WAVES OF CHANGE: WOMEN, WORK, WAR, AND WEDLOCK IN COLONIAL NEWPORT, RHODE ISLAND, 1750-1775

The intent of this thesis is to explore connections between gender relations and the construction of a local discourse by which residents of late colonial Newport, Rhode Island, interpreted the coming American Revolution. Historians in recent years have documented a relationship between gender and the rhetoric of the Revolution and separately have linked the development of commercial economies to a desire for independence in the colonies. However, relatively unexplored are the possible connections between the nature of gender relations within the emergent economies and the appeal for independence. The emergence of an urban economy in Newport dominated by commerce and consumerism wrought tremendous change i11 the way men and women interacted with each other in the city. Particularly affected was the traditional paragon of colonial gender relations matrimony. This development proved disconcerting to many residents, who found remedy in the ideas of the Revolution. Primary source materials, consisting of court records and newspaper publications, illustrate the intersections of gender and economics that gave the Revolution meaning for Newporters. Coupled with the work of other historians, this study proposes that the process was not unique to Newport, but rather characteristic of colonial port cities in that era of great change. As such, the scope of this thesis goes beyond mere local history. Indeed, it has as much to suggest about colonial America in general as it does about colonial Newport in particular.


Acknowledgments
No work of historical inquiry is ever a solitary effort and this project could not have come to fruition without the profound support and guidance of a great many people. To begin with, credit for the inception of this project must go to three individuals who each do great credit to the discipline of history -Joel Cohen, Sharon Hartman Strom, and J. Stephen Grimes.
Dr. Cohen was instrumental in turning my once raw and timid mind into a more confident and mature intellect. His high expectations of his graduate students continually motivated me to master a subject I had previously approached with indifference, colonial American history. Moreover, his firstrate teaching skills provided me with the tools I needed to grasp not only history, but historiography as well.
It was in preparation for one of Dr. Cohen's term papers that I had the great fortune to meet J. Stephen Grimes, the archivist at the Rhode Island Supreme Court Judicial Records Center in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.
Uncertain as to what topic to pursue for the project, Steve suggested I take a look at colonial divorce records. The result was a successful paper, ideas for further study, a greater understanding of the critical role of the archivist in historical research, and an appreciation for Steve as both a person and a professional. Without his keen familiarity of the sources and his commitment to me, this project would have been impossible. To his great credit, he always made me feel welcome by treating me like a scholar rather than a schoolboy. December of 1753, William asked that Joseph deliver the eight hogsheads along with Battey's commission to his widow as recompense for the voyage.
Though Joseph "did upon himself assure and faithfully Promise to deliver the said Phebe Battey of said Molasses when he should afterward be thereto Requested ," he instead plotted "Craftily and Subtilly to deceive and defraud the said Molasses or any part thereof to the plaintiff." 1 Phebe was not fooled , however .
Hiring David Richard as her attorney , Phebe sued Wanton on the grounds that , as William Battey's widow and administratrix of his estate, she and Joseph were "Tennants in Common" of the molasses landed in Newport by the Abigail and therefore she was legally entitled to a cut of the profit.
Variously pleading that "he hath fully accounted with" Phebe and that "he never promised and upon himself assumed in Manner and form" to reimburse her as she and her lawyer were suggesting , Wanton was able to stretch the case out over several years. 2 In the meantime Phebe called in other debts owed her deceased husband , such as that owed by the baker George Gibbs .
Finally , five years after William's death Phebe was awarded four hundred and thirty gallons of molasses determined by a team of auditors in 1758 to be "due from the said Wanton to the widow of the said Batty ... " 3 Phebe Battey's case speaks volumes about the character oflife for the women of Newport during the late colonial era . This was a period of great transition for relations between men and women, a time in which conceptual understandings of gender were under great stress. In recent years , scholars have begun to assert that a person's perception of reality is shaped by a 2 complex and dynamic social filtering process. Social constructs, impressions that are given meaning and transmitted throughout society via culture, mediate the formation of individual perception and experience. For instance, meanings attributed to biological difference in sex form one such construct, gender, which in turn informs the individual's organization of reality. As one of the foremost proponents of this school of thought, Joan Wallach Scott argues that "[e]stablished as an objective set of references, concepts of gender structure perception and the concrete and symbolic organization of all social life." 4 In late colonial New England, however, the verity of commonly-held assumptions and expectations about the sexes was called into question when manifestations that in the past had conferred them legitimacy were altered.
As coastal agricultural regions such as Newport developed into urban commercial centers, there occurred a reorganization of socio-economic relationships within these communities that obfuscated important aspects of the dominant gender constructs.
The agricultural origins of Newport, Rhode Island, had fed a certain image of family as a unit of production and of the woman as the "helpmeet" of man.
The tasks of men and women in an agricultural economy were distinct, yet complimentary. Raw materials produced by the male's husbandry were frequently converted into needed finished products, such as meals and clothes, by the wife's labor. As Jeanne Boydston puts it, "men and women were engaged in comparable and interdependent systems of production: both brought raw materials into the household, both spent long hours processing raw material into usable goods, and both conducted the exchanges necessary to supplement the family's own resources. " 5 This pattern of production has Chambers-Schiller has written that "Seventeenth-century New England deemed singlehood a sinful state, an evil to be exorcised from community life because such women menaced the social order. 119 Even into the eighteenth century, she notes, the unwed woman was viewed as "disgraceful." The colonial woman gained identity only in relation to others, for whom she was to sacrifice any personal desires. As such, her industry was determined by the extent to which her labor served others . " [T]he lives of early American housewives were distinguished less by the tasks they performed than by forms of social organization which linked economic responsibilities to family responsibilities and which tied each woman's household to the larger world of her village or town . 1110 Given expression by seventeenth century agricultural and familial organization, this notion of proper womanhood persisted into eighteenth century Newport despite the fact that socio-economic transformations had placed it at odds with the predicaments faced by a growing number of the city's women.
In the eighteenth century, Newport and many other coastal communities turned away from agricultural production toward commercial trade. This transition had a tremendous effect on residents. As Boydston notes, "In general both men and women in town were likely to engage in more trade and less agriculture and household manufacture than their rural counterparts. 1111 This trade was not restricted to one's own community, however. The sea linked coastal towns and cities, providing for the expansion of trade outside individual communities into what historians have termed the "Atlantic economy." Increased volumes of trade to increased numbers of persons over an increased geographic region often made the barter system of exchange impractical and so heightened the role of cash in the eighteenth century economy. Such an economy allowed for the application of individual skill for personal benefit and independence. No longer were masculine and feminine labor roles locked in the interdependency of an agricultural economy. By commercializing her domestic skills, a woman could obtain the resources necessary for an independent existence. At the same time, the evolution of Newport into an older, more urbane community and its growing reliance on shipping worked to variegate the structure of households in the city.
Lee Virginia Chambers-Schiller and other historians have noted of colonial America that 11 [t]he outmigration of men from more established to less settled areas of the region or the West shrunk the pool of prospective husbands for women in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. 1112 Jeanne Boydston has observed that 11 [t]he wives of sea-going men assumed virtually all of their husbands' customary daily responsibilities. 1113 Increasingly women in Newport were faced with having to provide for themselves despite the social prescription that they labor for others. This was the situation Phebe Battey found herself in as she initiated suit against Joseph Wanton, Jr. Significantly, Chambers-Schiller found that the "transformation of American society from a production-based domestic economy to a consumer-based household economy" actually led women away from men. Far from migrating to younger communities and rural regions where men predominated, women instead "were drawn to the merchandising and manufacturing centers where jobs were most available. 1114 Though she dates this process from 1790 forward, we shall see that it had in actuality begun some years earlier. In every way, these women defied the traditional markers of womanhood. They were not "goodwives;" often they were not even married. Rather than exclusively putting the interests of others first, they exhibited self-interestedness as they labored for their own benefit in the emerging cash-based economy of the Revolutionary era.
