Women's Agency in Early Modern Britain and the American Colonies

Book excerpt: From culture to childbirth, money to marriage and wooing to widowhood, Rosemary O'Day introduces us to the lives of women in early modern Britain and the North American colonies. Dispelling the myth that women during this period were weak characters dominated by husbands and fathers, O'Day reveals these women to be important agents in the social, economic, religious and cultural lives of their societies who exercised considerable influence on the world around them. Strong women, she argues, were not the exception but the norm at this time and in many, even most, cases their menfolk valued and colluded in their strength. These women did not exist in a vacuum. In examining the differing lives of married women in the old and new worlds O'Day challenges the assumption that women of the North American colonies had more agency than those in Britain. She demonstrates that gender is indeed a social construct and that different societies will construct it differently. However, far from leading us into the realms of abstract speculation, O'Day focuses on the real lives of real women, exploring how far their experience was determined by their family roles and to what extent they existed as individuals, expanding their own horizonsand those of future women.