Hometown American History Women in the Early Colonial Period

Gravestone, Mary Lattimer Farber Gravestone Collection

Mrs. Elizabeth Freake and Her Baby Mary, 1676 Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA

Prologue Anne Bradstreet I am obnoxious to each carping tongue Let Greeks be Greeks, and Women what they are. Who says my hand a needle better fits. A Poet’s Pen all scorn I should thus wrong, Men have precedency and still excel; For such despite they cast on female wits. It is but vain unjustly to wage war. If what I do prove well, it won’t advance, Men can do best, and Women know it well. They’ll say it’s stol’n, or else it was by chance. Preeminence in all and each is yours; Yet grant some small acknowledgement of ours. But sure the antique Greeks were far more mild, And oh ye high flown quills that soar the skies, Else of our Sex, why feigned they those nine And poesy made Calliope’s own child? And ever with your prey still catch your praise, So ‘mongst the rest they placed the Arts divine, If e’er you deign these lowly lines your eyes, But this weak knot they will full soon untie. Give thyme or Parsley wreath, I ask no Bays. The Greeks did nought but play the fools and lie. This mean and unrefined ore of mine Will make your glist’ring gold but more to shine.

Hall-Parlor House Plan New England 17th-18th centuries

John Lewis Krimmel, Blind Man’s Bluff (1814) Terra Foundation for American Art

Law and Gender: Adultery Status Punishment Married Man and Married Woman Death Married Man and Unmarried Woman Whipping and/or Fine for Fornication Married Woman and Single Man Death Single Man and Single Woman Whipping and/or Fine for Fornication

The Gibbs Children Museum of Fine Art, Boston (left and middle), and Clay Center, Charleston, WV (right)

Robert Feke, Isaac Royall and His Family, 1741 Harvard University

John Durand, The Rapalje Children, 1768 The New-York Historical Society

“Dignifying the Seats” Litchfield Historical Society, Litchfield, CT

Connecticut Historical Society Prudence Punderson, The First, Second, and Last Scene of Mortality 1776-1783 Connecticut Historical Society

“Enter Not into the Way of the Wicked, and Go Not in the Path of E Keep Within Compass, 1785-1805 “Enter Not into the Way of the Wicked, and Go Not in the Path of E Evil Men.” Winterthur Museum

A Society of Patriotic Ladies, London, 1765 Library of Congress