Historians such as Elaine Forman Crane have emphasized the economic origins of Newport's involvement in the Revolution. "I am as convinced today as I was seven years ago," she wrote in 1992, "that economic grievances precipitated Newport's entry into the war ... " 15 Joel Cohen has instead stressed the role of political and governmental forces in bringing revolution to Rhode Island: " [W]hen Rhode Island revolted it did so to preserve its liberal 'charter privileges,' its local economy and politics, and its traditionally independent nature." 16 Both interpretations articulate the importance of alterations in established interaction as the basis for Newport's involvement in the Revolution -Crane stressing the disruption of Britain's policies on established economic dealings and Cohen emphasizing the displacement of traditional political relations. Change is the common theme here and rightly so. But the changing character of relations among the city's inhabitants was pervasive and interconnected, and its sources multiple.
Joan Wallach Scott contends that historians must "eschew the compartmentalizing tendency of so much ~ocial history that relegates sex and gender to the institution of the family, associates class with the workplace and the community, and locates war and constitutional issues exclusively in the domain of the 'high politics' of governments and states. "17 This paper is an attempt to do just that. It asserts that gender, economics, and politics in eighteenth century Newport were interconnected, touching all aspects oflife so that alterations in one area were understood to have consequences far beyond itself. IfNewporters understood their community and its relation to the Revolution through gender, then the connections between the changes wracking the city in the late colonial era and the interaction between the sexes must be thoroughly mined in order to comprehend the nature of the American Revolution to Newport, Rhode Island.
Chapter one of this study examines in detail the evolution of colonial Newport society from its agricultural roots in the seventeenth century to its emergence as a leading city and center of commercial activity for the American colonies by the eve of the Revolution. Within this process originated a perceptual disjuncture between woman as an objective category of gender and women as subjects. The changing socio-economic circumstances experienced by women in the transition from rural agriculture to urban commerce challenged the impressions and assumptions from which N ewporters derived meaning for the colonial notion of womanhood. As a result, the extent of her relation to either the forces of transition or tradition became an important mark for those determining a woman's character.
Chapter two details the relation of women to the forces of socio-economic change in Newport and suggests that some women employed these changes to fashion for themselves a construction of womanhood that embraced feminine autonomy. The chapter illustrates women engaging in this process through economic activites. Very often these were activities and livelihoods that emerged in conjunction with the socio-economic transformations of the city 17 Scott , Gender and the Politics of History , 6. 8 and, while being informed by gender expectations, reorganized the terms of gender relations for these women. The impact of this occurrence can be gleaned from the court cases that form the basis of the third chapter.
The degree to which by the late colonial era socio-economic change had complicated understandings of gender in Newport and occasioned a disjuncture around the conception of colonial womanhood is evidenced by patterns within the Newport court records of the era. Chapter three examines those patterns. It posits that female litigants like Phebe Battey exhibited a boldness in the courtroom and elsewhere that was unexpected by men like Joseph Wanton, Jr. and is emblematic of a conceptual separation that had emerged between some men and some women regarding the feminine constitution. Significantly, at the very time that Newporters were confronted with divergences in the feminine constitution, they were also faced with disagreement over the nature of the English constitution. The two issues derived meaning from one another as Newport's residentsparticularly its men -struggled to determine the position of the seaport in regard to the coming Revolution. Politics, economics, and gender were conceptually linked to inform a paradoxical discourse that advocated the conservation of tradition in gender relations while promoting revolution against Mother England.
The final chapter of the thesis explores the connections Newport men made between local political, economic , and gender issues and the means by which these connections communicated significance to an understanding of the impending Revolution. So interconnected were these matters that public discussion of one was very frequently framed in terms of the others. As such, the local discourse on gender was rife with political and economic connotations just as politics and economics were given gendered meaning. 9 This finding supports the theories of scholars such as Joan Wallach Scott who argue that "Gender is one of the recurrent references by which political power has been conceived, legitimated, and criticized ." 18 The paper concludes by suggesting that the processes observed for Newport on the eve of the American Revolution were indeed not unique. Rather, correlative phenomena in other colonial American seaports indicate that what occurred in Newport was part of a general trend that both shaped the colonial perception of revolution and informed the structure of gender relations in the newly-formed United States . 18 Scott, Gend er and the Pol itics of H istory , 48.

Chapter One
Riding the Waves: The Development of a Colonial Port City Most historians consider the mid-eighteenth century to be the 11 golden age 11 of Newport, Rhode Island. Indeed, as the fifth largest city in the American colonies, Newport was a vibrant, cosmopolitan, and generally prosperous seaport community that its ever-increasing number of visitors found quite appealing. It would, however, be misleading to present the socioeconomically complex nature of eighteenth century Newport as an everpresent given, for it was not a given; it was a development. Actually, the dynamic commercialism of Newport in the mid-1700s was the outgrowth of a conscious pattern of thought, a mindset, that had developed in Newport over one hundred years earlier and still dominated the thinking of the city's inhabitants prior to the American Revolution.
In addition to religious toleration and freedom of worship, economic prosperity, not mere subsistence, was a core ambition ofNewporters from the beginning. It was this desire for economic affluence and the possibility of realizing it which fueled the city's drive toward the inter colonial commerce that would characterize the seaport by the mid-1700s and alter relationships among its inhabitants. The commercial development of Newport, Rhode Island, in the eighteenth century variegated the economic character of women and complicated colonial gender constructs that relied on the sovereignty of man in marriage for expression. The evolution of the seaport fostered household compositions that diffused authority within many families and engendered contrasting statndards of femininity and matrimony. Thus, the features oflife for the city's women in the mid-eighteenth century, and for all its residents in general, cannot be adequately probed and elucidated without first examining the development of the community itself.
Rhode Island is perhaps most famous in American history as one of the earliest havens for religious dissidents within the now-United States . Some historians, such as Sydney James, have gone so far as to credit the colony with demonstrating the viability of religious liberty so well that without Rhode Island the First Amendment right to freedom of religious worship might never have come about. Religion can even be argued to be the cause for the foundation of the colony itself. Roger Williams and his followers, and Anne Hutchinson and her followers, did establish the first villages of the colony for religious reasons, namely they were either banished or otherwise forced out of Massachusetts Bay Colony due to their religious persuasions.
Newport's lead founder William Coddington escaped almost certain banishment from Massachusetts for his beliefs by migrating to Rhode Island.
Yet to focus so heavily on the religious constitutions of Newport's early inhabitants is to disregard other important aspects of their characters. These men and women were not one-dimensional; they did have concerns and interests in addition to religious worship. Hand in hand with religious concerns, their economic interests and attainments shaped the nature of their flight from Massachusetts, influenced the decision to relocate on Aquidneck Island, and had a tremendous impact on shaping the character of their new home. It is imperative to understand that, as Carl Bridenbaugh has argued, the migration to Aquidneck "was much more than a flight from religious persecution." 1 "It was," he contends, "an agricultural-commercial experiment that had been thoughtfully and minutely planned in advance at Boston and adequately financed by men who were thoroughly familiar with the management of estates . " 2 Bridenbaugh's comments and other evidence suggests that the choice of Newport as a settlement was dictated as much by economic concerns as by religious ones. In fact , the two were not wholl y unrelated.
In his recent investigation of seventeenth-century Puritan culture, Stephen Innes has stressed the intimate connections between religion and economics in the Puritan mind . According to Innes, the New England Puritans ' "providentialism -the belief that they were participating in the working out of God's purposes -made all labor and enterprise 'godly business ,' to be pursued aggressively and judged by the most exacting standards." 3 Thus, to early New Englanders, religious concerns were economic concerns and vice versa . The drive for profit was infused with religious significance, and in a culture in which religious activity was of paramount importance economic gain became a priority . When the founders of Newport arrived on the shores of Aquidneck, then, they did so believing they had a stake in economic gain and possessing an intent to prosper, characteristics that would long define their progeny.
It is significant that Newport's founders did not originally cast their eyes on Aquidneck Island as the destination of their exodus from Massachusetts.
