AM214 GENDER IN THE ATLANTIC

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• AM214 GENDER IN THE ATLANTIC

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Plan of Lecture

• Moll Flanders, Robinson Crusoe and the woman
  problem
• Early America as masculine place
• Why did women not come to America?
• Male indentured servants
• Biafran female slaves
• Women in New France

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Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe

• Daniel Defoes Moll Flanders (1722) and Robinson
  Crusoe (1719)
• If Robinson Crusoe about self-mastering then Moll
  Flanders is about self-fashioning
• Moll Flanders a troublesome wench

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America as masculine

• 70-80 percent of migrants to British America male
• One in three migrants in seventeenth century an
  indentured servant
• No more than 15 percent of European migration to
  British America female 100-150,000
• Perhaps 0.1 percent of English women moved per
  annum to British America before 1780

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Why did women not move to British America?

• More abundant employment in Britain, especially
  in domestic service
• Pull of family and neighbourhood stronger for
  women than for men
• Women disliked hard labour in the fields
• Possibility of sexual abuse in America

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Effect of absence of women on social structure

• Edmund Morgan, American Slavery-American Freedom
  (1975)
• Richard Dunn, Sugar and Slaves (1972)
• Both pictured Virginia and Barbados as anarchic
  places of social and gender disorder

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Male indentured servants

• Lived a Hobbesian existence poor, nasty, brutish
  and short
• Went to America for economic incentives
• Accepted patriarchy as standard ways in which
  gender should operate
• African men experienced a crisis in patriarchal
  authority

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Biafran women

• Modal migrant to British America an African slave
  from Biafra going to Jamaica
• Biafran migrants had large percentage of women
  (45-50 in the mid-eighteenth century)
• Reduction of male influence over African women in
  America (Philip Morgan) although male authority
  increased again over time
• Black womens involvement in commerce and
  agriculture

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Women in New France

• Even more reluctant migrants than English women
• One advantage over English women better property
  and inheritance rights under Customs of Paris
  legislation
• 145 of 392 English female captives to Canada
  remained in Canada, suggesting better prospects
  for women in New France
• Cornelia Hughes Dayton

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