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Colonial New England and Roles of Women

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The fundamental theme surrounding the success of early American expansion has an overall misleading masculinity. Considering the first English settlers were primarily male, they have somewhat indirectly been attributed with being the sole vindication for America’s evolvement. However, this conventional understanding about New England’s success has casually omitted the reality that women, both European and Native, were vital forces behind the shaping of culture for a new nation. Women of both communities “have for far too long been seen as bearers of history to which men have contributed the ‘spirituous part’,” mentioned by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich in Goodwives (Ulrich, 240). Thus, women’s position fixed amid their communities was collectively inferior to men. Whereas each society exercised a hierarchy created around a notion that each gender had its specific role. In a woman’s case, a role characterized by each culture’s tradition, their prominence amid society, the responsibilities associated with that stature, and the rights to which were granted. Each community had its own ideology deriving from a long practiced tradition. The indigenous Americans had a matrilineal view to which a person’s status could be determined by the position their mother held. This unconventional perspective of women was most likely because many natives believed that women’s origin was in association to the fertility of the earth. For instance, present in Through Women’s Eyes, the “Acoma Pueblo Indians’ origin story, the first women in the world were two sisters,” who were created by the Thought Woman, Tsichtinako (DuBois and Dumenil, 8). The story further explains that the purpose for the sisters’ creation is so they “will rule and bring life to the rest of the things [their creator] has given [them] in the baskets,” which were filled with seeds for sun and nourishment. Which reassures the reason to which clans of Native Americans believed women’s work in the field was essential. Adversely, Colonial settlers had a patriarchal view, which social prominence was at the complete disposal of the man. Whereas the European belief of woman’s creation had derived by “the Lord God made he a woman,” from a rib of his first man creation Adam. “And Adam said, This is now bone of bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” GENESIS 2:18, 21-25 (Ulrich, 87). Each culture’s spiritual beliefs is what shaped the

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