For our class on Sept. 12, we're reading selections from two books from Early America:
Ramon Gutierrez's When Jesus Came the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846
Kathleen Brown's Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia
These historians will give us perspective on Spanish-Catholic ideals of marriage and English-Anglican ideas of marriage in the Early Modern period (1500s-1600s).
Then, they look at how these conceptions of marriage shift and transform when they are carried into a colonial context - in the case of Gutierrez it's New Spain, or modern-day New Mexico, for Brown, it's colonial Virginia.
If we talked about marriage in broad terms last week, let's look at these readings as case studies of two distinctive understandings of marriage. Think about how Nancy Cott and Hendrik Hartog's ideas play out in real life.
**What are the legal cultures at work here?
**How does religion shape in each context?
**What are the gender roles assigned to "husband" and "wife" in these cases?
**Why do both authors use "power" in their subtitles? (an unfair question since you haven't read all of the books, but make an educated guess.)
**How does race affect gender and marriage?
**Can you see the kernels of the monogamy/political liberty/consent VS. polygamy/despotism/coercion that Cott identifies developing in the 1700s?
Remember to be a good historian and to collect evidence (examples) to support your argument.
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Both Hartog and Cott use power in their book subtitles and incorporates the power relations and effects of power throughout history. After reading Gutierrez and Brown, the power struggle and relations implicit within many different and varied marriage traditions. For example in Brown's discussion of colonial Virginia, married women had an odd position of power in regulating the sexual relations of the townspeople. Married women were responsible for policing the sexual morality of the town's women and examining claims of sexual deviance or abuse. While this may seem like a peripheral role, the importance of women in the culture, economy, and success of the town gave married women a kind of subversive power over the town. Gutierrez concentrates more on the power families have over their children's wedding plans. The family often coerced their children into marriages that were based on social status rather than the child's personal interest. Also, the entire idea of marriage was more formatted to the needs of the more wealthy members of New Mexican society. Poorer individuals were forced to fend for themselves in marriage arrangements becasue their parents were unable to provide dowries, homes, etc. Moreover, the law provided more preference to contested marriages to the party that had more money and a higher status (as in the case of Juana Trujillo). Moreover, the church exercised its power over which couples could and could not marry as will as their ability to escape these marriages. It is clear that power is central both within marriage (between spouses) and as a function of surrounding forces either preventing or encouraging the bonds being formed.
I would argue that the role of women was less to put a check on the sexual relations of the communities, but in establishing the legality of the community mores. Brown specifically argues that women were imported to Virginia to bring settlement. As we read in Cott and Hartog last week, the ability of the government to legitimiza marriage is one of the first ways in which a government becomes legitimized (presumably because the government grants the right to the people to enter into a contract with that ability to consent being an example of a people's government). Where there was an established society (in this regard I mean a social hierarchy), the formal legalization was less important. For example, in Gutiérrez, he writes about the time delay between the conjugal start of the marriage and the formal start, as recognized by the church. The New Mexican society had a well established society so there was less of a concern to strictly legalize a union. As a carry-over institution, the Church of England in Virginia set the legitimate boundaries in an area that had no hierarchy.
Cait brings up some good points about how marriage relations bestow power and redistribute power that I want to emphasize:
1) Marriage gave women a more important social status, especially in the English colonies (and in England), and particularly when it came to single women and sexuality. Related to the idea of midwives, certainly, and an idea that changed in the nineteenth century as married women were expected to be more sequestered and doctors took on the role of tending to women's health.
2) Class: if marriage is all about the reallocation of resources - what are the rules of marriage when you have no resources to speak of?
Claire also makes an interesting point, a more "Cott-ian" argument, if you will, that asks how women were important to the colonial enterprise as a way for 1) the government to assert its power by making marriages, and 2) as a way to get English men to settle down.
