A 'wel ordered commonwealth' : gender and politics in New Haven colony, 1636-1690 / Ann M. Little.

Format:

Book

Manuscript

Microformat

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Little, Ann M.

Contributor:

Dunn, Richard S., advisor.

Zuckerman, Michael, 1939- advisor.

University of Pennsylvania.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Penn dissertations--History.

History--Penn dissertations.

Local Subjects:

Penn dissertations--History.

History--Penn dissertations.

Physical Description:

ix, 335 pages : illustrations ; 29 cm

Production:

1996.

Summary:

This dissertation is an examination of the social hierarchies and distribution of political power in early New England. A hierarchy based in gender, or patriarchy, was not just a ranking of men over women, but a comprehensive social hierarchy that also encompassed distinctions of status, class, ethnicity, and eventually race. New Haven Colony's extensive collection of town and colony court records, probate records, and narratives of its earliest settlers furnish evidence that as a colony far from a centralized state or national church, a gendered hierarchy based in the household was especially important for the maintenance of the social order in early New Haven.

Although theoretically everyone in early New England was ranked and vertically linked to one another in an organic polity, patriarchal authority resided in two places: in its political leaders and magistrates as civil authorities, and in its individual male householders who embodied domestic authority. Because of the divided nature of authority in early New England, this hierarchy was in fact a very fragile construct. Male householders, encouraged by the economic crises and religious reforms of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to see themselves as sovereigns within their own household, were loath to cede power and privilege to the civil authorities. This split between the civil and the domestic authorities was recognized and exploited not just by English male householders, but by people disenfranchised by the traditional distribution of political and economic privilege: English women, Indian men and women, and servants and slaves of all races and ethnicities. While these tensions were evident almost from the first in New Haven, it increased over time as the colony labored under fear of Indian uprisings and economic troubles. This conflict among men gives rise to a consensus on some kind of social and political equality for householder-patriarchs, or the beginnings of what historians of the eighteenth century call republicanism.

Notes:

Supervisors: Richard S. Dunn; Michael Zuckerman.

Thesis (Ph.D. in History) -- University of Pennsylvania, 1996.

Includes bibliographical references.

Local Notes:

University Microfilms order no.: 97-12964.

OCLC:

187469394