Laboring Women In New England

Words: 1438
Pages: 6

Throughout history many images of women have been pictured, including mother and wife. However, after the move toward social history women’s history has expanded. Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery, by Jennifer L. Morgan and Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England 1650-1750 by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich explore the vast images and roles women in this time period have taken on to see how they affected the current knowledge of New England history as well as how they were essential to it. In challenging the preconceived notions of the women’s role by showing how the women reacted to the constraints place around them. Women played a more essential role in not only understanding the dynamics of slavery in North America and the West Indies, and colonial life in Northern New England, but they also played an integral role in how that history was created. …show more content…
She explores how the images of people of color change in the eyes of Europeans and colonists, the different task enslaved women were expected to hold, and above all the importance of women’s reproduction as target of slave-owners greed. Morgan explores how enslaved women change throughout the time period of slavery in North America and the West Indies. Ulrich, in her book Good Wives on the other hand, discusses the role of women in colonial New England. She explores how the concept of what makes a woman a good wife and mother and the other roles that she would do. In this book she explores women’s roles in the economy, sex, and in the church. She argues that women not only have various different roles but the colonist survival in New England was dependent on the women’s