Inheritance and Independence: Women's Status in Early Colonial Jamaica

Abstract

T SHE most important difference between the Old World and the New in the early modern era was that the societies created by European immigrants were new societies. Members of these societies faced problems of organizing unfamiliar environments and developing viable social, economic, and political institutions where none previously existed.' They had models from the parent society, but the peculiarities of new environments made it difficult to transplant traditional norms. Moving to the New World was a momentous event, a decisive divide between the familiar and the unknown; although migrants soon formed new social and emotional ties, the abandoning of friends and family was of great significance both for individuals and for nascent colonial societies. Alienation from loved ones was exacerbated by high mortality rates and fragile family structures, as in the Caribbean and the Chesapeake, where new and long-lasting attachments were difficult to achieve. One consequence of the shift to a New World beset with demographic disaster, it has been suggested, was a considerable improvement in the condition of women in both the economy and the household. In a pioneering essay on the experience of white women in the seventeenthcentury Chesapeake, Lois Green Carr and Lorena S. Walsh have presented a startling finding: their painstaking reconstruction of women's lives, based on an extensive analysis of probate records, makes clear that Maryland men were often willing to grant to their widows sizable powers not just of management but also of disposal of property.2 Others, such as Edmund Morgan, have argued that women's awareness of their scarcity value made