The Silent Work of Ordinary People:

An Historical Review of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England 1650-1750

A Book Review by Karen Klebbe

March 2009

Very rarely do image and reality run parallel to each other. With the average woman in the United States being a size twelve, any Glamour or Cosmopolitan magazine cover is a testament to that truth. It is sad and oddly comforting to know this is not something particular to our time and place in American history—our foremothers also dealt with the discrepancies between image and reality, though it was not nearly as silly as dress size. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich discusses these contradictions in her book Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England 1650-1750. Ulrich poses a gulf existed between what New England colonial women were prescribed to be (meek, amiable, deferential spouses, doting and nurturing mothers, pious and faithful Christians) and the reality of most of women’s lives. Using insightful analysis of primary sources, Ulrich makes a strong scholarly argument for the contradiction as well as an enjoyable read.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich received her PhD from the University of New Hampshire in 1980, publishing Good Wives two years later. She is most well-known for writing A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary 1785-1812, for which she received the Pulitzer Prize and Bancroft Prize in American History in 1991. She has been at Harvard University since 1995 as the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History until 2006, when she became the 300^th Anniversary University Professor, a title she holds currently. Ulrich is also the residing president of the American Historical Association.

Good Wives is undoubtedly a social history with its focus on ordinary women and like any good social history; it incorporates larger themes (politics, economics, religious) as well. A student of history cannot get a true sense of the issues without a potent mixture of many themes. Ulrich has done an admirable job at making sure this from-the-bottom-up social history is about real people, not just a region or group of women. Good Wives is full of individual stories, stories that bring a larger theme to life, but they are individuals all the same. One minor annoyance is the parade of names—so many Hannahs, Sarahs, Nathanials, and Samuels that at times it is difficult to keep track of these intimate communities.

Ulrich’s premise in Good Wives is the dichotomous nature of the relationship between the image of women and the reality of their lives in northern New England (i.e. Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and what was to eventually become Maine) within the one hundred year time span from 1650 to 1750. The subject matter alone, the lives of women, is nearly invisible when approached from the availability of primary sources. Literacy rates have been projected to be as high as the 90^th percentile for female New Englanders before 1800. Why the dearth of self-produced primary sources? Most women were too busy nursing babies, caring for young children, washing, spinning, cooking and churning to record their thoughts and feelings on the matter. Most ordinary people, male or female, were simply too busy with the imperative yet back-breaking work of clearing land or exploiting maritime resources to write much of anything down other than yields and the prices received for such precious commodities. Then how does an historian extract the lives of women without self-produced primary sources? Ulrich turns to copious primary sources, almost exclusively produced by men, to render the fat of women’s often glaringly realistic lives in northern New England.

Ulrich relies steadfastly on five classes of primary sources: court records, probate records, family papers, diaries, and church records. One would require a vast number of these resources in order have enough data to arrive at meaningful conclusions and this Ulrich does. She also acknowledges the precariousness of the sources; not every woman would be involved in court cases, in fact very few women would be. What Ulrich does with this, however, is recognize the extraordinary circumstances that would bring a woman to court. Through analysis of individual cases, she then fits these women in to the larger economic fabric of their communities, as it was in the role of deputy husband that a woman most often found herself involved with the court (Ulrich, 36). Not only could a wife “double” as a husband, she had often was required to do so in order to protect or further her husband’s business, whatever field that may be, and ultimately furthering her own interest as well (Ulrich, 40). This allowed women much more of a partnership role as it was assumed the wife spoke and acted for her husband while away on other business or at sea. Ulrich also acknowledges the dilemma of relying on male diarists for information about the lives of their wives, daughters and mothers. She notes male diarists seldom wrote about their womenfolk except when their own activities and needs were disrupted or impinged by female activities (Ulrich, 139). Ulrich does not limit the scope of the book to primary sources. She constantly weaves the female experience into the wider fabric of political and economic colonial life of northern New England. With over thirty pages of endnotes, Good Wives is not written for the History Channel enthusiast. It is an academic and compelling scholarly work surprisingly accessible to the layman. There are consistent reminders throughout the book about its true audience, with historian name-dropping that excludes more popular readers.

Good Wives is organized into three major clusters, each symbolized by a biblical archetype: economic life (Bathsheba), sex and reproduction (Eve), and the junction of religion and aggression (Jael) (Ulrich, 10). Ulrich looks at four major housekeeping roles of a wife: service and maintenance (cooking and cleaning), agriculture, manufacturing (making soap, spinning) and trade (Ulrich, 70). All of these contributed significantly to the economic life of a family, particularly the manufacturing and trading, which often occurred within informal female trading networks, i.e. trading with relatives and neighbors, often for goods and services not produces within the nuclear family. Ulrich finds the strict demarcations of the 19^th century between the public and domestic spheres did not exist in 17^th century New England (Ulrich, 37). She discusses little about sex in the 17^th century, but devotes much of the Eve section to the incessant pregnancy and nursing most women experienced for 15-20 years of their lives. In this section, Ulrich makes an interesting case for the re-interpretation of the custom of parents naming living children after deceased siblings. Many historians have interpreted the custom as an indifference to the individuality of children, but Ulrich puts forth the idea that perhaps the custom developed as a way to “transcend death through progeny” (Ulrich, 150). She offers no definitive proof to support such an idea, merely an alternate interpretation of a perplexing custom. Ulrich completes the book with an analysis of women and violence and religion, sometimes separately, sometimes intermingled. She identifies four types of allowable violence: authoritarian, defensive, disorderly, and demonstrative (Ulrich, 186). The first two were almost always acceptable by their communities, the last two never so. Ulrich then addresses female participation in congregations—they were predominantly female, though they could hold no church office. Church membership was earned and one of the few public distinctions available to women (Ulrich, 216). This is the weakest section of the book. She adequately explains the importance of religious life within communities and illuminates the political problems pastors ran into if they could not appease the dowagers of their congregation--it often lead to their removal from said congregation. She makes an attempt to reconcile the antagonistic aspects of violence and religion.

The most immediate classroom use for Good Wives is Ulrich’s expert ability to decipher so much information about ordinary women’s lives from sources that on the surface seem to have so little about them. This should be required reading in every AP US History class, since she models primary source analysis so thoroughly. It is also imperative that the lives of ordinary women are presented to students, not just the lives of women such as Abigail Adams, who happened to leave a rich recorded personal and political history. Ordinary life is valuable to historians in and of itself and thoroughly more interesting to students.