Rather they first considered the Piscataqua region but rejected it as unsuitable to their needs. They were searching for, in the words of Carl Bridenbaugh, "the finest and most fertile land available , land having open fields or meadows with sufficient grass for pasturing cattle or that might be mowed for hay." 4 Concerning the choice of Newport as a settlement, Elaine Forman Crane has concluded that " [i]t is unlikely that this particular location was a happy accident, since the settlers were aware of the harbor's excellent reputation and growing use in the coastal trade." 5 Indeed, it was this combination ofland and sea which would facilitate early prosperity for the nascent city. And since several of the town's founding families, like the Coddingtons, Coggeshalls, Brentons, and Sanfords, already possessed mercantile wealth, knowledge, and connections prior to the establishment of Newport, it seems likely that they found the waters of Narragansett Bay appealing for reasons other than religious. Af3 one contemporary described them, these were "banished men, yet rich. " 6 Historians have agreed. Elaine Crane concurs that "they were fairly wealthy men, able to buy and develop large tracts ofland which in time would produce surpluses to pay for essential manufactured goods from abroad. " 7 To them she attributes colonial Newport's "never-ending search for commercial markets. 118 The background of Newport's founders and the path taken to achieve the remarkably rapid success of the city's establishment suggests that from the beginning Newport, Rhode Island, was about the search for financial success.
What has been written about the character of Newport's early settlers, that 14 characterized the city) reflected a taste that had characterized Newporters from the beginning. In the seventeenth century, "[t]he relative security oflife on the island led many of the more wealthy citizens to lay out large estates on which they built fine mansions ... 1110 Such grand residences were reflections of the premium placed on affluence and economic achievement by Newporters.
Of Newporters in the mid-eighteenth century, Shiela Skemp notes, "[t]he average artisan or shopkeeper was not a leveller, nor did he wish to drastically alter the social and economic order in which he existed. He merely desired a chance to improve himself, to rise above the station to which he was born, and to gain a measure of power, prosperity , and security." 11  Seventeenth century Newport displayed few of the trappings of urbanity that would characterize the city in the eighteenth century. In fact, it is a stretch to even label the Newport of the 1600s a city. Not crowded by any means, its population of around 2,500 late in the century was comfortably spread out along the waterfront. Sanitation and fire prevention, often concerns of crowded colonial populations, were of little real worry to Newporters. As crime was of insignificant proportions to warrant strong policing of the town, police patrol was generally lax and the town jail was frequently neglected . Wandering swine were a common sight about the streets, valued by residents not only for their nutritional content but also for their utility as street-cleaning scavengers. Not until the mid-l 700s, after Newport had begun to move toward a much more urban environment, did the animals become enough of a nuisance to justify a law forbidding them on the streets of the city. Despite growing commerce throughout the seventeenth 21  economy was not at this time particularly conducive to the sort of female economic participation overtly evident in eighteenth century Newport records. Their work was not the type of labor by which women could typically support themselves. There were apparently no women in the seventeenth century like the forty-two Newport women in 1774 who resided alone, hence Koelher's finding that the women on Aquidneck in the 1600s "did not live alone, nor were many self-supporting." 38 The largely rustic nature of seventeenth century Newport, where much of the population lived off the land, did not encourage the development of the solitary house-dweller nor the then less-than-ideal single parent head of household that by the next century characterized the highly commercialized Newport.
The most comprehensive and detailed census taken while Rhode Island was still a colony occurred in 1774, by which time Newport had evolved into a major urban colonial seaport and the fifth-largest city in the American colonies. However, the neighboring towns on Aquidneck, Middletown and Portsmouth retained the rural qualities that had characterized Newport in the previous century but had since been lost. A comparison of household structure between Newport and these two largely rustic towns reveals that the more populated and urbane Newport, with an economy that (as shall be explained in more detail later) had become almost wholly dependent on inter colonial commerce, began to promote household structures that were virtually nonexistent in its more rural neighbors. As noted earlier, forty-two Newport women lived alone in their dwellings at the time of the census.
Several men also lived alone. In neither Middletown nor Portsmouth, however, did anyone, male or female, live alone. Significantly, the urban, commercial conditions of Newport seem to have made more viable a 38  What are to be made of such statistics? When we keep in mind that the Newport of the 1600s more closely resembled the nature of the Middletown or Portsmouth in the following century than it did of itself in the eighteenth century, it seems likely that the incongruencies between the household structures presented above are consistent with those that would be found between the less urbanized, less commercialized Newport of the seventeenth century and the more urbane Newport of the eighteenth. Indeed, Portsmouth's 177 4 population of about 1,232 whites and its lower commercial volume make it not unlike Newport in the 1600s, which at the turn of the It was in the early eighteenth century that Newport, Rhode Island, really began to mature as a city. As it blossomed into a center of commerce, it lost reliance on local agricultural production as a vital source of revenue. Instead, it served as a harbor city that supplied goods from certain ports to meet the needs of other ports, rather like a middleman. An influx of merchants who understood Newport to be a budding seaport with a drive to prosper whetted Newporters' desires by transforming the city's commercial economy "from a sporadic, limited trade with a handful of ports to a complex trade involving hundreds of voyages annually to ports throughout the West Indies and continental colonies." 46 Increasingly, in its pursuit of profit, the decisions of the growing merchant class tied Newport ever closer to the burgeoning Atlantic economy of the eighteenth century. This development had tremendous consequences for structuring the sources of economic opportunity in the city. The increasing number of commercial vessels sailing in and out of the city, for example, created a considerable demand for crafts and industries geared toward the sea. Worn ship rope needed replacement; torn sails necessitated mending or replacement; damaged barrels or boxes required repair; even whole vessels occasionally needed to be exchanged for new ones.
Not surprisingly, as the demand for seafaring services increased so too did the supply. Newport in the 1700s saw a tremendous growth in the number of coopers, ropewalkers, sailmakers, caulkers, and other craftsmen who plied their trades in the port. The fact that Newport became well-known for its residents' abilities to produce quality vessels at reasonable rates in the eighteenth century indicates the prominence of shipping to Aquidneck. The more shipping Newport merchants engaged in and the more demand they created for jobs to facilitate that shipping, the more Newporters oriented the city's occupational structure toward the sea and loosened Newport from the agricultural moorings of its past. In fact, Newport fits well the process of development 30 So prevalent was seafaring as an occupation for Newport males that "there was scarcely a Newport family that did not claim at least one mariner in its ranks." 58 Rather than subsisting through the stationary lifestyle of a yeoman farmer, these men were engaging themselves in an occupation that demanded mobility. Every day mothers and fathers were bidding Godspeed to their seafaring sons departing for far off lands; left at the docks were wives and children wondering if they would ever see their husbands and fathers again. Yet every day, too, husbands, fathers, and sons were returning from long absences overseas to renew relationships that had been placed on hold.
There is perhaps no greater illustration of just how thoroughly the culture of the sea embedded itself in Newporters' lives than the decision of Hannah Lacy and her husband to name their boy Neptune. The nature of the seaport was truly reflected in the character of its inhabitants. The stay of the Jewish merchant Aaron Lopez in Newport provides a prime example of this reflection.
Though family connections drew Lopez to Newport in 1752, these connections must be understood within the context of the city's development. The determination to reap profits despite the risk also propelled many merchants and sea captains to conduct clandestine trade with the enemy during times of war. Newport was consistently cited by authorities as a great haven for such activity. It was also known as a safe refuge for pirates, whose plunder many residents were not reluctant to have fill their coffers. To be sure, other cities had such reputations as well, but not every colonial city did.
That Newport had them attests to other colonials' thinking about its inhabitants' values and priorities.
Though not surprised at the city's success, Newport's founders would As the city shed its agricultural heritage, the road to wealth in eighteenth century Newport became inextricably linked to the sea. To illustrate, based on the city's 1772 tax assessment list the two most prevalent occupations of the top tax bracket were ones wholly dependent on the Atlantic economy for their prosperity, merchants and distillers. A third, innkeepers, were benefited by the increasing transience of much of the population and the growing reputation of the city as a pleasant retreat for vacationers. "At the height of Newport's prosperity," Elaine Forman Crane estimates, "as many as 400-600 vacationers might have spent the season, which ran from May through October." 73 Yet the city attracted more than just those on the "upand-up"; it was also a magnet for the "down and out." As noted earlier, eighteenth century Newport was characterized by an increasing number of indigent. "By the 1750s," Lynne Withey has observed, 71 Acts and Laws of The English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations , in New England, in America , printed by Samuel Hall, (Newport, R.I.: 1767) . 72 Ibid . 73 Crane , A Dependent People, 60.
