First Generations: Women in Colonial America by Carol Berkin (review)

Book Reurews 133 aggressively expansionist-attacking and conquering (the right word) some two dozen nearby native people in the decades before 1607-receives far less attention than the aggressive expansionism of the English. Nor does the colonial counterpart to the Indian adoption of Smith-the clumsy crownmg of Powhatan in an attempt to make him a vassal of King James I-earn the same sensitive cultural reading afforded native strategies of inclusion. A balanced, nuanced, thorough account of the encounter beside the James remains elusive, even as we approach that meeting's four-hundredth anniversary. James H. Merrell Vassili'College Carol Berkin. First Generations: Women in Colonial America. New York: Hill and Wang, 1996. Pp. xiv + 206 and bibliographical essay. Carol Berkin's First Generations is an ambitious and successful attempt to synthesize the vibrant field of early American women's history into a brief and highly readable narrative history for use in college classrooms. As Berkin herself suggests in the work's preface, completing such a project was no easy task. The field of early American women's history, while exciting and intellectually rewarding, also poses enormous challenges to any author attempting synthesis. Scholars in the field, as Berkin acknowledges, have produced an enormous quantity of valuable literature, which, however compelling, can be vexing in its interpretive ambiguities, seeming contradictions , and inconsistencies of coverage. While always mindful to alert her readers to such interpretive disparities and gaps in the literature, Berkin recounts her version of the multiple but interwoven histories of early America's women-including Euro-American, Native-American, and African-American women-of the South, North, and Mid-Atlantic regions from approximately 1600 to 1800. Berkin highlights the shared as well as disparate ideals and experiences that contoured these women's lives and defined their roles and responsibilities within their respective cultures and communities. The colonial American woman, according to Berkin, had "multiple and sometimes conflicting identities that gave her life dimension and complexity" (xii). And it is this complexity that Berkin most seeks to illuminate in her work. The dynamic interplay of expectations, 134 Catlddldn Review of American Studies Revue ca11ad1em1edhudes 111111'110111,es opportunities, and L~onstraintsshaped the lives of all early American women c1sthey moved through the cydes of their lives and experienced the joys ,md frustrations of marriage, birth, work, and religion. Yet, as Berkin reminds her readers, taking ,1 closer look inside these parameters reveals the extent to which women's experience varied over time and space, and according to r,1ce ,111d SOL~i,11 class. White, Blad<, ,md Indi,rn women ultimately lived different lives, she suggests, even though they shared many common experiences ,ls women. Berkin works hard to place e,1rly American women in the context of their respective societies. By beginning and ending each chapter with a biographical vignette of one woman, she highlights the unique qualities of L".1d1 era, region, race, and class. She also makes sure to ,1ddress the ironies embedded in women's many roles and the complexities of their experiences. In the opening L~hapteron seventeenth-century Chesapeake, for example, Berk111 dr,1ws on the extensive literature produced by SL~holarsin the last two dec,1des to discuss how unstable demography, unbalanced sex ratios, and the intense labour demands of the tobacco economy, provided opportunities for white women, especially widows, to gain property and position. Yet, these same L'ircumst,mces, as she points out, also pushed lower-cLiss white and biaL'k women out to l,lbour in the fields and forL~edall to cope with high de,1th r<1tes ,rnd the aCL~ompanyingS()L'i,ll disruption. While such observ,nions, as sd10Llfs of women's history will know, are not new, Berkin's book is a work of synthesis. And on that level, it certainly succeeds. While this is an undeniably admirnble work, I do have a few mi nor qualms. In a book dedicated to ,1ddressing the complexities of women's experience from the perspective of race as well as region and dass, I was surprised to find that Indian women did not appear until the third chapter. Although Berkin implicitly justifies her organizational choice by explaining that most source rn.. tterials, written as they were by European observers, do not reve,tl a "true" Indian voice, her organizational scheme remains puzzling nonetheless . Indian women were here first and as Kathleen M. Brown's reL'CJH work, Good Wiues, Nasty Wenches, 1111d Anxious Pt1tri,1rc:hs:Gender; Ri1ce, and Pou 1er in Colcmi1dVirginit1(University of North Carolina Press, 1997), suggests, perceptions of Indi,m gender roles shaped the expectations colonial men had of the roles the white and bl,1ck women around them would fill. This work of synthesis also suffers from the unlucky fate of coming into pnnt at the s,1me time as two other significant works of early AmeriL~anwomen's history (Cornelia H. Dayton, Women Belore the B11r: Gender Lmu; & Society Book Reuil'll/$ in CoJ1uectimt 1639-1789 [University of North Carolina Press, 1995]; and ~fary Beth Norton, Founding Mothers ,md Ft1thers:Gendered Pou,er11mlthe Forming o{Americcm Society [Alfred A. Knopf, 1996]) have also reached our bookshelves. The works of Brown, Dayton, and Norton are refrnm111g mquiries into the lives and experiences of early American women -and men. Berkin's synthesis, therefore, is somewh,tt incomplete, though through no fault of her own. Putting such minor misgivings aside, however, First Ge11er,1tio11s is ,1 wellwntten ,md engaging narr.itive synthesis of the expanding ,md L~h.mgingticld of early American womrn's history. It is a book that should work well 111 m