Historians have long accepted the notion that women of English descent who lived in the English colonies of North America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were better off than either the contemporary women in England or the colonists’ own nineteenth-century daughters and granddaughters. The “golden age” theory originated in the 1920s power in the marriage market, since women’s contributions were vital to the survival of colonial households.
Dexter’s portrait of female colonists living under conditions of rough equality with their male counterparts was eventually incorporated into studies of nineteenth-century middle-class women. The contrast between the self-sufficient colonial woman and the oppressed nineteenth-century woman, confined to her home by stultifying ideologies of domesticity and by the fact that industrialization eliminated emphasized that the nineteenth century brought “increased loss of function and authentic status for” middle-class women.
Recent publications about colonial women have exposed the concept of a decline in status as simplistic and unsophisticated, a theory that based its assessment of colonial women’s status solely on one factor (their economic function in society) and assumed all too readily that a relatively simple social system automatically brought higher standing finally the era of revolution (approximately 1750 to 1815), which brought other changes to women’s lives.
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