"Newport had both an almshouse and a workhouse," a phenomenon that Gary Nash has noted for other eighteenth century colonial cities such as New York , Philadelphia, and Boston. 74 Then, as now, people perceived cities as arenas of opportunity and as a thriving seaport Newport attracted its fair share of hard-luckers. In regard to crime in Newport, Bridenbaugh contends that "the hitherto Arcadian little city on Rhode Island came in for a series of rude shocks after crime signalized its coming of age with the execution of John as he relates it.7 6 Witnessing this whole scenario unfold was a "grave, sensible, matronlike Quaker woman with her attendants." Significantly, possessing a wariness of Newport women which Benjamin seemed to lack ' she, not Franklin, sensed that his young acquaintances were no good. At one point in their journey she pulled him aside and explained: Young man, I am concerned for thee, as thou has no friend with thee, and seems not to know much of the world, or of the snares youth is exposed to; depend upon it, those are very bad women; I can see it all in their actions; and if thee are not upon thy guard, they will draw thee into some danger.77 Persuaded by the gentlewoman to keep his distance, Franklin declined an offer put forth by the young ladies upon reaching New York to "come and see them" where they lived in the city. The following day "the captain missed a silver spoon and some other things, that had been taken out of his cabin, and knowing that these were a couple of strumpets, he got a warrant to search their lodgings, found the stolen goods, and had the thieves punished." 78 That the entire episode warranted enough significance for Franklin to recount in his Autobiography is telling. Whether because he was blinded by an affection for the two women or by colonial society's idealization of "proper" behavior for a woman, Franklin was clearly too trusting of the women. He was aghast that women could, and would, act as such. Whereas before the revelation of their crime Franklin identifies the two as "women, 11 his reference to them as "strumpets" after the exposure of their misdeeds indicates a mental dissociation of their activities from his conception of womanhood. That the Newport Quaker woman was wary of the women suggests that she had had prior experience with "very bad women" and understood that the reality of 76 Franklin, Benjamin , Autobiography , (New York, N.Y. : Bantam Books reprint, 1982), 29. 77 Ibid., 29-30. 78 Ibid., 30 .
38 colonial women's behavior did not always match the ideal, an understanding many Newport men seemed either less willing or less able to grasp.
Sometime during the dark hours of September third or fourth, 1760, someone broke into a dockside warehouse belonging to the Newport merchant Benjamin Mason. The thief or thieves involved in the break-in seem to have been rather selective; presumably there were more items available to filch from the warehouse than only the "two Pieces of Cloth-coloured Shalloon ... and one Piece of Poplins" that were taken. Determined to apprehend the perpetrators, Mason recounted the details of the incident in the Newport Mercury and offered a reward "If any Person will detect the Thief or Thieves, so that he or they may be brought to Justice ... " Mason's choice of words is revealing for what it implies about his conception of femininity. Despite the fact that the pilfered fabrics were as valuable to women as to men (and probably more useful given the woman's role as needleworker for the colonial family), Mason nevertheless assumed the culprit(s) to be male. Like Franklin, Mason's conception of colonial femininity did not include connivance and thievery, base traits which were incongruent with the notion of women as the "softer sex." Indeed, he could not even entertain the thought that one of the city's many women could have assisted in the crime against him. "And ifit is suspected more than one [thief] are concerned, if either will discover his Accomplice or Accomplices," Mason added to his announcement, "he shall have the above reward, and be neither prosecuted nor exposed." It is unlikely that Mason's use of the pronoun "he" was meant to include women. Documents that sought to address both men and women, for instance, often employed the gender-neutral term "person," a word Mason himself used to address the reader of his ad, whom he perceived as a possible informant. Thus did Mason believe that if a woman were to be involved in 39 this ugly incident, surely it would be in this more becoming role. As the example of Mary Brown illustrates, however, this conception of femininity proved increasingly problematic.
Mary Brown arrived in Newport late in the year 1762 with a tale to tell.
According to Mary, she, along with her mother and father, the Reverend Josiah Brown, was forcibly taken from her home in Deerfield, Massachusetts, by Native Americans in 1739. Her captors murdered her parents and carried Mary north into Canada, where she would remain for the next twenty-three years. Whether she was released or escaped in 1762 she did not say, but in June of that year she left Canada and headed south for the colonies. By December, 1762 she had found her way into Newport and announced her presence to the town via the Newport Mercury on December 13th. As numerous men and women daily entered and left the bustling city of around 6,800 inhabitants, Mary's arrival in Newport was likely paid little notice. To garner attention to her plight, she sought out the local paper. Like so many merchants who advertised their newly arrived wares, Mary turned to the Mercury to advertise her arrival in the hope that she might find family.
Mary, the paper sympathetically announced, "thinks she may have some Relations still living, who are hereby inform'd that she is now in Newport, where they may hear of her by enquiring of the Publishers of this Paper. 1179 N ewporters would hear of Mary Brown again the following week, but unfortunately not as favorably as one might hope.
On December 20, the Newport Mercury announced that Mary Brown, "having been detected in Stealing, was committed to Gaol. .. 1180 Individual acts of petty theft were rarely commented on in the Mercury, so it seems 79 Newport Mercury, December 13, 1762. 80 Newport Mercury, December 20, 1762 . Mary's act had particularly rankled the paper, which admitted it had previously allowed Brown to "advertise in our last to find her Relations. "81 The episode allowed a doubt in the printers' minds about Mary's sad story to advance to an irritated challenge to the woman's very identity. On December 13, the Mercury had been sympathetic yet skeptical of Mary's tale of woe, but not skeptical enough to reject its publication. "One Mary Brown, who, as she says, was taken by the Indians at Deerfield ... " began their relation that day of her plight. The subsequent announcement of her incarceration the following week suggests a sense by the paper's editors that Mary, "as she calls herself," was as fraudulent as her story. Though still not on the scale oflarger cities like Boston and New York, "[c]rime and the general disorder which accompanies it," Sheila Skemp contends for Newport, "was to be sure on the upswing in this period." 82 The Town Council tried to clamp down on the growing problem of transience and poverty in the city, implying its irritation with the situation. The evidence, however, suggests that it was fighting a losing battle.
As Helena Wall has so ably demonstrated, an enforced sense of community pervaded colonialAmerican society. In many regards, a person's private life was public property. "Throughout colonial America, settlers supported the preeminence of the community, relied on the family as a source of social order, and empowered local authorities to protect communal values and stability. " 83 Particularly in New England, there existed a long-held belief that a community in essence "owned" its residents and was hence responsible for their conduct. A narrowly defined term, residency was established only 81  by birth or the formal permission of the community as represented by the local town council. Non-residents who either did not seek or were denied resident status were deemed suspect. The uneasiness such persons caused communities is evident both by the use of the anxiety-laden term "stranger" to define them and the construction of a widely-used system of dealing with such strangers, the "warning-out" system. The warning-out system was designed to preserve one's own community by driving out non-residents and forcing them to return to the towns or villages of their legal residency, which were seen as being responsible for these people (particularly if the stranger seemed likely to become a town charge). However, the notion of fixed residency implied by the long-standing system was increasingly at odds with the growing mobility and transience that characterized Newport by the mid-1700s. Faced with this dilemma, the Newport Town Council significantly chose to fight change with tradition. Rather than discard the tradition of fixed residency, the Council employed it as a foil against the city's rising number of transients.
