Essay by Sara T. Damiano, Fall 2022
Sara T. Damiano, PhD, is an historian of women and gender in early America and the Atlantic World, and an associate professor at Texas State University, with research and course work focused on individuals, especially women, who possessed limited access to formal political and economic power, and who are seldom centered in eighteenth-century historical sources.
At first glance, the papers of the Kennebec and Pejepscot Proprietors position men as the primary economic actors in White New Englanders’ settlement of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Maine. Yet, when we look more closely at the period, it is clear that both Wabanaki peoples and White women were actively involved in the region’s economy. Gendered family structures and divisions of labor shaped Wabanaki and colonial New England economies, and Indigenous and White women were essential contributors to each.
Amongst the region’s original inhabitants, the Wabanaki, men and women jointly provided for their society: generally men hunted game which women in turn cleaned and preserved, and men cleared the fields where women planted and harvested corn. From a European perspective, Wabanaki men held the majority of public political power, yet, women wielded important forms of influence, including because marriage and courtship rituals emphasized the approval of a bride and her family. In addition, women spoke and traded with English colonists and could become informed, opinionated participants in issues of land rights.
In 1659, “Jane alias Uphannum,” a woman from a powerful Wabanaki family, appeared before English officials to recount a land sale. Jane, along with her mother and brother, had sold land to English colonists eight years prior, and Jane insisted that the English honor their prior agreement.(1) The following century, amidst escalating disputes between colonists and the Wabanaki in 1736, a Penobscot couple visited an English household to relay a warning. When the husband began to reveal too much information, his wife chastised him and ended the exchange.(2)
For their part, as White New Englanders invested in and settled in early Maine, they mobilized kinship ties that structured colonial business and investing practices. Colonists drew on family wealth in order to invest, and familial bonds undergirded business partnerships. As a result, women necessarily assumed key roles in economic networks. Through marriage, women built connections, solidifying alliances and facilitating the transfer of wealth between families. In addition, daughters as well as sons inherited from their fathers, and widows inherited from their husbands both via their dower rights and additional bequests. Familial bonds and inheritance held particular importance among the sorts of Boston-area elites who founded the Kennebec and Pejepscot Proprietors. Elite Boston women not only stood to own property themselves, but also helped their families preserve dynastic wealth and status across generations.
At the same time, marriage law differently shaped men’s and women’s abilities to own and control land. Like other British colonies, Massachusetts, including the district of Maine, derived its legal system from its mother country. Within this framework, unmarried women possessed the same legal rights as men, including the abilities to independently purchase, own, or sell land. A small number of affluent widows and single women were therefore among those colonists who became landowners. In the 1670s, for instance, Bostonian Rachel Atkins purchased two tracts of land in Maine, one from the Wabanaki and one from an English colonist. For such women, land represented an important source of wealth and, potentially, income.(3)
Once Rachel Atkins married, however, the British legal principle of coverture curtailed her rights. Coverture stipulated that married women’s legal identities were subsumed under those of their husbands. While coverture’s consequences were varied and uneven in daily life, its ramifications were clear within property law. Married women could not purchase property, and husbands acquired custodial powers over property that their wives owned prior to marriage. Thus, after Rachel Atkins married James Berry in 1687, she could no longer independently consent to decisions regarding her land. In 1716, James Berry and Rachel Atkins Berry jointly sold the land to the Pejepscot Proprietors. James signed above Rachel on the land deed, exemplifying the intertwining of husbands’ and wives’ economic fortunes through marriage.(4)
Overall, coverture’s limitations on women’s ability to contract meant that women made up a small minority of White landowners in early Maine, both before and after the formation of land companies. Most women landowners were widows who inherited such property from their late husbands. Gendered divisions of economic activity, moreover, meant that women landowners did not participate in companies’ day-to-day decision-making or shareholders’ meetings. Instead, they appeared in the record primarily when land titles required their signatures.(5)
While a small number of White New England women owned property, many others facilitated the settlement of early Maine. As colonists moved to the region both as squatters and titled landholders, wives and daughters helped their families to survive and grow within a rugged and sparsely populated region. Involving extensive physical labor indoors and out-of-doors, women’s daily work included gardening, dairying, food preparation, spinning, weaving, clothes-making, laundry, and childcare. Women also traded with nearby households, and wives assumed financial and legal responsibilities both in their husbands’ absences and within routine divisions of household labor.
The work of Hallowell, Maine resident Martha Ballard (1735-1812) exemplifies female settlers’ varied and extensive responsibilities. Ballard’s husband, Ephraim, was surveyor and agent for the Kennebec Proprietors, and so generated extensive documentation within its papers. Meanwhile, Martha gave birth to and mothered nine children, managed the daily provisioning of her household and supervised its labors, and performed vital work as a midwife, attending 816 births within 27 years. She recorded these activities in her diary, which contains nearly daily entries spanning from 1775 to 1812.(6) Ensuring the survival of their households and the reproduction of her families and communities, the labor of women including Martha Ballard was an essential complement to the surveys and land sales documented in company records.
Women’s economic activities, in short, undergirded both Wabanaki society and White New England colonists’ investment in and settlement of early Maine.
About the Author
Sara T. Damiano, Ph.D. is a historian of women and gender in early America and the Atlantic World. At the time this essay was written (2022), Prof. Damiano is an assistant professor at Texas State University, with research and course work focused on individuals, especially women, who possessed limited access to formal political and economic power, and who are seldom centered in eighteenth-century historical sources.
Further Reading
Pawling, Micah A. “A “Labyrinth of Uncertainties”: Penobscot River Islands, Land Assignments, and Indigenous Women Proprietors in Nineteenth-Century Maine.” The American Indian Quartertly 42, no.4 (2018): 454-487 muse.jhu.edu/article/708887 (retrieved August 2022).
Endnotes
1. Alice Nash, “The Abiding Frontier: Gender, Family, and Religion in Wabanaki History, 1600-1763” (PhD diss, Columbia University 1997), 148-199.
2. Deposition of Jane and Ann Woodside, May 14, 1738, Microfilm of the Henry Knox Papers, vol. 40, item 31.
3. James Berry and Rachel Berry Deed to Proprietors (1716), Proprietors of the Township of Brunswick: Pejepscot Proprietors Papers, collection 61, vol. 1, p. 81-83, Maine Historical Society.
4. Clarence Almon Torrey, New England Marriages Prior to 1700 (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1985), 230; James Berry and Rachel Berry Deed to Proprietors (1716), Proprietors of the Township of Brunswick: Pejepscot Proprietors Papers, collection 61, vol. 1, p. 81-83, Maine Historical Society.
5. Ian Saxine, Properties of Empire: Indians, Colonists, and Land Speculators on the New England Frontier (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 53.
6. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on her Diary, 1785-1812 (New York: Knopf, 1990). Ballard's diary is in the Maine State Library's collections, Ms B B189.