Women in Early America by Thomas A. Foster (review)

Women in Early America, edited by Thomas A. Foster, makes the case for the importance of and necessity for scholarship on women. While some readers may question the exigency necessitating a collection solely on women, Carol Berkin in her foreword and Foster in his introduction clarify the need for such scholarship. Berkin reviews the scholarly strides taken since the 1970s to recover and restore women to the larger historical conversation. Even with the impressive inroads that many women's studies scholars made in the twentieth century, and even with today's focus on the intersections of gender, race, class, and region, Berkin asserts that men are still portrayed and accepted as the universal historical subject. Foster supports Berkin's claim with some staggering facts. First, he argues that the most popular topics in early American history are on the exemplary lives lived by great men. Second, he states that in "1985, only about 4 percent [of articles] covered women's history. By 2000, this figure had risen to a less-than-a-whooping 8 percent" (3). While women's studies and scholarship on women continue to grow, the numbers show that this work represents only a small percentage of the larger historical scholarship. In addition, the scholarship on women is overwhelmingly on women in the twentieth century, and not the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These statistics and trends speak to the great necessity of books like Women in Early America.

Rejecting the familiar narrative of the representative man that dominates much of the history of the new nation, Women in Early America introduces readers to women at the margins. The eleven essays, written by historians and literary scholars, range from rich biographical essays on individual women's lives to informative essays on diverse communities of women. This mixture introduces readers to Doña Teresa de Aguilera y Roche, the wife of New Mexico's governor in the seventeenth century; Rebecca Kellogg Ashley, a former captive of and translator for the Iroquois; and Ona Judge Staines, Martha Washington's runaway slave; as well as servant women living in the Chesapeake; women slave owners in Jamaica; traders' wives in New France; agrarian Indian women in the Ohio River Valley; and Loyalist women in New York City, among others. The collection is organized chronologically, beginning with an essay on the Inquisition in New Mexico during the seventeenth century and ending with an essay on female education, academies, and seminaries in the post-Revolutionary eastern United States. From Detroit to Jamaica, the essays cover a wide geographic expanse, including the contested land and settlements of the Dutch, British, French, Spanish, and Native Americans.

It is this incredible breadth, from individual women in New Mexico to communities of women in Jamaica, that Jennifer L. Morgan in her afterword asserts is the collection's "most important contribution" (273). She writes, "The essays collectively argue that the colonial landscape is always already a place in which women's presence was productive" (273). It is this focus on women's integral presence and participation in the North American landscape that reorients our thinking and perceptions on colonial America. Take for instance Erica Armstrong Dunbar's essay, "'I Knew That If I Went Back to Virginia, I Should Never Get My Liberty': Ona Judge Staines, the President's Runaway Slave." Here, Dunbar tells the incredible story of the escape of Ona Judge from the first family's Philadelphia residence. With her focus on Ona, Dunbar offers readers new historical information on the free black and the fugitive black populations in Philadelphia and New York City, the slave culture at Mount Vernon, and the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793, which Washington signed and then surreptitiously tried to evade with his search for Ona. Ona's story not only helps to contextualize slavery in post-Revolutionary Virginia and Philadelphia but rewrites and reframes the popular American conception of the Washingtons as so-called benevolent slave owners. As scholars continue to "widen the category of...