On October 6, 1760, the Council initiated a strategy designed to rid the city of those that did not belong. The Town Sergeant was ordered to "Go Over the Town from House to house and Enquire what familys they have and when he finds Any that are not Inhabitants to Warrant them to Appear at the Town Council the 10th day of November ... to Give An Acco[un]t of themselves to said Council." The same day saw the Council grill Latham Clarke, a vagrant from Hopkinton, over his recent return to Newport, the town of his birth. Officials were determined to make visible those whom the populace, mobile city had allowed to become invisible. But the magnitude of the problem and the inadequacy of the proposed solution were ironically suggested in April of 1761 when one Rachel Jacobs was brought before the 42 Council. Though admitting she was not a native of Newport but rather of Dartmouth, Massachusetts, Rachel revealed that she "has been here two years Last fall, but unknown to said Council. " 84 She then asked to make application for residency. Whether her request was granted or not we do not know, but her brief appearance in the historical record provides a glimpse into the evolving character of Newport, an increasingly dynamic, diverse city whose inhabitants' lives were also increasingly mobile and diverse, a sense of which can be further gleaned from the city's newspaper.
The content of the Newport Mercury mirrored the character of the city it served; the significance of the sea and of commerce, the importance of slaves and the slave trade, the growing incidence of crime, and Newport's involvement in Britain's affairs could all be evidenced from a single issue of the paper. On September 23, 1760, for example, two Newport privateering vessels, the brigantine Diana and the schooner Success, were fitting out "in Order to cruise against His Majesty's Enemies" and encouraged those with an interest in "making their Fortune" to join their outfits. That same day found Benjamin Mason still searching in vain for the thief or thieves that had raided his warehouse earlier in the month. Yet Mason was not the only Newporter on the hunt that day. The innholder James Hardy announced his search for a female Native American slave of his who had "RUN away last Thursday Night." His predicament was shared by Abe Michener, whose "Indian wench" had fled her bondage in Newport and, Michener supposed, "gone to Dartmouth." While some slaves were fleeing bondage, others, such as the "YOUNG Negro Fellow" and the "LIKELY Negro Girl" advertised in American slaves instilled both hope and fear among the city's white inhabitants, who understood them as sources of income yet agents of disorder as well. Racial tension in Newport was surely high in 1751 when it was discovered that Peter Taylor's slave Cambridge had been plotting a slave revolt by intending to kill local slave owners in the city. 86 And the changes in the economy also fostered changes to relationships between the sexes.
The long-standing pursuit of profit that spawned the steady growth in ocean-going commerce and the rising, increasingly mobile population, which combined to help transform Newport in the eighteenth century, also helped create a society that promoted various activities and relationships outside of marriage which worked against the gender roles it may have encouraged within the institution. In a revealing article concerning women in seventeenth century Salem, Massachusetts, C. Dallett Hemphill suggests the significance that the process of urbanization may have had on defining gender roles and relations. Early in Salem's history, when it was yet a rather rural region (similar to seventeenth century Newport), gender roles were relatively loosely defined. Women could be found transacting men's business , working alongside their husbands in the fields, tending livestock, and performing other tasks traditionally assumed to be of a masculine nature. Of Northern New England women between 1650 and 1750, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich has similarly concluded that "[a]lmost any task was suitable for a woman as long as it furthered the good of her family and it was acceptable to her husband." 87 And Joan Jensen has made like discoveries for rural Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century, finding accounts that "provide enough evidence , for example, to call for revision of some historians' conclusion that women did not work in the fields. " 88 However , as Salem's economy began to orient itself toward the sea and develop urbanity, gender roles began to diverge and crystallize , contends Hemphill. "As husbands became gunsmiths, coopers, cutters, or schoolmasters, and thus less dependent on agriculture for subsistence , their wives' share in familial economic production fell off." 89 Their role as consumers, however , was accentuated by the growing commercialism of Salem and they became more domestic. Patricia Cleary also suggests that "women may have had more responsibility for shopping activities after midcentury." 90 But if urbanization diminished female economic production within the institution of marriage, it also promoted it outside marriage , thus accentuating the divergent characters of wed and unwed women. Significantly, too, urbanization helped 87 Ulrich , Good Wives, 37. 88 Jensen , Loosen ing the Bonds , 46 . 89 Hemphill , "Women in Court," 172. 90  create a diversity in women's economic fortunes that further accentuated differences in relation to matrimony.
Historians of Newport have observed that late in the colonial era wealth became more heavily concentrated in the hands of the city's elite, a phenomenon experienced by other colonial seaports as well. Elaine Forman Crane writes of these cities that "wealth was increasingly channeled into the hands of fewer people, while each community was faced with a growing number of inhabitants unable to provide for themselves." 91 The wives of the wealthy, Shiela Skemp notes, "led a life of relative frivolity." 92 For these women, "any broadening of their social lives came in large measure from their role as ornaments and enhancements to the festivities ofmen." 93 As such, contributors to the Newport Mercury could excoriate such women publicly and wonder "How far the Vanity of our Ladies in dressing, and of our Gentlemen in drinking, contributes to the general Misery of the People?" 94 At the same time, however, others could lament the "Number of able-bodied Men, Women, and Children, who are poor Persons ... " 95 Indeed, Lynne Withey estimates that approximately forty-five percent of Newport's population in the 1770s were too poor to be taxed. 96 Life for these women was far from frivolous. Inside or outside of marriage, they could ill-afford to play the role of ornament. Even some middle-class women "relied on public charity or the help of friends, or, alternatively, secured a position as school mistress or clerk ... " 97 Thus were two types of marriages presented to Newport women, one characterized by a wife's inactivity in the public economic realm (except 91  46 perhaps as a consumer) and the other by forced activity in the marketplace.
The growing number of poor in Newport coupled with the increasingly transient nature of marriage in the seaport community ensured more of the latter type. At the same time, the commercialization of Newport provided more and more opportunities for more and more women to survive without husbands by supplying occupations which, as Cleary notes of shopkeeping, were "usually understood by contemporaries as falling within accepted norms for women's family employment, [yet] had the potential to transcend or contravene those mores." 9 8 The evolving character of the city's economy provided Newporters with divergent sets of feminine economic characters. The first hewed more closely to traditional ideas about the role of a wife as an economic dependent and resembled the seventeenth century Rhode Island women Lyle Koehler describes. The second, which follows Gloria Main's observation that more New England women were "working outside the home in the final decades of the colonial period," was characterized by sustained public economic endeavors. 99 Though it was this second character which gained prominence as Newport headed into the Revolution, it was the first which was embraced by many as the standard, the epitome of femininity. In a culture sensitized to issues of economic import, these Newporters were keenly aware of the economic dimensions of gender and by the mid-eighteenth century perceived that changes in the city's economy were adversely affecting that paragon of colonial gender relations ... matrimony. 98 Ibid., 182. 99 Main, "Gender, Work, and Wages in Colonial America," 65.

Chapter Two
Staying Afloat: Women's Economic Activities in a Commercial Seaport The complex yet often subtle relationship between women and the colonial American economy has received significant attention from scholars in recent years. By supplementing information obtained from official political and economic documents with sources hitherto neglected, historians have formulated a more inclusive definition of what constitutes economic value and constructed a new understanding of the role of women in the early American economy. The image of the colonial economy that has traditionally dominated the discipline's discourse is of a gender-defined, dual economy driven by men from whom colonial women were virtually prohibited contact.
Women are presented in this discourse as having controlled a different, less public and hence less important ecomony, one in which their activities had little bearing on the overall health and course of the general economy.
Recent historians, however, have questioned the validity of such a model.
