“Her Humble Estate”: Poverty and Widowhood in Seventeenth-Century New York

Abstract

New York History Summer / Fall 2015© 2015 by The New York State Historical Association 318 “Her Humble Estate”: Poverty and Widowhood in Seventeenth-Century New York Abby Shelton In 1668, four years after the British assumed control of New Netherland, Aeltie van Breeman faced the first of three court cases designed to collect the debts of her recently deceased husband. First, Theunis Spitsbergen claimed that Van Breeman owed him ninety-seven schepels of wheat for some wooden boards. The widow defended herself by saying that “her husband has perished and that she kn[e]w nothing about the debt.”1 When Gerrit Swart sued for another of Van Breeman’s debts the same day, she claimed that “on account of her poverty she can not pay it.”2 The following year the administrators of Jan Andriesz’s estate prosecuted debts against Van Breeman. But Aeltie could “not give any information about it either.”3 Van Breeman’s testimony in these three cases reveals that she was ill prepared for the vicissitudes of widowhood. The impoverished widow claimed to know nothing of her husband’s business dealings. Perhaps this was due to her own disinterest or incompetence, or perhaps Jan van Breeman was a domineering, patriarchal figure who shared few of his business transactions with his wife. Van Breeman possibly also pled ignorance as part of a legal strategy. But court and public records from colonial New Netherland and New York tell another story. The legal and economic privileges granted women in New Netherland and early New York did not shape the lives of all women in the colony equally. Though much of the historiographical literature on this topic suggests that women under Dutch law possessed legal and material advantages that Anglo-American New Yorkers did not, widowhood could prove an economic, physical, and emotional trial for women of Dutch and Anglo descent alike. 1. “Theunis Spitsbergen, plaintiff, against Aeltie van Breeman, defendant,” A.J.F. van Laer, trans. and ed., Minutes of the Court of Albany, Renesselaerswyck and Schenectady, 1668–1685, 3 vols. (Albany: University of the State of New York, 1932), 1:23 (hereafter cited as MCARS). 2. MCARS, 1:22. 3. MCARS, 1:103. Shelton Poverty and Widowhood in Seventeenth-Century New York 319 Early American women’s historians have only been studying the place of widows in seventeenth-century North American colonies for about forty years.4 Many women’s historians assume that marriage characterized the experience of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women, yet in doing so they ignore widows, who comprised as much as ten percent of the AngloAmerican population. Furthermore, as many as half of all Anglo-American women found themselves widowed at some point in their lives.5 Many of the first historians of Anglo-American women argued that women’s participation in the courts and their control over property declined with the coming of the eighteenth century and the “Anglicization” of colonial law. In particular, Lois Green Carr and Lorena Walsh suggested that women in seventeenth-century Maryland had greater autonomy in marriage and property rights than women in England or other colonies, but then Maryland colonists lost those freedoms in the eighteenth century as native-born populations grew.6 This argument was augmented by Cornelia Hughes Dayton’s study of colonial Connecticut courts. Dayton made the case that as Connecticut shed its Puritan legal heritage and adopted English common law in the late seventeenth century, women were increasingly barred from the courtroom.7 More recent studies have begun to counter the notion that women’s participation in the public square declined in the eighteenth century and instead have focused on how widows created a unique place for themselves in colonial economies and the social order as unmar4 . The two earliest studies of Early American widows are Alexander Keyssar, “Widowhood in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts: A Problem in the History of the Family,” Perspectives in American History (1974): 83–119.and John Faragher, “Old Women and Old Men in Seventeenth-Century Wethersfield, Connecticut,” Women’s Studies 4 (1976): 11– 31. Keyssar and Faragher’s articles were followed by Lois Green Carr and Lorena Walsh, “The Planter’s Wife: The Experience of White Women in...