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Reviews in American History 29.1 (2001) 15-22



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Single in the Quaker City

Clare A. Lyons


Karin Wulf. Not All Wives: Women of Colonial Philadelphia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000. xvii + 217 pp. Illustrations, tables, notes, and index. $39.95.

In the years just preceding the American revolution David Cooper took up his pen to give fatherly advice to his daughter Martha as she reached maturity. He beseeched her to approach courtship and marriage with caution least she be "disagreeably married, tyed for Life to a Man not worthy of thee, & who after he had thee fast would disreguard thee & make thee a Slave that himself might be a GentleMan" (p. 25). Thoughts of the weighty choice of marriage occupied Martha's thoughts as well. She reflectively considered this important life choice as she copied poems into her commonplace book that evaluated marriage and raised the possibility that a young woman might choose not to marry. Karin Wulf begins her book, Not All Wives, with the concerns of these two to introduce us to an eighteenth-century world where Philadelphians questioned the legitimacy of patriarchal marriage, and where a sizable portion of the city's female population lived as unmarried women creating important places for themselves in the city's spiritual, economic and political life. The book closes as a tragic declension story. In the late colonial period unmarried women were increasingly excluding from public consideration and participation as gender trumped marital status and class standing in dictating social position and public life was masculinized.

Karin Wulf has made an important contribution to early American women's history. Not all Wives is a gracefully written, extensively researched account of unmarried women's experiences in colonial Philadelphia. Her study is a fine addition to the growing body of scholarship that has broadened our understanding of gender in colonial America beyond New England and Chesapeake studies. Her account of single women's agency in colonial Philadelphia and her documentation of their central roles in the colony's development complicates the mosaic picture emerging within this field. Many of the findings in this book are based on painstaking research in tax records, court dockets, and poor relief documents. But Wulf creates an intimacy between the reader and her subjects by incorporating detailed vignettes of a few of these [End Page 15] women. We enter into the lives of Quaker Elizabeth Norris who created a retreat for her theologically inspired "sisters in singleness" (p. 54) at the family's country estate. We are shown the complexity of lives that combined independent property ownership and a daily commitment to domestic pursuits: lives like Mary Sandwith's, who enjoyed the economic independence of a single woman of property but who devoted her daily life to domestic concerns in the management of her sister Elizabeth Drinkers's household. Because Not All Wives provides sophisticated analysis and pleasant inviting stories of eighteenth-century women, it will be a useful book for scholars as well as undergraduate readers.

In her introduction Karin Wulf presents the methodological and demographic justifications for this study. A focus on marital status allows us to untangle the influence of gender from marital status and class standing. Such a study will refine our understanding of how gender operated in colonial societies, and uncover the diversity of women's experiences. Marital status is a useful, if underutilized, category of analysis for early American women's history. Unmarried women were a demographically important part of the city's population. Philadelphia, like European early modern cities, attracted a sizable population of unmarried women. Some of these were women who never married, others were widows who chose not to remarry. The life cycle of many urban women included long periods outside of marriage. These periods of single status were created by lengthy gaps between marriages and in the period before and after a marriage. No gender imbalance prevented these women from marrying. The sex ratio of colonial Philadelphia, Wulf estimates, gave a slight numerical edge to men. It is impossible with the surviving data to establish just how many unmarried...

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