Good Wives by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

The Summer of '19 is being dedicated to strong women: be them, know them, raise them.  This summer's readings are for my girls.

I first read this book in 2005 in a research methods course in Women's Studies, along with Ulrich's more well-known (I believe) A Midwife's Tale, the biography of Martha Ballard.  When curating my reading list for this summer, I felt it was a vital piece of American Women's History and needed to be included.

The subtitle of Good Wives is "Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England 1650-1750".  As many of our students get their image of New England women of the time period from The Scarlet Letter, The Crucible, and the poetry of Anne Bradstreet, I felt much was left out.  The focus on sin, witchcraft, and piety/religion omits the realities of daily life for the vast majority of women.  The "simple things" like childbirth and rearing, cooking, cleaning, and running a household are overshadowed by the sole images of the aforementioned literary works.  Not to take anything away from them, but there is much more to be learned of how women's lives were affected by their (or more correctly their father's of husband's) financial means, travel, illness, and location.  I used several excerpts from this as a supplement in my teaching, but I still felt it worthwhile to reread these depictions in their entirety.

Ulrich explores the various roles of women--housewife or one in control of the home base and its daily workings, deputy or husband's assistant in his craft or agriculture or business, consort or lover, mother, mistress of her servant girls, neighbor, Christian, and heroine.  These roles are examine through the lens of Christian female mythology: Bathsheba (finances and daily life's impacts on them), Eve (sexuality and childbearing), and Jael (reconciling necessary violence with peaceful Christian ideology). 

It is my hope to have some of this summer's readings appear in our American History and Literature classes' outside reading lists, not just a Women's Studies course.  I believe this has a place, front and center, in OUR history. 

All opinions expressed on this blog are solely those of Mrs. W.

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