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Chesapeake Migration Patterns

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The England that the seventeenth-century migrants left behind was undergoing dramatic changes, many of which stemmed from a rapid rise in population that began early in the sixteenth century. As the population grew, the economy altered, social stratification increased, and customary modes of political behavior developed into new forms. England’s ruling elites saw chaos everywhere, and they became obsessed with the problem of maintaining order in the evidently anarchic society around them. The large-scale migration of English people to America can itself be taken as an indication of the extent of these changes, for never before in the century-old history of European expansion had more than a small number of male adventurers chosen to emigrate …show more content…

With the exception of a few Catholic migrants to early Maryland, all English settlers in America were Protestants. But the contrast between Southern and Northern religious practices was marked. Since transferring a vigorous Anglican parish structure to the seventeenth-century Chesapeake proved impossible, religion in Maryland and Virginia remained more a matter of personal piety than a constant institutional presence. In New England, however, Puritan church and state were closely entwined: each supported the other, and determining which was the superior authority (especially in the early years) was often difficult. Thus, New England women had to reckon with two strong institutions—the Puritan church and the stable patriarchal family—that Chesapeake women did not. The effects of these religious differences have not been explored as fully as those resulting from demography, but the case of Anne Hutchinson suggests that Puritanism in its formative stages offered women opportunities for religious leadership obviously denied Chesapeake residents with no comparable institutions. Although Puritan theology reinforced secular patriarchal tendencies, it also emphasized the spiritual equality of all souls before God and the ability of all believers (male or female) to interpret the scriptures. Hutchinson took advantage of the ambiguities in Puritan teachings and, for a time, …show more content…

Tempting as it is to forget the similarities, which were many, and stress the differences, the important characteristic of colonial women’s lives was alike, whatever the region: an adult woman’s status was everywhere determined by her marital state. In the Chesapeake no less than in New England, a woman was seen chiefly as an adjunct of her husband. Her social standing depended on her husband’s position in the colonial hierarchy: her primary role in family and community was as mistress of his household. Granted, the same was true of her English contemporaries. But two major differences separated the women of the Old World from those of the New. First, because of later marriage and longer widowhood, seventeenth-century English women most likely earned wages and lived independently of a paternal or marital household for a period of time at least as long as the terms of their marriages. In other words, they spent as much of their adult lives outside a marital household as inside one. Few American women had similar experiences: demographic constraints precluded long-term, independent lives in the colonies. Second. English women actively engaged in a market economy, exchanging goods and services with neighbors and working in shops alongside their husbands and fathers. The economic life of seventeenth-century English

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