According to Jeanne Boydston, the development of a cash-based market individualism in the late colonial era initiated a perceptual exclusion that continues to this day of non-wage, particularly female labor from economic valuation. Prior to this time, economic utility was judged by what she terms "labor contribution" rather than by any monetary reward. Under this definition of economic value, the work of the colonial woman that frequently went without monetary remuneration -cooking, cleaning, childcare, gardening, cloth production and repair -nonetheless contained economic value. It was part of the overall economy of household production and interdependency that characterized the seventeenth and early eighteenth century. "Family subsistence in early America was achieved by hundreds of transactions with neighbors." Though it went unpaid, feminine labor formed a key component of the early American economy and was generally acknowledged to be as crucial to individual and family survival as masculine work. The notion of a gender-dichotomized economy in which feminine labor was disconnected and devalued, Boydston contends, developed only after the emergence of a cash-and wage-based economy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. "Economic life, while still based in the family unit, was coming to be seen as an activity shaped by individual interest, characterized by market contact and money-making (the "penny"), and focused on extra-household activity -none of which well fitted the work of housewifery. "1 T.H. Breen has noted the way in which the consumerism of the American colonies after the mid-eighteenth century was conceptually associated with dependency, a term that other historians such as Edmund Morgan have found was becoming anathema to colonists of the Revolutionary era. In this new conceptual understanding of economy, which was in its infant stages during the Revolutionary era, conventional gender constructions dictated that man became the producer and woman the consumer . Yet contentions that colonial commercial development reduced the female role in economic production and cast her in the role of consumer ignore the many ways in which the economy constantly formed and reformed relationships between men and women that frustrated the assignation of conventional gender constructions to the dichotomous economic categories of producer and consumer. 2 While Boydston's efforts focus primarily on establishing the economic utility of women 's unpaid work, other historians have noted the ways in which women could continue to play the role of producer in the emerging cash-based marketplace of the colonial era. Due to the prominent position of men in the monetary marketplace of early America, it is easy to dismiss the reciprocal influences of women on the marketplace and of the marketplace on women . In her intriging work Women Before the Bar , Cornelia Hughes Dayton contends that the developing cash-based commercialism of the eighteenth century actually did work to circumscribe many women's involvement in economic transactions. However, to admit as much is not to deny that women could play a meaningful role in this type of economy; in fact, Dayton found that some women, particularly widows, could and did prove to be "important source[s] of both consumer and commercial loans and therefore, it must be acknowledged, played a modest but significant part in the capitalization and commercial development of the countryside . " 3 Dayton's findings reinforce my contention that female economic pursuits were not wholly relegated to a more informal, barter-based sector of the colonial economy. It is, in fact , difficult to categorize the economic activities of the late colonial era woman, for she was an economically multifaceted creature. A variety of factors could muddle neat distinctions between genders in the Revolutionary economy.
Current research suggests that the economic character and utility of a particular woman was influenced by a variety of factors. The three most significant for the purposes of this study include place of residence , marital status, and spousal employment. In regard to place of residence, Jeanne fem ale in the role of consumer. around the barns and fields; rather, "[a]s soon as school was out they would run to the wharves, swarm up the rigging of the ships, and shinny to the topmast striving to be the first to place a cap on the tip. " 7 The lure of the sea was strong in Newport and many boys grew up, whether by choice or circumstance, to make their livings on the water, an eventuality of tremendous consequence for the city's women. Since colonial women were expected to marry, as increasing numbers of men became mariners so too did more and more women become mariners' wives, a status that could -frequently be both physically and emotionally difficult. Such marriages were often, as one such wife described them, "'fraught with sorrow and heartpangs'. "8 Marriage to a seaman was full of trials and tribulations. "Unlike female inhabitants of agrarian societies," Bill Baller has discovered of eighteenth century Marblehead, Massachusetts women, "the women of Marblehead were used to sons and husbands being away from home for long periods. " 9 Indeed, depending on the destination, a sea voyage could last months, sometimes years. Though the husband was still nominally the head of the household, this meant that while he was at sea the mariner's wife was effectively left in charge of the family hearth. This situation placed such women in rather odd circumstances with regard to their legal status. As married women, mariners' wives were in a legal state of coverture, a condition that "prohibited them from owning property, establishing businesses, signing contracts, or in other ways managing personal affairs or supporting themselves. "IO Such activities were deemed inappropriate and unnecessary for married women , as they were, in theory, to be provided for and protected by their husbands. Yet adhering to the widely accepted and long-established theory of coverture , a central tenet of colonial marriage, was highly problematic for many eighteenth century Newporters.
It was often difficult for common seamen to provide adequate security for their families. Of these "Jack Tars" Jesse Lemisch has written that "there were many ... in the colonial period ... who left the land in flight and fear , outcasts, men with little hope of success ashore." 11 Few mariners appear to have thrived financially in their occupation. Elaine Forman Crane suggests "[a]nother reason for the growing number of poor [in Newport] may have been related to seamen's wages, which appear to have followed the Philadelphia pattern between 1763 and 1776 , and according to various accounts were, on the whole, even lower than wages in Philadelphia." 12 "Newport's greatest single group of impoverished residents," Sheila Skemp asserts, "was ... sailors who arrived in port and simply stayed on because they were sick, wounded , lame or even dying. " 13 Compounding the problem of supporting the family for mariner husbands was the fact that they were physically absent not only from the home, but from the entire town for prolonged periods of time. As wives well knew, under these circumstances the support of a husband could prove hopelessly unattainable. 10 Riley , Glenda, Divorce: An American Tradition , (New York , N .Y.: Oxford University Press , 1991 ), 20 . 11 Lemisch , Jesse, "Jack Tar in the Streets: Merchant Seamen in the Politics of Revolutionary America," The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, Vol. XXV (July 1968) , 377 . 12 Crane , A Dependent People, 65. 13 Skemp , A Social and Cultural History of Newport , Rhode Island , 117.
With her husband Joseph at sea, Mary Brown herself resolved to sublease the couple's dwelling to Timothy Wetherel for forty pounds "by reason she could get a rume Cheaper in another place." 14 Mary's decision suggests a realization on her part that, with Joseph away, she could not hope to subsist without generating some income on her own. By renting a less expensive place, thus cutting her expenditures, and leasing out their dwelling, thus producing new income, Mary acknowledged the reality that Joseph would not be able to support her. Like most mariners' wives, she understood that she would have to provide financially for herself, despite the fact that she was married. Lisa Norling's investigation of another eighteenth century sailor's wife, Lydia Almy of Smithfield, Rhode Island, reveals a similar pattern. With her seafaring husband Christopher away, Lydia "earned cash by taking in an occasional boarder and tanning skins to sell, and she expressed no sense of conflict over or inappropriateness concerning her forays into financial management and market production." 15 Baller has found of Marblehead women that " [w]ith their husbands at sea, they assumed responsibility for child-rearing and household management." 16 These women became decisionmakers not necessarily by choice, but certainly by circumstance. Ironically, the very nature of their marriages did not generally allow mariners' wives to submit in practice to marital coverture. Thus many such women regularly lived in a state of quasi-independence, married yet often living lives similar to other Newport women, like single women and widows, subsisting outside the institution of marriage. And the periodic autonomy mariners' wives could expect within their marriages was ever in danger of becoming permanent 14 Barsheba Loveland v. Timothy Wetherel , RIICCP case file, May session, 1750. 15 Norling, "How Frought With Sorrow and Heartpangs," 426. 16 Baller, "Kinship and Culture," 295. 54 should (as all too frequently began to happen by the mid-1700s) their seafaring husbands fall victim to an unforgiving ocean.
"It is hardly surprising in a community where men earned their living by the sea," writes Elaine Forman Crane, "that the sea extracted a heavy toll in return." 17 Indeed it did. So conscious were sailors about the hazards of their occupation that many drew up their wills just prior to departing for voyages.
And frequent were visits to the town council by newly widowed mariners' wives in order to confer over their deceased husbands' estates. One mishap Leaving his wife behind in Newport, Samuel Cranston set sail for the West Indies in 1756 to carry out business transactions. He never arrived.
Off the Florida Keys his vessel was set upon by pirates and Cranston taken prisoner. Seven long years passed and his wife supposed Cranston had perished in the Caribbean. Assuming her widowhood, she accepted a marriage proposal and in 1763 was preparing to remarry when Samuel finally returned to Newport. 19 The plight of the "widow" Cranston illustrates the strains seafaring placed on the institution of marriage in Newport and suggests the difficulties both men and women could experience in such marriages. "Without confirmation, one could never be certain of a catastrophe at sea which would release a woman from her legal restrictions as a feme covert. " 20 "It is little wonder," writes Sheila Skemp, "that there were so many sailors from Newport who were lost at sea, never to be heard from again, that the General Assembly was forced [in 17 44] to initiate special legislation giving their wives the power of attorney after they had been missing for three years." 21 Marriage in eighteenth century Newport was clearly physically, emotionally, and legally fluid. Husbands and wives were frequently separated and reunited; feme covert women often behaved out of necessity as if they were feme sole; and wives could quickly become widows at any age. Instability was a common characteristic of Newport marriages by mid-century. Moreover, married women in the seaport were more often exhibiting a de facto autonomy at odds with the conventional notions of marriage that were to structure the identity of men and women and inform their interactions with one another. Rather than establish the husband as the locus of authority, these marriages diffused authority and blurred gendered distinctions within the institution.
