"My Resting Reaping Times": Sarah Osborn's Defense of Her "Unfeminine" Activities, 1767

Abstract

In recent years, historians of nineteenth-century American women have begun to look behind the overt actions of their female subjects in order to examine motivations and self-perceptions. This approach has led to the publication of some of the most interesting, informative, and provocative works that are yet available in the field of women's history.1 Unfortunately, thus far a similar mode of analysis has not been adopted by students of colonial women. Books and articles on seventeenthand eighteenth-century female Americans still concentrate on delineating their domestic work patterns and activities outside the home or focus on the actions of the prominent women of the age.2 most obvious reason for the failure to inquire into the inner lives of eighteenth-century women is not a lack of interest; it results, rather, from an apparent paucity of sources. But to say that documentary evidence that would provide insight into the colonial female experience is more sparse than 1. E.g., Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, The Hysterical Woman: Sex Roles and Role Conflict in 19th Century America, Social Research 39 (1972): 652-78; Ann Douglas Wood, Mrs. Sigourney and the Sensibility of Inner Space, New England Quarterly 45 (1972): 163-81; and Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973). 2. E.g., Roger Thompson, Women in Stuart England and America (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974); Linda Grant DePauw, Founding Mothers: Women of America in the Revolutionary Era (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1975); and Carol Berkin, Within the Conjuror's Circle: Women in Colonial America (Morristown, N.J.: General Learning Press, 1974).