Spinsters

During the 17th century the term spinster came to mean not only a female spinner of wool, cotton, or linen, but also a never-married woman. The two meanings overlapped because many single women earned their living by spinning. Over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries spinster took on a derogatory meaning, England apparently leading the way in developing this connotation. Some scholars contend that spinsters, in addition to challenging prevailing models of womanhood that prescribed the proper role of an adult woman to be wife and mother, were seen as impediments to British mercantile and imperialist expansion, which required constant childbearing to reproduce the workforce.

While single women formed between 10 and 20 percent of the adult female population in Europe between 1250 and 1800, they were anomalies in the early North American colonies. For example, between 1619 and 1622 approximately 150 single English women came to Virginia. By the end of 1622 every one of them had married. In 17th-century New England virtually all white women married as well. New England authorities deemed single people, both men and women, to be so potentially disruptive to social order that they were directed to live with “well governed families.” Single women over the age of 23 earned the label spinster If they were still unmarried at 26, they were called “thornbacks,” an unflattering reference to a sea skate with sharp spines on its back and tail. Unmarried women were also more vulnerable to charges of WITCHCRAFT. By the 18th century spinsters were not seen as necessarily threatening to social order, but as objects of derision and scorn. Old maids were considered odd, ugly, ill-natured, nosy, and possessing undue curiosity, childlike credulity, absurd affectations, and spiteful natures.

In Europe spinsters or “maids” most commonly supported themselves as servants, but some also engaged in other wage labor, piece work, petty trading, or small shopkeeping. In 17th-century New England the apprenticeship system trained girls only for housewifery; there is no record of a mercantile establishment hiring a single woman until after King Philip’s War. By the 18th century more single women found employment in the kinds of jobs available in Europe, traders were sometimes referred to as “she-merchants,” and some single women worked in newspaper printing, teaching, and sewing. Even so, as was true across the Atlantic, these were usually poorly paid positions, with low status and little hope of economic security.

Further reading: Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide, eds., Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250-1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999); Karin A. Wulf, Not All Wives: Women of Colonial Philadelphia (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001).

—Mary Murphy

Squanto (1580?-1 622) interpreter, intermediary One of the most pivotal figures in the history of English colonization of North America was Squanto (also known as Tisquantum), a Patuxet Indian. The Patuxet were an ALGoNQuiN-speaking tribe who engaged in agriculture, hunting, and fishing in the coastal region of what would become southern New England. Europeans visited the area with several exploratory ventures, most notably Samuel de Champlain in 1605 and John Smith in 1614, describing a land with a substantial population that offered potential for fur trade and agricultural development. Details about Squanto’s early life are sketchy, as are the events leading to his departure from the American mainland. One likely scenario offered by historians is that Thomas Hunt, an officer left in charge of the fishing operation in Smith’s expedition, captured Squanto along with approximately 20 other Native Americans and attempted to sell them as slaves in Spain. Not surprisingly, Hunt’s action served to embitter relations between Europeans and Native Americans in New England.

Not much is known about Squanto’s life shortly after his capture, but in 1617 he was living in London in the household of John Slany, an employee of the Newfoundland Company. Through this association Squanto met Sir Ferdinando Gorges, who decided to send Squanto back to New England to act as an interpreter for a 1619 expedition. The New England Squanto encountered upon his return was already radically changed from the one he had left only years earlier. The most dramatic difference was in the Native population, which had fallen victim to an epidemic of European disease in 1616. The Patuxet were hit particularly hard, and the surviving members abandoned their village before Squanto arrived. Left without family or tribal ties, Squanto offered to serve as an interpreter for the Wampanoag Indians and the newly arrived English colony at Plymouth in 1620. Along with Samoset, Squanto served as translator and intermediary between the Pilgrim settlers and Massasoit, the Wampanoag sachem.

