Ebb Tide in New England: Women, Seaports, and Social Change, 1630-1800

Abstract

Ebb Tide in New England: Women, Seaports, and Social Change, 16301800. By Elaine Forman Crane. (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998. Pp. x, 333. Cloth, $50.00; paper, $17.95.) Women and Reform in a New England Community, 1815-1860. By Carolyn J. Lawes. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000. Pp. x, 265. Illustrations. $39.95.) Both of these books make significant contributions to the continuing discussion of the status and experience of women in early America. Both dissent from the formulations of previous histories. Both focus on New England, but cover different periods and make different arguments, which invites us to consider how they can be reconciled. Elaine Forman Crane examines women in four seaport towns over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She chooses this focus in order to obtain the clearest picture of change over time, as towns are where change happened first, women predominated, and space was most clearly gendered. She argues that women's visibility and autonomy declined markedly during the colonial period. Crane begins with a chapter on the demographics of her seaports, demonstrating the emergence of a female majority in each. She then sets her story of change in the context of the recent European past, thereby connecting the American decline with a general decline of women's status coinciding with the rise of the modern state in the West. The core chapters of the book examine New England women's experience in the churches, in the economy, and in the courts. Crane then returns to the larger European cultural and intellectual context to help explain why any theoretical possibilities for women raised by the American Revolution could not bear fruit. Crane does the great service of surveying a sweeping chronological period, which allows us to see both the direction of, and the forces behind, change. But her book is complex, and there are eddies of subarguments that detract from the general drift. Although Crane's evidence is drawn from four seaport towns, it often seems as if she is discussing New England in general. Her announced concerns with the uneven sex ratio and the rise of female poverty in the seaports often fade from view. Within her chapters on religion, the economy, and the law, both the urban focus and the larger argument about change over time sometimes recede, although they reappear in her chapter conclusions. Still, the complexity of the data that causes these wrinkles will make this book a useful reference tool, as Crane surveys church procedures, work roles, and legal practices systematically. In each case, she complicates the pictures painted by earlier historians by showing women in situations where earlier scholars had painted them out-as choosers of ministers, disciplinarians of fellow congregants, marital partners (rather than deputy husbands), and economic actors in their own right. Crane desires to redress the balance in women's history between a recent emphasis on female agency and a reality of oppression. Ironically, despite her emphasis on the triumph of patriarchy, her most striking evidence is that of female agency in the seventeenth century. Crane's contribution might have been even greater had she not presented her work as quite so revisionist. In fact, because of the long period covered, including the helpful European background, her story could be seen as knitting together the work of other scholars with more limited time frames. Her argument is not totally incompatible with Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's in Good Wives (1991), Cornelia Hughes Dayton's in Women Before the Bar (1995), and Mary Beth Norton's in Founding Mothers and Fathers (1996). It would have been helpful if Crane had tried to build on the work of these scholars rather than simply suggest that earlier historians got it all wrong. …