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c h a p t e r t w o “They Will Be Adjudged by Their Drinke, What Kind of Housewives They Are” Gender, Technology, and Household Cidering in England and the Chesapeake, 1690 to 1760 For centuries in England the task of producing alcoholic beverages had belonged to women. Indeed, in 1656 Englishman John Hammond denounced Chesapeake women for making insufficient amounts of alcohol, particularly unhopped corn brews that he called “beer,” for their households. Hammond reported that in Virginia and Maryland “beer is indeed in some places constantly drunken, in other some, nothing but water or milk and water or beverage; and that is where the goodwives (if I may so call them) are negligent and idle.” These “slothful and careless ” women, Hammond announced, had reduced some of the local men to drinking water. Hammond instructed women to increase their production. “I hope this item will shame them out of those humors,” Hammond concluded, and he reminded women that “they will be adjudged by their drinke, what kind of housewives they are.” As in England before 1700, making alcohol was women’s work.1 When the Richmond County, Virginia, court sentenced Thomas Phillips to ten lashes, “well laid on,” at the public whipping post for “picking open the lock of George Sisson’s chamber and taking out the keg of his cider house and disposing of his cider” in 1722, the judge thought nothing of describing the cider as George Sisson’s property, even though it was very likely made by his wife. The Richmond Court’s ruling shares a close connection with Hammond’s critique of “slothful” housewives. By the late seventeenth century, when women in the Chesapeake were fulfilling Hammond’s challenge and regularly making the alcoholic beverages necessary to sustain their households, people in England were concluding that alcohol production was men’s work. Chesapeake men and women came to depend on female-produced ciders and unique New World drinks rather than on the new male-produced beer that was increasingly popular in England. So, when the Richmond Court described the cider as George Sisson’s property, the court unintentionally disguised the drink’s true origins: the women of Sisson’s household.2 Women’s cidering activities, hitherto unnoticed, reveal the delayed and rural nature of the early Chesapeake in the context of the English colonies and the Atlantic world. Alcohol production in the Chesapeake increasingly resembled that of rural England in the sixteenth century, where women produced cider and unhopped ale. The study of alcohol illustrates how out of step the early Chesapeake was in the Atlantic world, albeit for very practical reasons. Small-planter households rejected imported scientific and technological innovations . While Western Europeans made alcoholic beverages that required early modern technological innovations, most Chesapeake households continued to produce only raw, simple, naturally fermenting ciders. Western Europeans making beer used the hops flower, a new discovery, and they distilled liquors with newly invented stills, whereas most Chesapeake colonists made only ciders from apples, peaches, and persimmons; concoctions of molasses and water; a little unhopped ale from corn and molasses rather than from oats and barley; and some apple brandy distilled from cider in primitive stills. It is worth noting that southerners would not generally enjoy the beverages now called beer, ale, or lager until the spread of refrigeration in the twentieth century. They were also unsuccessful at producing wine and frustrated at importing drinks. Instead of increasing their participation in Atlantic world trade, Chesapeake colonists chose to make their own cider. This Chesapeake isolation allowed colonists to decline to engage in the masculinization of alcohol production that prevailed in other Atlantic world countries . Whether in Latin America, Africa, or Western Europe, the task of making alcohol became men’s domain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For example , in colonial Mexico, women had long brewed pulque, a cactus wine made from maguey plants. In the Andean region, indigenous women brewed a corn liquor called chicha. But in the early seventeenth century, Spanish newcomers desiring to control the indigenous population declared that alcoholic beverages were the domain of the Spaniards. Despite local women’s resistance, Spanish men assumed control of production, distribution, and consumption of alcohol in much, if not all, of Spanish America in the seventeenth century. Similarly in Africa, men and women on the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana) had cooperated in distilling akpeteshie, a palm wine, for centuries. It was an Akan taboo for a woman to work...

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