In the early years of colonization, the European settler population in America was overwhelmingly male. Particularly in colonies like Virginia—founded on commercial enterprise and tobacco cultivation—men dominated, and without women, family formation was limited. This imbalance led to unstable, transient communities ill-suited for permanent settlement. Social cohesion suffered in the absence of stable households, and the colonial dream remained fragile.
To address this instability, the Virginia Company launched a campaign in the 1620s to bring young women to the colony. Dubbed “tobacco brides” or “Jamestown brides,” between 90 and 150 English women were offered incentives such as dowries of land or tobacco in exchange for marrying settlers. The program saw mixed results, but it revealed a deeper truth: the success of the colonial experiment depended not just on conquest or commerce but on the controlled presence of women to establish domestic, reproductive, and moral order.
Unlike Virginia, the Pilgrims and Puritans of New England migrated as families, bringing a more stable gender balance that enabled generational continuity. Their example helped solidify the ideal of the colonial household as the foundation of civilization. However, this model relied on rigid gender roles and social hierarchies to enforce order and discipline.
In some colonies, especially during the early frontier phase, settlers formed relationships with Indigenous women. These included voluntary interactions, coercive alliances, and violent abductions. Though sometimes framed as cultural “blending,” such relationships often exacerbated tensions with Native communities and led to further dispossession and subjugation of Indigenous women. Colonialism enforced patriarchy by undermining matrilineal Indigenous traditions and recasting women as spoils of empire.
As European women arrived in greater numbers, colonial governments imposed increasingly strict laws to regulate their behavior. Women were not integrated as equals but as moral and reproductive instruments of the settler regime. Colonies employed English common law, particularly the doctrine of “coverture,” to render married women legally invisible. A wife could not own property, sign a contract, or file a lawsuit. Her legal identity was absorbed, i.e., “covered,” by her husband, who controlled her labor, income, and even custody of their children—legal suffocation.
Moral policing also intensified to control women’s sexuality. In Puritan colonies, “bastardy” laws punished unmarried women for bearing children while often sparing the men responsible. Adultery, fornication, and even “lascivious speech” were criminalized—frequently enforced with humiliating public punishments. Respectability, virtue, and femininity were crafted not as rights but as performances demanded under the threat of legal and social discipline.
These laws were backed by an ideology that fused religion, science, and custom into the myth of separate spheres: white women belonged in the home as pious, passive caretakers, while men governed the world outside. This ideal became hypernormalized—so embedded in daily life, religious belief, and cultural production that it became invisible and unquestioned. Yet, it was never universal.
The illusion of womanhood as a domestic angel only applied to white, middle- and upper-class women. Colonial society produced a gendered caste system, where race and class dictated the terms of womanhood and the degree of rights—or lack thereof—granted to each.
At the top of this pyramid were elite women, typically the wives of landowners, merchants, and officials. They supervised households staffed by servants or enslaved people and maintained family reputations through social and religious rituals.
Middle-class women, often wives of artisans or small-scale traders, contributed to family businesses and managed modest homes. Many worked in textiles, healing, or midwifery.
Poor white women, often living in rural or frontier conditions, labored intensely—growing food, caring for livestock, spinning thread, and sometimes “taking in” laundry for money. These tasks formed a labor economy that remained invisible in political life.
A significant proportion of women in the 1600s–1700s were indentured servants. These women, mostly young and poor, signed contracts to work unpaid for 4–7 years in exchange for passage to the colonies. They typically worked as domestics in household service, field labor, nursing, and textile work. They were often barred from marrying and faced contract extensions or punishment if they became pregnant. Many failed to escape poverty even after gaining their freedom. Indentured servitude ended by the early 1800s.
Enslaved African women, brought to North America between 1619 and 1808, were chattel slaves—permanent, hereditary property. Existing as property, they could be bought, sold, traded, or inherited, and they had no legal rights. Their labor was exploited in fields, households, and childbearing. They had no legal protections and endured unspeakable violence, including sexual coercion, forced breeding, and family separations. Their identities were erased under both law and theology.
Indigenous Women lived in hundreds of distinct nations with varying roles before and after colonization. In tribes that were matrilineal societies, indigenous women held significant authority in agricultural, political, and family matters. Colonialization brought land theft, violence, dispossession, disease, rape, and forced assimilation. Missionaries and settlers imposed European gender roles, undermining traditional status.
Another group was known as “feme sole” from English common law, meaning a “woman alone” in contrast to “feme covert,” a woman covered (also known as coverture), meaning covered by marriage with rights assumed by the husband. When a woman married, as above, her husband gained legal authority over her property, income, legal voice, children, and body, i.e., marital rape was not recognized in law.
Feme sole were widows, divorced women, or single women. Unlike married women, these women could own property, sign contracts, and sue or be sued in their own name. Being feme sole gave women legal personhood; however, in Puritan New England, these rights were limited. Nonetheless, this legal status garnered social suspicion. The limited protections these women had made this status precarious.
On the eve of July 4, 1776, the eve of “all men are created equal,” women in the colonies, regardless of class and standing, faced degrees of subjugation and unfreedom. This was the reality below the illusion of white women being celebrated as mothers of the new Republic. This Republican Motherhood cast white women as moral stewards of the Republic—but only within the home. It was a new illusion: a moral pedestal in place of political rights.
By the 1830s, women began to emerge as moral stewards of the Republic outside the home, especially among the elite and middle classes. Motivated by the Second Great Awakening (1790s-1840s), women began to organize around moral reform, advocating for temperance, education, and the reform of prostitution. Others, like sisters Angelina and Sarah Grimké, became abolitionists, speaking out publicly against slavery. They were criticized by those who said women should not speak publicly or engage in politics. This kind of reaction compelled women to confront gender inequality, ultimately leading to the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, which marked the formal beginning of the suffrage movement.
Comingled with the abolition movement, the suffrage movement was largely shaped by white middle class and elites, though powerful Black women like Sojourner Truth, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Ida B. Wells refused to be erased. The 15th Amendment (1870) granted Black men the right to vote but denied it to all women. It would take another 50 years and another illusion—that women could be equal citizens without destabilizing patriarchy—before white women were granted the vote in 1920.
Across three centuries of colonial and early American history, womanhood was never a stable or unified category—it was fractured by law, shaped by class, and stratified by race. What appeared as “natural” gender roles were, in fact, meticulously engineered systems of control—legitimized by religion, cemented in law, and normalized through daily repetition.
The illusion was that women’s subordination was organic, moral, or divinely ordained. The reality was a deeply hypernormalized system of gender control existed that required constant reinforcement, surveillance, and violence. From tobacco brides to Republican Mothers, from enslaved field laborers to unprotected femme sole—womanhood in early America was less a role than a rank.
This foundational illusion—of separate, unequal spheres—endures in altered forms to this day. Understanding its construction and consequences is not only a historical endeavor; it is also a key to dismantling the legacies of gendered hierarchies that persist in law, labor, relationships, and cultural life.
Day 145: days left to January 20, 2029: 1,317 days