New Mexico in the early 1800s (settlement began there in the 1500s in a way not that unlike Virginia - there were also calls for women to come and act as models for Pueblo women and to "civilize" Spanish and mestizo men), is quite different from early Virginia which seems like a society on the verge of collapse.
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Can women be at once subversive, as Cait says - showing their agency and gaining power where they can get it - and also tools of the colonial government?
Kathleen Brown's "Good Wives and Nasty Wenches" uses some of the same ideals as Hartog in regards to the legal aspects of power in marriage and how it applies in a colonial setting. The initial case Brown brings up, that of Thomas(ina) is an example of how every group of people in the colonies and their new ideas of society looked for someone over which they could hold power. For the women in Jamestown, they could wield power that they didn't usually have over Thomas(ina) because she/he was an unknown factor in the hierarchies of society, even in England; they showed their power by taking a major role in the investigation of Thomas(ina)'s gender and voiced their opinions on what his/her conduct should be limited to.
Because Jamestown did not have the long-standing, aristocratic gentry as the landowning families, the social hierarchy which the colonists were used to and most wanted to emulate in America was no longer applicable: in England, the only landowners were the wealthy, who rented their land out to tenant farmers, whereas all of the colonists (even some of the women, as "the burgesses accepted a petition to grant husbands shares of land for their wives") were landholders, placing everyone on the same level at the beginning of the colony (Brown, 80). This leveling of the "playing field," as well as the distance between Virginia and England, allowed the power structures of traditional English culture to be manipulated in Jamestown. The lack of a designated aristocracy led to the male colonists trying to reshape the power structures, especially when the legal system was as sparse and distant as if was found to be.
Jamestown, as an economic investment rather than a social community, also lacked the initial religious background with which some of the colonies were founded; the lack of ministers during Jamestown's early years led to new legal situations, less influenced by the church and more influenced by individual beliefs. Brown says that "marriages were of much greater social consequence in a colonial society in which public authority was fragile and [the church] had only a weak presence" (92). Because of the weak presence of religious authority, common law was allowed to usurp the power of the minister: instead of seeking legal or religious permission to marry, a couple could go through a three week period of "public proclamation of banns," in which they would announce their intentions to marry and allow any other community member give input (kind of like the "if anyone knows why these two shouldn't be wed, speak now or forever hold your peace" moments in weddings in movies).
The power of the community over the individual, as well as the new, slightly undefined powers of women in the colonies (who had a slightly ambiguous role as homemaker and fieldhand) as they defined what it meant to be a woman, shaped the social structures of the colonies into something new and different than those hierarchies found in England.
I think it is interesting to note the difference in the classes of New Mexico and Virginia. In New Mexico there were numerous different categories. We see terms presumably concerning racial origin such as mestizas and genizaros that denote lower classes, while Spaniards were considered higher class. In cases of marriage, such as in the case of Juana Rodriguez and Juana Trujillo, it was the honor of the Spaniard that prevailed because she was deemed more deserving of it merely because of her birth (Gutierrez 234).
In Virginia, however, there was little race mixing, so country of origin was not so much of an issue as the outward perception of being a "good wife." Being a good wife, as advertised by the Virginia Company, meant involving oneself in "domestique imployments," tasks so central to the perception of the female gender that a male servant actually hung himself when he was forced to perform them (Brown 85). Women were in such short supply, however, that there was actually a price of 120lbs of tobacco to obtain one as a wife (Brown 81). It is thus understandable that the importance of family status was less important to women because of the shortage. However it was a lack of chastity and inattention to domestic chores that led women to be categorized in a lower "class," the class of "wench."
Virginian women both lost and won freedom by their scarcity. They were forbidden, at least initially, from "freely contracting marriage" in an attempt to maintain social classes. Men in upper classes, in other words, would have the privilege of gaining the hand of the scarce commodity (Brown 81). Conversely, women gained social status and power through their marriages. Married women were given the task of policing sexual indiscretions and examining female defendants of these crimes, giving them a relatively substantial role in the early colonial legal system.
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