Women In The North American Colonies

The Western Europe that opened up the Atlantic world in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was patriarchal . This means men ruled over women and children in the family and in society. All aspects of patriarchal societies allocated power and property to men though religious, political and cultural beliefs . These patriarchal ideologies were taken to the Atlantic World and although women were not sailors or explorers and did not directly discover any of the new world they did contribute to an extent toward the successes of the North American Colonies. Even though European women tended to stay home, the work of African and Indian women in the colonies contributed to their successes. Women were servants, seamstresses, midwives, slaves, tavern
This shows how important women were for the colonies as without them population would unquestionably not have been possible. European women were very much the housewives of the era as shown by their roles in Plymouth Colony, where they were the cooks, cleaners and child minders . Women here also did some of the work that may have been taken on by men in Europe, this included working in the fields . The contributions made here by European women were important as without them they would not have eaten as well as they did or the homes in general would not have been as successful and the children may not have grown as well as they did. Also the fact that these women took on what was traditionally known to them as “men’s” work would have helped greatly because if the colony found itself short of workers they still had someone to rely on to make sure the work was done. Women from Europe also contracted themselves as indentured servants which helped them finance their passage, this was an important form of white migration to the new world . Indentured servants’ work mainly included growing, processing and transporting the sugar or tobacco. Women were important in the tobacco and sugar industries in the Virginia Company of London in 1608. Sir Edwin Sandy’s, Treasurer of the Virginia Company of London, wrote in 1620, “The plantation can never flourish till families be planted and the respect of wives and children fix the people on the soil.” So if women had not become servants and entered these industries the colonies and industries themselves may not have thrived as well as they did, showing women played a role key in the successes of North American Colonies. If the indentured women of Chesapeake in