The Colonial Mosaic: American Women, 1600-1760

The story of colonial settlement is often told as if men were the only actors, but women—as wives, agricultural workers, domestic servants, members of religious congregations, community builders, and mothers of a new generation—were crucial to European settlements just as women in Native American groups were to theirs.
Colonial "women's work" was hard, physical labor. In the South, the urgency of farming crops for export stretched a woman's workday from sunrise to sunset (and beyond). It …