While the urban, commercial nature of Newport promoted de facto autonomy within marriage, it also enabled larger numbers of women to subsist outside the institution of marriage by structuring the economy so as to enable feminine labor to acquire the monetary valuation increasingly needed to avoid dependency on and debt to others. Edmund Morgan notes the political connotations of debt for colonials: "Whenever debt brought a man under another's power, he lost more than his own freedom of action. He also weakened the capacity of his country to survive as a republic." 22 By contrast, the woman was expected to enter into a state of dependency by marriage, yet in the emerging economy could avoid the economic pressure to do so through the pursuit of profit. Indeed, in her study of remarriage patterns in early nineteenth century Newburyport, Massachusetts, Susan Grigg suggests that among the seaport's women personal affection and desire may have been as important as economic need or physical opportunity in the decision to remarry. 23 Still, the means of economic pursuit for women were informed by colonial gender constructs.
In his analysis of eighteenth century American seaports, Jacob Price has emphasized the significance of service-oriented occupations for men in the employment structure of colonial cities. Though the creation of such jobs as innkeepers, teachers, butchers, shopkeepers, barbers, and the like were economy like external trading activities and manu _ facturing, in colonial cities service-sector vocations accounted for more male employment than any other area of the economy. "In general, it seems safe to say that, in all substantial colonial towns, the service sector broadly conceived accounted for around 50 percent of the employed adult male population." 24 Though he includes little discussion of women in his analysis, Price's findings are significant in understanding the relationship of Newport women to the city's economy.
Colonial social construction of gender roles dictated that women be handmaidens. To the woman fell the tasks of service: cooking, cleaning, laundering, mending, midwifery, child care. Women were ever reminded that they should "Let your Desire be to please all Men honestly." 25 And of wives men were taught that "To make your happiness compleat, Be still her chiefest aim. " 26 AB such, the association of colonial women with service could actually promote greater female activity in a service-oriented economy.
Price's findings suggest that such occupations were clearly on the rise by the mid-l 700s, affording colonial women greater opportunities to utilize their role as handmaiden to eke out an existence on their own.
One of the most common methods of economic subsistence for Newport women in the 1700s, the taking in of boarders, was so common precisely because of the urban, cosmopolitan nature of Newport. On any given day, scores of visiting mariners, merchants and tradesmen, and even an occasional dignitary like George Berkeley would dock at one of Newport's many wharves. Their need for shelter and food created a demand for a service Newport's women were quite able and willing to provide. In town to 24 Price, Jacob M., "Economic Function and the Growth of American Port Towns in the Eighteenth Century ," Perspectives in American History, Volume 8 (1974) 58 ply his trade in 1764, the English oculist and surgeon Dr. Stork advised prospective patients to visit him at Mrs. Searing's dwelling near the Trinity Church, where he was to board for the next three to four weeks before moving on. 27 The way in which Newport women could, and did, play upon gender distinctions to generate their own revenue is suggested by the advertisement Abigail and Elizabeth Cole jointly placed in the Newport Mercury early in the summer of 1759.
Available evidence suggests that Abigail and Elizabeth were sisters and that both were single women. Together they succeeded in carving out for themselves reasonably comfortable existences in the port city by attending to men's needs. In June of 1759 they took out an ad to "acquaint such GENTLEMEN who have Occasion for Private Lodgings" that they were moving their business to a new location which promised "a Number of genteel Apartments for the Accommodation of Gentlemen." 28 That the ad was addressed to a male audience was no coincidence. Women boarded, but men did so more frequently, in greater numbers, and were generally able to rent at higher rates. The Coles understoo~ this and recognized also that their gender proved no barrier to their search for a male clientele. The sisters seem to have experienced some success in their boardinghouse operations, for in 1774 when the census-takers came around they still maintained their own place. Elizabeth is listed in that census as a head of household with five others attached to her residence, one white woman over sixteen (presumably Abigail), one Native American, and three blacks. The following year's tax list found Abigail and Elizabeth listed together as the sixth-highest taxed women in the city at nine shillings three pence. 27 Newport Mercury, February 20, 1764. 28 Newport Mercury, June 5, 1759.
Though boarding was by no means unknown to rural areas, it proved more viable for more women in an urban environment. Newport in the eighteenth century was a dense, compact city. Bruce Daniels estimates that Newport's density in 1774 was 1,196 persons per square mile. In contrast, Providence, the colony's second largest community, had a density of 239 persons per square mile. 29 Elaine Forman Crane believes that the compactness of Newport affected housing availability. "Whether there were 1,500 or 1,800 families in the community , there clearly were a great many more families than houses. Under these circumstances, house sharing must have been a common phenomenon. 1130 As Newport grew to become the fifth largest city in the colonies, the increasing mobility and density of its population provided a substantial demand for lessors. Many widows took advantage of this situation to provide support for themselves after their husbands' deaths.  38 Cleary, "'She Will Be in the Shop,"' 182 . 39 Skemp, A Social and Cultural History of Newport, Rhode Island, 126. 40  not overlooked by the town council. In 1772, the council taxed her fourteen pence, a high rate for a woman and indicative of her relative prosperity.
Exactly how these women were able to transact and interact in a profession that was still male-dominated and required at least a modicum of financial understanding is unclear. It seems likely, Lisa Wilson has concluded, that such women had been involved in the operations of the shops long before they were widowed. "Widows' behavior gives us good reason to believe that these women were familiar with the economic affairs of their families before their husbands' deaths." 41  certainly a prostitution problem in Newport. "Deborah Meanwell" argued in 1769 that the lack of concern "for the safety or liberties of their country" evident among Newport's young men stemmed from the fact that they were frequently out "drinking, gambling, and whoririg" their nights away. 56  Historians have generally been slow to appreciate the significance of slavery in allowing white women to maintain themselves outside of marriage.
Lynne Withey has described the impact of slavery on household size in Newport, noting that the discrepancy in size between households with slaves in 177 4 and those without them was seven-tenths of a person. She suggests that only the wealthy benefited from the presence of slaves in Newport.
"Slaves were most common in Newport," she writes, "where they were servants in wealthy households." 62 There is indeed a strong relationship between wealth and slaves in colonial Newport, even among women heads of half percent of Newport taxpayers in the late colonial era were women. 63 The 177 5 tax list, for instance, contains the names of only thirty-four female taxpayers, women with enough wealth to justify taxation. Of these women, well over half (between fifty-five and sixty percent) owned slaves. In fact, together they held approximately half of the slaves owned by female heads of household in the 1770s, which numbered nearly three hundred women.
Many of the women were widows and presumably inherited their slaves from their husbands. Yet it would be a mistake to construe the slaves' presence in these women's estates as simply reflections of their deceased husbands' wealth. There were slave-owning women who did not appear on the tax list, and though certainly helpful, inherited wealth was no assurance that a widow could maintain herself economically over the years. Widowhood was often synonymous with poverty in colonial America and a deceased husband's debts could financially ruin his wife, as could her own mismanagement.
