Question

How did race and class shape women's experience in the colonial societies of north and South America ?

Answer 1

During the colonial period, European women in America remained entitled to the legal protections provided by imperial authorities, even when they occupied unfree statuses, such as indentured servitude. For instance, when masters or mistresses mistreated their indentured servant women physically violated the terms of their labor contracts, the servants had a right to complain at the local court for redress; in some jurisdictions, their pleas met with remedies from the bench. Nevertheless, patriarchal models of authority prevailed, and despite their access to the courts, indentured women remained restricted by a series of laws that gave their masters extensive powers over them. They could not marry or travel while under contract, and if they ran away, became pregnant, or challenged their masters, they would be penalized with extra terms of service. While the law in Virginia, for instance, penalized masters who impregnated their servant women by freeing the latter, at the same time the statute averred that such women might be unfairly “induced to lay all their illegitimate to their masters” in order to gain their freedom. The statutory language is clearly indicative of class-based notions of dissolute sexuality. Indeed, the statutes enacted across imperial North America, like those iterated above, were devoted to creating and enforcing differences among women on the basis of not only race but class as well.