1. Hometown American History
Women
in the
Early Colonial Period

2. Gravestone, Mary Lattimer
Farber Gravestone Collection

3. Mrs. Elizabeth Freake and Her Baby Mary, 1676
Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA

4. Prologue
Anne Bradstreet
I am obnoxious to each carping tongue
Let Greeks be Greeks, and Women what they are.
Who says my hand a needle better fits.
A Poet’s Pen all scorn I should thus wrong,
Men have precedency and still excel;
For such despite they cast on female wits.
It is but vain unjustly to wage war.
If what I do prove well, it won’t advance,
Men can do best, and Women know it well.
They’ll say it’s stol’n, or else it was by chance.
Preeminence in all and each is yours;
Yet grant some small acknowledgement of ours.
But sure the antique Greeks were far more mild,
And oh ye high flown quills that soar the skies,
Else of our Sex, why feigned they those nine
And poesy made Calliope’s own child?
And ever with your prey still catch your praise,
So ‘mongst the rest they placed the Arts divine,
If e’er you deign these lowly lines your eyes,
But this weak knot they will full soon untie.
Give thyme or Parsley wreath, I ask no Bays.
The Greeks did nought but play the fools and lie.
This mean and unrefined ore of mine
Will make your glist’ring gold but more to shine.

5. Hall-Parlor House Plan New England 17th-18th centuries

6. John Lewis Krimmel, Blind Man’s Bluff (1814)
Terra Foundation for American Art

7. Law and Gender: Adultery
Status
Punishment
Married Man and Married Woman
Death
Married Man and Unmarried Woman
Whipping and/or Fine for Fornication
Married Woman and Single Man
Death
Single Man and Single Woman
Whipping and/or Fine for Fornication

8. The Gibbs Children
Museum of Fine Art, Boston (left and middle), and Clay Center, Charleston, WV (right)

9. Robert Feke, Isaac Royall and His Family, 1741
Harvard University

10. John Durand, The Rapalje Children, 1768
The New-York Historical Society

11. “Dignifying the Seats”
Litchfield Historical Society, Litchfield, CT

12. Connecticut Historical Society
Prudence Punderson, The First, Second, and Last Scene of Mortality
Connecticut Historical Society

13. “Enter Not into the Way of the Wicked, and Go Not in the Path of E
Keep Within Compass,
“Enter Not into the Way of the Wicked, and Go Not in the Path of E
Evil Men.”
Winterthur Museum

14. A Society of Patriotic Ladies, London, 1765
Library of Congress