with her Daughter-in-law, who must be Mistress of the House.” He assumed that Winthrop would be subsumed into her son’s household and that a widowed mother, dependent not only on her son but on her daughter-in-law, would create problems. The implication was that as his wife and sole mistress of the house, Winthrop would exercise more power than as a widow. When that did not sway Winthrop, he switched tactics and suggested that her wealth “might do som Good to help and suport” him.⁵ Not surprisingly, her answer did not change.

When Sewall visited Winthrop on October 17, she greeted him “Courteously, but not in Clean Linen as somtimes.” Yet Winthrop did allow Sewall to take some liberties; he not only held her bare hand (he had to remove her glove to do so) but also kissed her (he declared those kisses “better than the best Canary [wine]”). Usually, however, Winthrop avoided being alone with him and placed obstacles between them when they were together. Winthrop explicitly addressed her beliefs about sexual matters several visits later when she claimed that the “Apostle Paul affirm[ed] that a single Life was better than a Married” and that “she had not pleasure in things of that nature as formerly.” For Sewall, that made her “the fitter to make me a Wife.” Winthrop remained unmoved, and Sewall remained undaunted; he turned next to friends and family for assistance.

Sewall twice visited Winthrop’s sister, Madam Mary Mico (who possessed “a parcel” of books—perhaps including some advice books aimed at widows⁶), to enlist her aid in persuading the widow to marry him. Mico initially rejected Sewall’s pleas for help, arguing that she was “in the same condition” (by this time, she had been widowed for two years and remained so until her death in 1733). He understood the power of female networks, but not well enough. Perhaps Madam Mico was jealous of the attention her sister was getting, or perhaps she did not want to lose a close female companion who shared life experiences with her. Whatever her reason for initially rebuffing Sewall, she later conceded that if “her Sister were for it, she should not hinder it.” But she never agreed to actively help his cause.

When he next visited Madam Winthrop, she “took occasion to speak pretty earnestly about my keeping a Coach,” which her friends advised “must be set on Wheels, and not by [be] Rusting.”⁷ Sewall declared that he could not afford to keep a coach and that his estate to her would be himself; he hoped her estate to him would be the same. The following notation in Sewell’s diary suggests his discussion of the affair also went beyond family:

As were drinking at the Governour’s, he said: In England the Ladies minded little more than that they might have Money, and Coaches to ride in. I said, And New-England brooks its Name. At which Mr. Dudley smiled. Govr said they were not quite so bad here.

When Sewall presumptively asked Winthrop how soon he could make their negotiations public, she tartly replied that they were “like to be no more public than they were already,” suggesting her disapproval of the prominent men of the town gossiping about her.

On November 2, having apparently taken his friends’ counsel, Sewall offered Madam Winthrop £100 a year upon his death as a marriage settlement and asked what she would give him if she died first. She indicated that she knew that he had given all of his estate to his children by a deed of gift and could not live up to his end of the bargain. He denied the charge, claiming he owned land in the colonies as well as in England.⁸ On November 7, Sewall again pressed his marriage proposal, saying that he loved her (she would only admit to respecting him). He also disingenuously complained that while he offered his proposals without any advice from friends or family, she “had so many to advise with, that twas a hindrance.”

At last, convinced of Winthrop’s rejection, Sewall told her he would not bother her any more. As he walked out the door, he reminded her that she had “enter’d the 4th year of her Widowhood.” On November 11, he noted, “Went not to Mm. Winthrop’s. This is the 2d Withdraw.” Thereafter, Sewall mentioned Madam Winthrop only in passing and never again wrote of their courtship. On March 29, 1722, he married the widow Mary Gibbs.⁹ Three years later, Katherine Winthrop died a widow at the age of sixty. In her will, she named one son, two daughters, her daughter-in-law, four grandsons, three granddaughters, her sister, and numerous nieces and nephews as heirs.¹⁰

When Sewall suggested that Winthrop could better provide for her children by giving them their full portion of her estate through a deed of gift than by trying to raise them through her management of the estate, he addressed widows’ economic power and familial responsibilities. When he assumed that Winthrop would be controlled by her son, he suggested the constraints on widows’ independence within the family. When he discussed Katherine Winthrop’s lack of attention to her physical appearance and her evident determination to avoid physical contact, Sewall alluded to both Winthrop’s and the community’s fear of sexual misconduct implicit in widowhood. Finally, when he mentioned the community and the social networks formed by her “friendly neighbors,” he identified the ambivalent role the community played in a widow’s decision.¹¹

In the same city, eight years after this courtship, Thomas Amory died suddenly on the morning of June 19. Unlike Katherine Winthrop, Rebecca Amory was a young widow; she was twenty-seven—a full thirty years younger than Winthrop, and she and Thomas had been married only six years. Also unlike Winthrop, Rebecca Amory had five children under the age of six to care for. Amory’s brother Isaac, living in Charleston, South Carolina, wrote her, “I here make you all the offers of Service in my Power tho at so great a distance and wish I could be with you to help you tho I hope you’l find many Other freinds[.]”¹² He understood the importance of a support network, even if it could not be family. As did Madam Winthrop, Rebecca Amory was to rely on friends for advice.

