Eras Book Reporting Form AP English Language and Composition Name: Hadley Cabitto Date: October 26, 2015 Period: 5 Book Title: The Wordy Shipmates Genre: Non-Fiction Original Publication Date: October 7, 2008 Your Edition’s Publication Date: 2008 Author: Sarah Vowell Number of Pages: 250 Brief Summary and Arrangement of the Book: The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell is a telling of the Puritans during the 17th and 18th centuries. She uses witty one liners and immense sarcasm to explain the division between groups of Puritans. She also uses examples from important documents and events to illustrate the contrast in the groups reactions.
Within the incisive “Polly Baker’s speech,” Benjamin Franklin satirizes the patriarchal structure of the judicial system that unfairly judges women. Franklin utilizes a sardonic persona of a “poor” 18th century women being “persecuted for the fifth time, for having a bastard child” who only wants her “fine remitted.” Through his judicious use of hyperbole and his persona’s rhetorical conditional statements, Franklin produces a sarcastic tone in Polly Baker’s speech and ridicules the “great men” who enforce the institutionalized bias against women under the rule of law.
It shows the vital roles played by men and women in society and the extremities that lay between them. Anne Orthwood’s Bastard: Sex and Law in Early Virginia by John Ruston Pagan highlights the nature of life in the colonial times and how it aided the creation of American law. The strength in this composition of diaries are the primary sources given throughout the book. Primary sources like those evident in Anne Orthwood’s Bastard, allows its readers to come up with their own conclusions and images of what went on because the sources are created from people who lived it. Whenever someone is exposed to primary sources, they are able to stop learning history and actually start doing history because they are researching actual data/evidence.
The collapse of the consensus era of American scholarship in the 1960s and the rise of cultural historians in the subsequent decades began a revitalized interest in early America’s legal system. The 1970s also marked the end of the intellectual historian’s dominance. The works of “giants” such as Bernard Bailyn and Edmund Morgan were gateways into the present era of the historical field. These authors, and many like them, took advantage of scores of new data and sources being uncovered from seventeenth century Virginia, to question many aspects of traditional scholarship. Bailyn, in “Politics and Social Structure in Virginia,” breaks with the norm of existing scholarship by examining Virginia’s seventeenth century political system from a non-institutional
In 1692 Salem Massachusetts, social power and status was dominated by male figures that could prove and constantly defend their strict moral purity. Power came from reputation, and reputation was defined in the eyes of God. Woman on the other hand held virtually no social power until marriage, and even then were considered voiceless in the social hierarchy. Girls held the least power in the social order, representing a financial burden to their families that needed to be repaid in the role of servant. Betty Parris, however defies this social order.
Abigail adamantly advocated for women’s education. She believed that in order to be a good wife, mother, and citizen, it was essential that women received at least a small amount of education. Abigail wrote, “It is very certain that a well-informed woman, conscious of her nature and dignity, is more capable of performing the relative duties of life, and of engaging and retaining the affections of a man of understanding, than one whose intellectual endowments rise not above the common level.” (216). Abigail did not demand sexual equality, she only hoped for a legal system where women could find fulfillment in their roles as wives and mothers (48).
When Fanny Trollope stepped on American soil, women were 100 years from their right to vote, forced to stay within their strict gender roles by their controlling husbands, and were forbidden to pursue an education or a professional career. Compared with Trollope’s familiar British society, America was far behind regarding their equality of women. Trollope came to America, without her husband, and with most of her children, an extreme feat in the eyes of Americans back in the 1820’s. She advocated for education, self-sufficiency, and occupation. Trollope saw through the “new free democracy” facade and noted in “Domestic Manners of the Americans,” that women were not in mind when the framers wrote the constitution, and that they played a subordinate,
Around seven years after Brown’s phenomenal work, Terri L. Snyder released Brabbling Women: Disorderly Speech and Law in Early Virginia. To advance the image of women in early Virginia, this book is an early examination of colonial Virginians attitudes towards women’s speech and how men viewed this speech as undesirable. The title of the book is taken from a 1662 Virginia law passed by the General Assembly that stipulated that “brabbling signified a wrangling, quibbling, quarrelsome, or riotous disposition.” This law turned an otherwise un-gendered type of speech into a gendered style of conversation, which recognized the speech of disorderly women as a key factor in the mayhem in the colony in addition to Bacon’s Rebellion. According to Snyder,
During the Puritan times gender roles in the society were very anti-feminist. Women were required to act as housewives and do womanly duties such as cook, clean, and take care of their children. Women had very little freedom as far as their rights were concerned also. Puritan writers, Anne Bradstreet and Mary Rowlandson both experienced the struggle of the anti-feminist movement. From their writings we see that they both were against anti-feminism and they tried their best to abandon the whole idea.
A woman’s place in Puritan society was very limited during these times. A preface was added to her narrative by a puritan pastor as approval for her to publish her prose. Before her captivity Rowlandson didn’t know what a struggle consisted of. She was the typical housewife in a Puritan society. She never went without food, shelter, or clothing before her captivity.
Gender roles played a heavy role in colonial society, and the women who did not conform to these roles were easy targets for witchcraft accusations. Women who were post-menopausal, widowed, unmarried were not fulling their “duty” to society of bearing children and thus could come under fire (Lecture.) Those who were aggressive, out spoken, or did not do as another wished could also bring cries of “witch!” (Lecture.) This is highlighted in Cotton Mather’s Accounts of the Salem Witchcraft Trials, one of these accused women Susana Martin stands trial with many of the testifiers being men who had been wronged by Martin in some way or another.
“To the Ladies”, written by Lady Mary Chudleigh, is a poem that expresses feminism, and gives women a taste of how they would be treated in a marriage. Chudleigh displays this poem as a warning to women who are not married yet, as she regrets getting married. She uses such words that compares to slavery, and negative attitudes toward future wives to warn them. Back in this time period when the poem was published in 1703, women were known as property of men and you won’t have an opinion or a say so. The poem expresses a life of a naïve woman, who is bound to marriage by God, and she cannot break the nuptial contract.
“Women” by Louise Bogan Louise Bogan married her husband, Curt Alexander in 1916, and had a child a year later. In 1920, Curt Alexander died, causing Bogan to become a widow and left her with no reliable income and an adolescent to care for. After moving to New York City, later on, Bogan met other writers, this sparked her writing career. After writing multiple reviews for periodicals, she later wrote the poem “Women” (Louise Bogan). Throughout the course of this poem, Bogan uses metaphors, imagery, and the setting to show that women are seen as incapable of doing what men do.
“The boat-mother set her hands on either side of Lyra’s face and her daemon… bent gently to lick Pantalaimon’s wildcat head” (105) and Mrs. Beaver packed “… five loads and the smallest for the smallest of us…my dearie (111). In brief, Ma Costa and Mrs. Beaver are the stereotypical representation of domesticated womanhood which strikingly contradict Mrs. Coulter who “…was never mother” (230) and the White Witch who “… isn’t a real queen at all… she’s a horrible witch… everyone hates her”
Anne Bradstreet (1612 – 1672) has been a long-lasting leading figure in the American literature who embodied a myriad of identities; she was a Puritan, poet, feminist, woman, wife, and mother. Bradstreet’s poetry was a presence of an erudite voice that animadverted the patriarchal constraints on women in the seventeenth century. In a society where women were deprived of their voices, Bradstreet tried to search for their identities. When the new settlers came to America, they struggled considerably in defining their identities. However, the women’s struggles were twice than of these new settlers; because they wanted to ascertain their identities in a new environment, and in a masculine society.
