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INTRODUCTION Colonial American women of the eighteenth century do not seem to share the historical exuberance of their seventeenth-century predecessors. After all, women of the eighteenth century inhabited a more settled, stable world. Huts had become houses and villages had become towns; wealth was becoming class, and color wasbecoming race. Gone were the days when Thomas(ine) Hall could masquerade in the Chesapeake of the 16208 in either male or female guise. Gone was the time in New England when conditions had allowed Anne Hutchinson to usurp male authority and challenge the social and religious precepts ofher day.Fewerwomen now experiencedat first hand the shock of Indian captivity, as Mary Rowlandson or Hannah Dustan had during the last decades of the seventeenth century. And never again would the female association with witchcraft be allowed by the pressures of a pubescent society to explode into a bloodletting on the scale of the Salem trials of 1692. Only the events of the American Revolution saved women from what might otherwise have been a disturbingly quiet century and dragged them insistently back to the forefront of scholarship. The history of the colonization of Georgia reminds us that eighteenthcentury America still had frontiers. Despite the budding urbanization, growth of institutions, and consolidation of social hierarchies in older territories, there remained many new worlds ripe for exploitation. The most perceivable frontier was geographic. During the century Europe and West Africa hemorrhaged enough migrants tofillup settled seaboard areas ofNorth America, aswell as the banks of navigablewaterwaysand fertile eastern plains, and flow westward into the Appalachian backcountry. Sandwiched between the three great European colonial powers and two major southeastern Indian peoples, Georgia constituted a clear geographic frontier of British settlement between 1732and 1776. The significanceof the geographic frontier, though not the engine ofAmerican identity that Frederick Jackson Turner once described, is that it was a prerequisite of other frontiers: it provided a site for the exploration ofother boundaries in society, the laboratory in which practical and theoretical experiments were conducted. By the time of Georgia's founding, many other regions had already played their part. Each new colony had shipwrecked its settlers' expectations upon the rocks of reality. The debris was gradually reconstructed as it drifted ashore, a product of both European origins and American environments . As fledgling settlements became functional societies, perceptions of gender, rank, and race had hardened and stuck fast like old barnacles. 2 • Introduction In Georgia's Frontier Women my goalisto construct a comprehensiveaccount of women's contributions to the demographic, economic, and socialprocesses of settling the youngest of the British American colonies that declared their independence in 1776. Here, on the margins of settlement, perceptions were initially pliant, social systems were supple, and the population was colorful. Eighteenth-century Georgiawomen were more diverse in origin than the vast majority offormative colonial populations. Georgia'swomen drew not onlyon a pluralistic OldWorldheritagebut also on NewWorld migration and experience. In a sense, writing a history of eighteenth-century frontier females issubject to the same hazards that they faced: navigating a practical route through the dense theoretical fogofgendered oppression. Somealarming gapsin source material compound the dangers of a patriarchal bias within the historical record. Perhaps it is asking for trouble to focus upon women, limit oneself to the colonial lower South, and seekto encompassraceand ethnicity. But aswith earlysettlers , instead ofcasting envious glancesat the more fertile northern regions (and their excellent recent scholarship), I found my energies were best channeled into a redoubled determination to persevere in the hope that this book at least serves as a foundation for future refinement. The records may not be as comprehensive asthe diaries and letters ofNewEngland or the demographic data of the Chesapeake. But sufficient sources have survived the ravages of time—and Sherman—to shedvarying amounts oflight upon female roles in earlyGeorgia. Naturally, the elite educated whitewoman isprone to baskingin the spotlight, while her counterparts among the lower classesand non-European populations remain shadowy reflections. Shereminds us that there was no single generalizable female experience;genderwasonly one vector in a larger social matrix that encompassed age, nationality, occupation, race, and class. Equally, the public documentation of her activity in newspapers,wills, church records, and obituaries far outstrips information about more private locations—about her home, her relationships, and her thoughts. Just as one cannot sit in on a stranger's memorial service and be remotely confident that one has a firm grasp of her actual character in life, the unevenness in the data available tends to transform certainties...

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