[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Martha Ballard s diarydocuments the genuine satisfactions that one woman derived from mastering herdomestic environment.It shows both the variety and the social complexity of householdlabor, highlights the interdependence of mature women and young women within thefamily economy, and modifies earlier conceptions of patriarchy.Although Martha Ballard lived almost to the era of industrialization, in education andin sensibility she belonged to the colonial period.Born in Oxford, Massachusetts, in1735, she emigrated to the Kennebec River country of Maine in 1777 with her husband,Ephraim, and five children.Three other children had died in the diphtheria epidemic of1769.3 For the rest of their lives, the Ballards lived in that section of Hallowell, Maine,that separated in 1798 to become the town of Augusta.The extant diary opens in 1785,the year Mrs.Ballard turned fifty.It closes in May of 1812, about a month before herdeath.This essay will focus on the first fifteen years of the diary, 1785 1800, the periodin which her two youngest daughters came of age and married.The importance of such a document for our understanding of women s work in earlyAmerica is clear.Martha Ballard s diary is the intact delft platter that allows us toidentify and interpret the shattered fragments that are all that remain for so much of NewEngland.The diary confirms, for example, the existence of a separate female economyexisting beneath the level of traditional documentation.In Hallowell, as in other NewEngland towns, male names predominate in surviving merchant accounts, while tax listsand town records give little, if any, evidence of female enterprise.Yet the diary makesquite clear not only that women were managing a rich and varied array of tasks withintheir own households but that they were trading with each other (and sometimes withmen) independent of their husbands. Martha ballard and her girls 145Martha Ballard s diary shifts our attention from the by now rather tired question ofwhether women shared men s work to far more interesting issues about how theyinteracted with each other within the female economy.We can now add detailedquestions about the interaction of mothers and daughters, and mistresses and servantswithin the household.We can also begin to discuss changes in female consciousness, notas evidence of the emergence of women from patriarchal dominion, but as evidence ofchanging values within an already cohesive female realm.Close study of such a document also shows the complexity of the family labor system.New Englanders may have preferred their own offspring to hired laborers, but no familygave birth to full-grown workers, nor could even the most powerful patriarch ensure anoptimal balance of sons and daughters.By its very nature, a family labor systemdemanded a web of connections beyond the household.Households self-sufficient inland, livestock, and tools (and they were few) could never be perennially self-sufficient inlabor.Furthermore, because mothers invested more heavily in childbearing and rearingthan fathers, and because daughters married earlier than sons (and perhaps moved furtheraway than their brothers), the transitions within the household were sharper for womenand potentially more disruptive.This was particularly so in young towns where the sexratio limited the number of single women available for household work.Martha Ballard s diary is a record of a particular time and place, a Maine river town inthe years just after the Revolution, but it is also a record of a particular kind of economy:one characterized by a clear gender division of labor, by reliance on family members andneighbors rather than bound servants, and by mixed enterprises (men engaged inlumbering and fishing as well as farming, women in small-scale textile production,poultry raising, and dairying).Exportable products were nonagricultural, and they were inthe male domain.These conditions were not characteristic of every town in NewEngland, but they were certainly typical of many from the seventeenth century forward.Ephraim Ballard was one of the middling sort of Maine pioneers who opened up theriver valleys in the years after the Revolution.According to the Hallowell tax list for1784, he had three acres of tillage, eighty acres of unimproved and ten acres of unimprovable land.In addition, he had three cows and a pair of oxen, the latter asuseful for lumbering as for farming.From 1779 to 1791, he and his sons operated saw-and gristmills, just as he and his father had done in Oxford and as his grandfather andgreat-grandfather had done a hundred years before in Andover, Massachusetts.Ephraimwas also a surveyor.Into his eighties he continued to run lines for the Commonwealth ofMassachusetts and for the wealthy Kennebec Proprietors, who were attempting to assertcontrol over squatter lands in the newly settled Maine interior
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]