The Golden Age
In the essay "The Myth of the Golden Age" by Mary Beth Norton, Mary did not agree with historians that it was a "Golden Age" for women during the colonial period. She feels that women's lives outside the home were severely limited. Mary felt women never achieved a status later to be lost. The colonial period, even comparatively speaking, was not a golden age for women. During the colonial period most white women were expected to devote their chief energies to housekeeping and to the care of the children. While husbands where expected to support them by raising crops or working for wages. Women also did some outside chores such as gathering fruits and vegetables and making clothes for their family. Only the wealthiest women who had servants escaped some of these labors. Native American women had similar work roles. They did not do the spinning of wool or weaving but made clothes by tanning and processing the hides of the animals their husbands killed. Like their white counterparts the Native American also drew a division between the domestic labors of women to the public realm of men. Black women were more inclined to work both in field and in house. More often black women engaged in labor outdoors then the whites.
Yes, they were important decisions but who is to say that women could not help make them. Was this also considered part of the "Golden age"? Yes, they may have had special privileges by carrying their masters' baby such as "lighter work loads and separate houses", but they would go through most of their teenage life get!ting pregnant and giving birth to the masters babies. I fell many might not find the sex ratio to be beneficial. We have come a long way in this matter. "One wonders just how much power they could have wielded. Mary Beth Norton states, "Evaluation of women's position depends on what aspects of their experience are relevant to an understanding of their social and economic position, for no one would claim that colonial females exerted much political power. In my opinion women never had the opporunity or the chans to contribute in the econimic matters, it was always seen as a mans job to make these so called important decision. The first argument by historians asserts that a scarcity of women worked to their advantage. Historians of American women have regarded the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a "Golden Age" in which women were better off than their English female contemporaries of the succeeding Victorian era. "Since under the law any child of a slave woman was also a slave," masters would increase their slaves by encouraging their slaves with fertility. Which was a very tedious and time-consuming job. Women may have had a chance to pick and choose their spouse but who knows if the man they chose was the right one. Most seventieth century brides where often teenagers. ------------------------------------------------------------------------**Bibliography**.
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