Although the colonies established a rich diversity of economic activities, from a functional occupational standpoint, daily life was fairly stable. Occupational roles changed little over the years in settled areas; from today’s perspective, occupational opportunities remained narrow and rigid. Most people expected the future to replicate the past, and most young people followed in the employment footsteps of their parents. Perspective 3.2 shows the traditionalism in the Native American culture.
The male population generally fit into one of several employment categories, the most predominant being family farmers. Other significant categories or classes were slave, indentured servant, unskilled laborer, and seaman. Upper-middle classes included artisans, merchants, and landowning farmers, but the richest occupational groups included merchants in New England and the Middle colonies and large landholding planters in the South. As Edwin Perkins (1988) and Alice Hanson Jones (1992) inform us, the very wealthy were classified as esquires, gentlemen, or officials.
Most women participated in work to complement the work of the male head of the household. Child care, domestic service, livestock tending, and household production dominated women’s duties. Family farm life in particular, the most typical lifestyle of the period, had women and children engaged in handicraft production within the home. During harvest times, they usually turned to outdoor work to help the men. In seventeenth-century Maryland, for instance, Lois G. Carr and Lorena Walsh (1977) have shown that wives routinely spent the spring and summer months in the tobacco fields. In the Middle colonies, according to Joan Jensen (1986), women typically helped An individual woman might, if she wished, “own” a patch of corn, or an apple or peach orchard, but there was little reason for insisting on private tenure: the work was more happily done communally, and in the absence of a regular market, a surplus was of little personal advantage, especially if the winter were hard and other families needed corn. In such circumstances hoarding led only to hard feelings and strained relations as well as the possibility of future difficulty in getting corn for oneself and one’s family. (1970, 24)
NATIVE AMERICAN FAMILY STRUCTURE
In contrast to the patriarchical family, social-economic structure of European settlers, the Iroquois and other eastern tribes developed a matrilinear family structure. As hunters, men were frequently absent from the household for long periods, often for months and sometimes even years at a time. This disengaged them from fatherly (and husbandly) responsibilities; therefore, the husband-wife relationship was not the most basic social relationship. Instead, the most fundamental foundation of the family was mother-daughter.
The long-term relationships of mothers, daughters, granddaughters, and neighbors living communally minimized shirking and bad behavior, and the sharing provided a form of insurance against poor individual harvests and bad times.
Women were the planters and harvesters, with corn the primary food source. Although all land was commonly owned by the nation, or tribe, loose ownership rights to individual plots could occur. From Anthony Wallace, we learn the following:
In the easier tasks of spreading hay to dry, digging for potatoes, gathering flax, and picking fruit. Most away-from-home work for women, especially younger women, was in other people’s homes. Such domestic service for extra income was common for women under the age of 25.
Alice Hanson Jones (1992) reminds us to take special note of the inferior legal and political status of women and the fact of male dominance and patriarchal authority within the family. A woman was expected to be obedient to her husband, and marriage was accepted unquestionably as her proper destiny, regardless of class or status. For those who did not marry, the outlook for work was bleak.
To spin fiber or help in the household tasks of parents or relatives was likely for an unmarried woman (hence the term spinster, meaning an unmarried woman). Some women, with education and special connections, might teach music, reading, or other skills.
Children began helping their parents at about the age of 7 or 8; by the age of 12, they were usually important apprentice-type workers in the home or fields. Child labor was very important, and maintaining the allegiance of children to labor on behalf of parents was a special problem for parents in the nonslave areas. Indeed, the problem was reflected even in the law. The laws of inheritance varied among the colonies but were consistent with the goals of economic efficiency and the maintenance of a reliable rural labor force. Southern colonies used primogeniture (the oldest son inherits the estate) because slaves supplied labor on the plantations, while the Middle and New England colonies typically used multigeniture (splitting estates among the sons) to better ensure work allegiance by sons.
World History