When Thomas died, Rebecca was granted administration on his estate, which was valued at slightly more than £2,600 and included a wide variety of furniture, household goods, clothing, books, slaves, livestock, a house, land, wharfage, and stills.¹³ This large estate reflects the success of his various business undertakings, which enabled him to leave his widow well situated materially and financially. Yet, even under these circumstances, it seemed likely that Rebecca Amory would remarry for two reasons: first, her youth and wealth made her a prime candidate in the Bostonian marriage market; and second, she needed a husband to manage the large estate and to be a father to her orphaned children. But Rebecca Amory remained widowed until her death, in 1753. Perhaps she and Katharine Winthrop took to heart prescriptive literature against remarriage, or perhaps demographics dictated their status. More likely, they exercised the newfound autonomy widowhood engendered and simply chose not to remarry. In the process, they embraced new identities for themselves.

As wealthy, high-status, independent women, Winthrop and Amory do not represent all widows in colonial America or even all widows in New England. They do, however, exemplify the individual and communal struggles around widowhood and remarriage. There is no concrete evidence that either woman read the large body of prescriptive literature about widowhood. But that all the parties involved, however tangentially, could not agree whether Madam Winthrop should marry Samuel Sewall reflects the ideology prevalent in early America. As this ritual suggests, it was not easy to draw clear boundaries around those who did and who did not support widow remarriage and why they believed as they did. It was a complicated and sometimes confusing matter, but one in which widows exerted their power over their own lives and their own identities—that is, over their concept of widowhood and traditional gender boundaries.

The ideals promoted in sermons and conduct books were neither aimed at an elite few nor limited in geographic and temporal scope; in fact, they represented a transatlantic and intercolonial ideology of remarriage. For example, in England, the most popular conduct book, The Whole Duty of Man, Laid Down in a Plain and Familiar Way for the Use All, But Especially the Meanest Reader [emphasis added], went through sixty-four editions between 1659 and 1842; The Ladies Calling went through at least twelve editions up to 1787; and New Whole Duty of Man: Containing the Faith as well as Practice of a Christian went through thirty-seven editions between 1741 and 1853. Total sales of advice books neared one thousand copies. All this suggests that they indeed reached a large and socially diverse audience.¹⁴ Likewise, colonists—whether they emigrated from England or were born on this side of the ocean—read, reread, and memorized the contents of these books.

Almost every early American woman owned a Bible, a prayer book, and The Whole Duty of Man.¹⁵ Probate records indicate that these books frequently appeared in women’s estates. In Massachusetts, nearly half of all widows’ estates contained books and other reading material. In Maryland and South Carolina, respectively, about 40 and 45 percent did so.¹⁶ The will of William Norris of Prince George’s County, Maryland, suggests one way some women came into possession of these books. Norris bequeathed his daughter two of Richard Allestree’s most popular tracts: The Whole Duty of Man, which included private devotions and rules for the proper conduct of each household member, and The Government of the Tongue (1674), a manual about ethical speech.¹⁷ Widows in all three colonies also bequeathed such reading material. However, because widows in Massachusetts and South Carolina tended to live in urban areas and possessed greater wealth—and thus had the leisure time to read—they were more likely than Maryland widows to bequeath books. The range of prescriptive literature went beyond the Bible and a handful of titles. Inventories listed more than a hundred separate titles; in addition to history books, dictionaries, and legal treatises, there were the more ubiquitous psalm books, an extensive variety of religious treatises, numerous sermon books, as well as The Ladies Library, The Compleat Housewife (first published in England in 1727, this book appears to be the first cookbook published in America), Ruth’s Recompense (written in 1628 by an English Puritan minister, this is a commentary on the biblical book of the widow Ruth), and Garland’s Of Vertuous Dames.¹⁸ The Ladies Calling, which appeared most often in southern colonial homes, was used as a guide to proper female conduct. Other writers of conduct books paraphrased or copied verbatim whole passages from it. Also popular in the southern colonies was The Ladies Library, a compilation of passages taken from works such as The Ladies Calling and Mary Astell’s Serious Proposal to the Ladies and Some Reflections upon Marriage.¹⁹

The continuing popularity of Cotton Mather’s Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion, printed originally in 1692, is supported by two pieces of evidence. First, the English evangelist George Whitefield, who discovered Ornaments on a trip through New England in 1741, recommended it to all the women of Boston and sent it to Benjamin Franklin to reprint for the women of Philadelphia.²⁰ Second, and more important, the inside front cover of a copy of a third edition, dated 1741, bears the following inscription: “Dorothy Griggs Her Book ad 1743” and “Dorothy Griggs and her Daughters Book.” That Dorothy Griggs took the time to inscribe the book in both her own name and in her daughter’s name is highly significant. According to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, such acts “set a person apart” and became “crucial props in unobserved intimate ritual.” With this advice book and through this simple act, Griggs created a female identity and “a world of meaning” across two generations and in the process transmitted her cultural ideals to those who followed.²¹

Mather understood the importance of his message beyond his neighborhood and parish. On March 17, 1718, he wrote to Samuel Sewall that “You have [done] so much . . . for the widow, that I cannot but believe my poor Marah [Marah Spoken To: A Brief Essay to do Good Unto the Widow] will be welcome to you.” Sewall noted in his diary that when Mrs. Denison visited him, he gave “her a Widow’s Book Bound, having writ her Name in it.”²² Mather also sent “a little number of” copies of his A Visit to the Widow (identified as a paraphrased title for his Marah Spoken To) to ministers in neighboring towns where there were a large number of widows. He hoped that the ministers would then disperse the copies among the widows.²³ In addition, local governments in New England frequently handed out free b...