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Founding Mothers & Fathers is a scholarly study of the
responsibilities and rewards New World colonists assigned to adults
solely on the basis of gender. Historian Mary Beth Norton asserts
that a changing world-view caused the limited power wielded by a
handful of early colonial women to trickle away by the time the
American Constitution was framed. Since nearly every moment of
daily life was subject to intense scrutiny by the entire community,
the court records and other public documents Norton diligently
combed to make her case are anything but dull, and the offenses and
punishments meted out speak loudly to the issues of gendered
power.
Crystallizing the inflexibility of gender roles in the American
colonies is the tale of a servant known as Thomasine or Thomas
Hall, alternately. Raised for two decades as a girl, Hall later
switched several times between the clothes and roles of a man and
those of a woman. Although outraged townswomen repeatedly assured
colonial authorities that Hall was physically male, his feminine
mannerisms and skill with a needle and thread so unnerved one
regional commander that he demanded Hall "be putt in weomans
apparell." Other stories include that of the ne'er-do-well Pinion
family, who brawled through two generations of theft, adultery, and
domestic squabbles in New England, and a man and woman brought up
before a Virginia tribunal accused of "a great bussleling and
juggling of the bed" judged unseemly in an unmarried couple.
Founding Mothers & Fathers offers a full-bellied, incisive view
of a developing social hierarchy and the slim margin of power that
women held and lost within it. --Francesca Coltrera
内容简介
In this pioneering study of the ways in which the first
settlers defined the power, prerogatives, and responsibilities of
the sexes, one of our most incisive historians opens a window onto
the world of Colonial America. Drawing on a wealth of contemporary
documents, Mary Beth Norton tells the story of the Pinion clan,
whose two-generation record of theft, adultery, and infanticide may
have made them our first dysfunctional family. She reopens the case
of Mistress Ann Hibbens, whose church excommunicated her for
arguing that God had told husbands to listen to their wives. And
here is the enigma of Thomas, or Thomasine Hall, who lived
comfortably as both a man and a woman in 17th century Virginia.
Wonderfully erudite and vastly readable, Founding Mothers &
Fathers reveals both the philosophical assumptions and intimate
domestic arrangements of our colonial ancestors in all their rigor,
strangeness, and unruly passion.
"An important, imaginative book. Norton destroys our nostalgic
image of a 'golden age' of family life and re-creates a more
complex past whose assumptions and anxieties are still with
us."--Raleigh News and Observer