Like many Natives who worked (willingly or through force) as translators in the early colonial period, Squanto soon found himself caught between two worlds, with one foot in English culture and one ensconced in the Algonquin world. By helping the struggling Pilgrims learn how to grow crops in the marginal New England soil, Squanto ensured their survival and established himself in a position of considerable authority within the English colony. In addition, as the primary interpreter between Massasoit and the Pilgrims, Squanto was central to the increasingly fractious political negotiations that took place after 1620. The balance was impossible to maintain for long, however. In trying to enhance his own political position, Squanto alienated Massasoit. In 1622, while returning from a meeting with the sachem, Squanto succumbed to the same diseases that had ravaged his people in the earlier epidemic.

Further reading: Kathleen J. Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 1500-1650 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996).

—Melanie Perreault and Billy G. Smith

Standish, Myles (1584?-1656) military leader As the military commander of the Pilgrims and the Plymouth Colony, Captain Myles Standish was responsible for the colony’s security. Standish claimed descent from the Roman Catholic family Standish and that his inheritance from the family had been “surreptitiously detained.” He served in the continental wars in the Low Countries before joining the Pilgrim Separatists in London on their voyage to North America. He was one of the signers of the Mayflower Compact. Standish’s experiences on various campaigns apparently rendered him hardy enough to escape the “general sickness” of the first winter in Plymouth, which claimed the life of his first wife, Rose. He led several of the exploratory expeditions in and around Plymouth, including the 1622 offensive against the Massachusett Indians at Wessagusset.

Standish was derisively referred to as “Captaine Shrimp” by Thomas Morton of Merrymount. Standish had broken up the Merrymount trading settlement in 1628 and arrested Morton, sending him back to England. Standish remarried in 1623 or 1624 and helped established Duxbury, the first direct offshoot of the Plymouth church, which was incorporated as a town in 1637. Standish was also a chief negotiator with local Natives, learning several dialects and helping to keep peaceful relations between them and the colonists. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow chose Standish as the hero of his 1858 poetic romance, The Courtship of Miles Standish, based on the story published in Timothy Alden’s A Collection of American Epitaphs and Inscriptions (1814). Standish was depicted as a courageous, hot-tempered military man, unable to court Priscilla Mullins because of his lack of words and instead requesting his young friend John Alden to court her on Standish’s behalf. There is little evidence beyond oral tradition for the romance, but it was one of the most popular poems in 19th-and 20th-century America.

—Stephen C. O’Neill

Starbuck, Mary Coffin (1645-1717) minister The youngest daughter of one of the earliest and most prominent settlers of Nantucket, Mary Coffin became an important proselytizer and the first recognized minister of the Society of Friends (Quakers) on the island. She was born February 20, 1645, in Haverhill, Massachusetts, to Tristram Coffin and Dionis Stevens, who moved the family to Nantucket in 1662. That same year Mary became the wife of Nathaniel Starbuck.

Mary’s wealth and status afforded her a significant role in the community. Her husband, the wealthiest man on the island, operated a farm and served as a government official. Mary tended their 10 children (two died before reaching adulthood) and the households of her extended family after the deaths of both her and Nathaniel’s mothers. Her most remembered role, though, is as a religious leader.

Literate and well-versed in the scriptures but apparently a member of no particular church, Mary joined a Calvinist “circle” attended by her in-laws and ultimately became its leader. In the 1690s, however, a rift in the community over land titles and the deaths of several prominent Nantucket leaders ushered in a new era, allowing Quaker missionaries to gain what at first seemed to be a weak foothold on the island. Mary became one of the earliest to be included among the converted.

That she had assumed a leadership role in her previous religious organization suggests that some similarities existed between the beliefs of that group and those of the Quakers. Most important for Mary was the Quaker support of equal status for women in religious activities, including ministering. By 1708 the Starbucks had begun holding Quaker meetings in their home, known as “Parliament House,” and Mary, at age 63, had become an influential leader.

Women of the period typically played a large role in the religious education of their children, and Mary was no exception. Although her children had reached adulthood by the time of her conversion, she still maintained significant influence over their lives. Only one of her children did not embrace Quakerism.

—Nicki Walker Carroll