One Colonial Woman’s World: The Life and Writings of Mehetabel Chandler Coit by Michelle Marchetti Coughlin (review)

Almost ten years ago, while working on a project that draws on many early New England family papers, I read through the Gilman Family Papers at Yale’s Sterling Library in hopes of learning more about Mehetabel Chandler Coit’s diary, extracts of which had been published in the late nineteenth century as Mehetabel Chandler Coit: Her Book 1714 (1894). The Gilman manuscripts are extraordinarily rich and include some of Coit’s and other female family members’ letters, but the original diary remained elusive. It was wonderful to read, then, Michelle Marchetti Coughlin’s account in the spring 2013 issue of Common-place of her successful journey to finding the diary—and more—in the hands of a descendant in Pennsylvania.

It is more gratifying yet to read the results of Coughlin’s research in her full explication of Coit’s life and writings. The diary itself is a relatively brief document, neither a lengthy piece such as those written by Philadelphia diarists Hannah Callender Sansom and Elizabeth Drinker, nor a weighty, multi-decade record such as that of Maine midwife Martha Ballard (famously interpreted by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich). Fewer than fifty pages of spare entries make up Coughlin’s twenty-four-page appendix, the “Full Text of Mehetabel Chandler Coit’s Diary, 1688–1749.” The diary entries are not chronological, and they are composed in phrases and fragments, all likely after 1714, although some are retrospective. The second page of the diary entries, for example, includes a note that “June 4–1697 / our house was Raised / ye 23 of Septembr following / we cam to live in itt” and then immediately following “july 22: 1726 / Mr Winthrope went / to England.” The other two entries on the page are from 1728 and 1748 (194).

Although a diary this brief may seem a pretty slender source on which to rest a biography, the creative methods of historians of women, long used to archival poverty, suggest otherwise. After all, Martha Ballard’s routinized depiction of her daily work seemed to many scholars unyielding, but in Ulrich’s hands that very regularity came to illustrate something significant about Ballard’s experience. By connecting snippets of information within and across entries, Ulrich reconstructed a world of male and female mutual labor, economy, and society—a tour de force of historical detection and imagination.

Coughlin’s strategy is necessarily different. “The writings of Mehetabel and her female family members provide a framework for understanding” New England in a period of change, Coughlin argues, and the book offers a sort of collective biography of free women from middling to substantial and devout families (191). By interleaving an exploration of the disjointed and brief diary entries with context supplied by other contemporary sources—diaries and letters; church, town, and court records; and the substantial secondary literature on New England, women, and families—Coughlin situates Coit in the “external and internal realities” of the world she knew and in which she lived (xix). Coughlin takes the reader through the Chandler and Coit families’ moves from Roxbury to New Roxbury (Woodstock) and then New London, through births, illnesses, marriages, and deaths.

Coughlin supplies examples of events and developments that must have been meaningful for Coit although mentioned in her diary briefly or, more often, not at all. When the seventeen-year-old Coit contracted smallpox, for example, it seems she was sent to Boston, and Coughlin speculates about her treatment based on other material and information about medical practice at the time. When members of her family were deeply involved in iconic events, such as the witchcraft trails at Salem, in which several members of the extended family were caught up, Coughlin sketches what might have been the diarist’s understanding and response. When children die or marry, when Great Awakening fervor sweeps through the region, when her family’s shipyard business was thriving...