One Colonial Woman's World: The Life and Writings of Mehetabel Chandler Coit

Introduction

introdUCtion despite the great strides made in the field of early american women’s history over the past few decades, only a small number of primary sources written by women have yet been made widely available. it is true that few women in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries left behind written records of any kind, and fewer still of these writings have survived; but it is also true that only a fraction of the surviving documents have been published. Many scholars are currently working to remedy this situation; however, it remains the case that what has often been missing from the story of early america are the voices of its women. This book, based on the writings of Mehetabel Chandler Coit, a new englander who lived from 1673 to 1758, is intended to help fill this void. The bare outlines of Mehetabel’s life are as follows. She was born in roxbury , Massachusetts, where she lived until 1688, when she and her family became some of the first settlers of Woodstock, Connecticut. in 1695 she married John Coit, a shipbuilder of new London, where she lived out the rest of her days. She and John had six children together and led a relatively comfortable existence until John’s death in 1744 at the age of seventy-three. Mehetabel remained a widow for the final fourteen years of her life. For over sixty years Mehetabel kept a diary: her first entry dates from May 1688, when she was fourteen, and her last from May 1749, when she was seventy-five. Since the prevailing view among historians is that no femaleauthored diary from the seventeenth century has survived, the dozen or so entries dating from before 1700 may qualify Mehetabel’s as the earliest extant diary written by an american woman.1 The work usually given this distinction is the 1704 travel journal of Madam Sarah kemble knight—who, ironically , was a neighbor of Mehetabel’s in new London—however, knight’s original manuscript no longer exists, and recent scholarship indicates that xvii Introduction xviii the first published edition may have been altered by its nineteenth-century editor.2 it is unclear why historians have overlooked Mehetabel’s diary, particularly given that extracts were published by her descendants in 1895 as Mehetabel Chandler Coit: Her Book, 1714. over the years this volume of extracts has been listed in several bibliographies of american diaries, such as William Matthews’s American Diaries: An Annotated Bibliography of American Diaries Written Prior to the Year 1861, harriette Forbes’s New England Diaries, 1602–1800, and Joyce Goodfriend’s Published Diaries and Letters of American Women. The diary transcript was also cited by Lyle koehler in his 1980 Search for Power: The “Weaker Sex” in Seventeenth­Century New England; by estelle Jelinek (who dismissed it as an “undistinguished family history”) in her Tradition of Women’s Autobiography (1986); and more recently by kirsten Phimister, in her 2008 essay on white women in colonial america in British Colonial America: People and Perspectives.3 despite this general familiarity with the extracts, it appears that no one had ever tried to locate the original manuscript. i first came across the published extracts while researching early new england diary literature. The diary’s age and the intriguing nature of the entries impelled me to search for the original, which i eventually located in private hands. Genealogical research showed that the diary had been passed down in Mehetabel’s family to her son Joseph’s great-grandchildren, Maria Perit Gilman , emily Serena Gilman, and Louisa Gilman Lane, who had arranged for the 1895 publication. in the twentieth century the diary descended through the Gilman sisters’ brother edward’s family to his great-granddaughter elizabeth Lawrence Gilman anderson. elizabeth anderson, a remarkable woman who lived to be 101, preserved the diary for decades before ultimately entrusting it to a favorite nephew, who retains possession of it today. he kindly shared its contents with me, revealing that the original manuscript contains material not included in the published extracts, such as poems, recipes, herbal and folk remedies, financial accounts, religious meditations, and even some humor. These elements help round out a portrait of Mehetabel’s personality and interests and add immeasurable value to the diary. The search for the manuscript also revealed the existence of approximately two dozen letters written by Mehetabel and her mother, mother-in-law, sister , and daughter between 1688 and 1743, as well as a sixty-four-page poem completed...