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CHAPTER FIVE Expansion andContraction ^ ^ ^ The newwaves of settlers that rolled into Georgia's lowcountry swept aside much of the occupational flexibility that had characterized women's extradomestic work during the trusteeship. Diversityofopportunity began to ebb away from the settled seaboard, as normalization contracted the scope of individual women's activities. The rapid growth in the population sated the hunger for white women's labor. The proliferation of slaverynow meant that the most menial, marginal, and emergencywork wasfoisted upon bondspeople—on the plantations and, gradually,in the cattle pens, stables, and largerkitchens too. In part, this was simply a case of black women's replacing white women in the labor market. Yet the employment of female slavesin the royal era tended to limit bondswomen to one discrete occupation with a distinct set of responsibilities— as a field hand, cook, or maid. With the entrenchment of slavery and the consolidation of settlement, the variety of women's work as individuals contracted as the frontier moved. The energysavedby narrowing white women's occupational breadth allowed for the specialization of female behavior in the lowcountry. Georgia could now afford a genuine elite, whose obsession with gentility and fashion was virtually a full-time job in itself; for these women the concept of laboring in the fields was utterly alien. Among the middle classes, and particularly in the growing towns of Savannah, Darien, and Sunbury, female occupations became increasingly specialized to cater to a market whose consumer needs were becoming more predictable, reliable, and profitable. Only for those hardy pioneers who continued to settle the western backcountry and the southern frontier did the abiding principles of self-preservation mean that women's work would continue to approximate strategies revealed in the trusteeship period. While the changing contours of the labor pool and the market were, in all likelihood, the most immediate influences on women's employment history, other factors played important supporting roles. Two related to the outgoing colonial regime and the removal of the trustees. The proportion of personal decisions made by paternalistic aristocrats and their appointees now shrank as colonial authority shifted away from on-the-spot arbiters and became attached to more formal processes. The abundance of historical records, a reflection of 124 Expansion and Contraction • 125 the trustees' thirst for information,also evaporated in the early17505. Asaresult both the possibility and the visibility of female activity outside the conventional declined. Moreover, society's conventions werealso now in aphase of transition, as new forces within Georgia—lowcountry and backcountry, urban and plantation , Carolinian and West Indian—competed for ascendancyin politics and commerce.AsI suggestedin chapter 4,the incoming British colonial regimewas concerned with order and regulation, enlightened empire and standardization. Women's work was far from peripheral to these shifting sands: one of the first bills to which the newly constituted Georgia Assembly turned its attention in January 1755related to the legal status of female extradomestic labor. On several different occasions in the 17508 and 17608, legislators addressed women's economic status and legal capacities during and after marriage. This reflected both that ownership of land in the lowcountry wasbecoming steadily more profitableand that familieswerebecoming more stable and cohesive. This stability was evidenced in the declining proportion of husbands who, in their will, nominated their wife as the sole executor of their estate. Whereas in the first decade of the colony's existence, about half of all the wills specifying a wife as an executor listed her as the sole executor, by the final decade of the colony's existence this proportion had dropped to less than a quarter of wills. In a comparison of 411 colonial wills, 37 were made by women, and 249of the remainder made reference to a wife; wives were named executors in 154 cases and sole executors in 43cases.The proportion of wills that named the wife as soleexecutor declined as follows: 1733-42,50 percent (4/8); 1743-52,33 percent (1/3); 1753-62, 30 percent (10/33);1763-72, 26 percent (20/76); 1773-82, 24 percent (8/34).This pattern of wives' finding their testamentary access to property dwindling over time wasextremely common across North American colonies asthey matured.1 Georgia legislators' efforts were manifested, above all, in repeated attempts to ensure procedural consistency in the transmission of wills, conveyances, and mortgages. Contemporaries were acutely aware of the problems of inheritance that had emerged at the end of the trusteeship, and the legislators debated and passed bills on the subject in 1760, 1762...

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