"With a husband's death, a widow was immediately beset by legal, financial, and family problems. " 64 That a woman like Sarah Rumreill who had been widowed for over twenty years could yet appear on the 1772 tax list is as much a testament to the way she handled her husband's wealth as it is to the husband's wealth itself. Evidence suggests that the utilization of slaves afforded Newport women a level of subsistence they might otherwise have been unable to maintain. slaves to aid them in general housework and the running of a small farm or business. " 65 Training one's slave in a particular craft was socially acceptable and thus northern slaves were often familiar with a variety of occupations, including (but certainly not exclusive to) tanning, smithing, carpenting, tailoring, weaving, baking , and butchering. Greene contends that "[i]n the many homes employing slave labor , Negro women served as cooks, laundresses, maids, nurses and as general household workers, but they were also trained in domestic arts . 1166   Mary Mullin's Doppo could be valued at up to one thousand pounds, 74 a runaway slave represented a severe economic blow to women as both lost capital and lost labor. As such, it was not uncommon for colonial mistresses to traipse into the printing shops with advertisements offering rewards for the return of their fugitive slaves . Nor was it unknown for women to advertise the sale of their slaves, again immersing themselves in public financial dealings . "Transactions involving the sale of slaves were usually executed through regular bills of sale and were witnessed, signed, and recorded just as was the sale of other property." 75 Sale was not an uncommon method of ridding oneself of an uncooperative slave. Moreover, the sale of a slave could yield needed finances for a woman should her situation deteriorate. In this regard also, it was financially beneficial to possess skilled slaves. "At the slave market artisans invariably sold for twice as much as unskilled field hands." 76 Not surprisingly, then, when the Newporter Amy Weeden sought to sell a slave of hers in 1765, she was sure to emphasize that the "likely Negro Man ... is allowed, by the best Judges, to be a very good Painter." 77 The extra money garnered by the sale of a skilled slave could be of great importance, as by the mid-eighteenth century a clear characteristic of Newport was the growing number of poor inhabiting the seaport .
Bruce Daniels argues that the rising poverty in the city "resulted primarily from economic forces operating beyond anyone's direct control." 78 74 see , for example, the appraisal of James Collins's estate in the Newport Town Council Record Book , 1760-1763, Book 13, pg. 91. Collins owned several slaves ranging in value from 1,000 pounds for "one Negro Man named Bristol" to 200 pounds for the young slave girl Violet. 75 Greene, The Negro in Colonial New England , 45 . 76  Increasing population and density, the fluctuating Atlantic economy which "swung erratically between prosperity and depression," and increasing involvement in Britain's colonial wars all played a part in bringing about the situation. 79 Though not as severely, it seems clear that Newport was enduring some of the same growing pains that Gary Nash has described for other northern seaports ... increased poverty, indebtedness, and widowhood. 80 Sarah Shaw's husband Lemuel had a history of trouble with the law. In 17 48 he was prosecuted for the illegal selling of rum, probably without a license. A few years later he was ordered to pay a ten pound fine for illegal 79  trembling inder its burden" whose only "means that Holds up our Heads above water at all is a couple ofboarders. 1193 She also resumed teaching. their lives and their possessions as well as a desire to independently decide the distribution of their estates.
In her examination of the free women of Petersburg, Virginia, in the early nineteenth century, Suzanne Lebsock has discovered that for women "relative poverty was less likely to prove an obstacle to writing a will" than it was for men. 109 Moreover, they could be more meticulous than men concerning the distribution of their estates. Lebsock attributes such distinctions to differing value systems between the city's men and women. Because the measure of a man was his wealth, she argues, men who were financially troubled were reluctant to document their humiliation and would instead hold off in the hope of better days ahead. By contrast, women were less concerned with wealth as a measure of personal worth and more concerned about providing what they could, however little, to loved ones while it was still in their power to do so. Yet it must be kept in mind too that wealth is a relative concept. In a city like Newport, where women were as a whole poorer than men, those women who maintained their own households might not regard themselves as indigent and might still consider their possessions of worth, despite the opinions of others. entries of her possessions were often preceded by the adjectives "old" or "coarse." She owned, among other things, "Two old Bedsteads," "Two pair old Sheets worn and patched," "One Pair coarse pillow Cases," "Two old Gowns," and "one Broken grid iron." 114 Still, Albeen chose not to leave the distribution of her estate to the Town Council (as was done in cases of intestacy); rather she preferred to do so herself so as to ensure that her children received her estate "Equally Divided between Them." 115 Included in her possessions were "2 spinning wheels and a foot wheel" that Sarah probably used to make and mend cloth. The spinster Sarah Chaloner must have maintained close ties with her mother, for when Sarah died in late 1760 much of her modest estate went to her mother, whom she requested administer her estate. Lee Virginia

Chambers-Schiller has noted that the number of spinsters like Sarah
Chaloner was on the rise in the late eighteenth century and that most of these women, such as Newport's Ann Fling, "moved between the domestic, England." 122 In 1774, Freelove was one of the forty-two women in Newport that census-takers found residing completely by themselves.
In the service-oriented economy of Newport in the late 1700s, the work of women such as Ann Fling, Sarah Osborne, and Temperance Grant was integral not only to their own maintenance, but to the maintenance of other Newporters as well. Women were connected to the local economy in a multitude of manners. They were shopkeepers, staymakers, schoolteachers, servants, and slave holders. They were spinners. Abigail Howland was paid two pounds, fourteen shillings for eighteen skeins of worsted in 1749. In 1757 she received twenty-two pounds, eight shillings for fifty-six skeins of cotton. 123 The same editorial that lamented the poverty of many of the city's women also acknowledged that "most of them [are] very good SPINNERS." 124 Newport women were midwives and wet nurses. Indeed, it was not unknown for their services to be advertised in the local paper. In 1759, for instance, one ad announced "A WET Nurse is wanted" and in 1764 a woman advertised herself as "A wet Nurse, with a good Breast of Milk, wants a Place." 125 Women were tavern keepers, boarding house owners, tailoresses, glovers, hucksters, and quilters. The widow Peckham was simply referred to as "the woman that quilts." 126 Any number of means were used to make a living.
After her husband James's death, Ann Franklin took over his occupation and became editor of the Newport Mercury until her own death in April of 1763. is made only by Anne Durfey, of Newport." According to Anne, "THE excellent Virtues" and "intrinsic Worth" of her ointment were "well known" among Newporters. Anne's claim must have had at least some validity to have inspired the impostors then "vending their spurious" imitation.
Obviously rankled, she viewed their fraud as a threat, an effort "to deprive the said Durfey [of] Advantage." 128 As Anne Durfey's notice suggests, the difficulties faced by colonial women in trying to maintain an independent existence could induce them to vigorously defend that which was of economic import. frivolous diversion however. Rather, the two women frequently "talked the Matter over before they set out together" and involved so many other women in their schemes, including Susannah's mother and Polly's sister, that their crimes were clearly an organized, purposeful effort to draw income.141 Indeed, many of the stolen items were resold to unsuspecting N ewporters !
The women's thievery brought them into contact with all sorts ofNewporters and provides a glimpse into the daily interactions of women and men in the colonial city.
A number of different women were involved in the ring of thievery, but no men. One of the central culprits was Susannah, a spinster and daughter to the widow Mary Lamb (who was herself involved in the operation). Other members included Polly Moody and her sister Mary, also a spinster. Martha Moody, wife of the Newport housewright James Moody and seemingly a relative to Polly and Mary Moody through marriage, was also an accomplice.
The connections these women had to one another, be it through blood, marriage, or friendship, facilitated the viability of the endeavor, as did the commercial nature of eighteenth century Newport with its many shops and wharves. In fact, many of the stolen goods were taken from local shops.
Susannah Lamb admitted in court that during the summer of 1775 she had entered the store of the widow Rogers and stolen 11   In large measure , a woman's marital status dictated her relationship to the colonial Rhode Island court system . The English common law principle of unity of person as it was adopted by the American colonies effectively barred a married woman from overt, active participation in legal trials. Because she was no longer regarded as an independent agent, but rather as an extension of her husband , the law did not generally permit her to file suit on her own.
Marylynn Salmon writes of the colonial wife , "At marriage , her husband gained the right and responsibility for prosecuting suits in her name as well as his own. She could not initiate a suit without him." 2 Thus, in colonial court records the married woman appears (when she appears at all) in a passive role. In one of many such examples from the Newport records, though Mary Channing was the administratrix of the late Newport physician James Robinson's last will and testament, she could not prosecute Robinson's debtors without the participation of her husband John in the suit.
Significantly, this principle extended even to the prosecution of incidents occurring before the woman's marriage. Took ... " Asa'a appropriation of Ann's earnings did not end here, however.
Nine months after he had abandoned his wife and child , Asa "returned and making enquiry in the neighbourhood, where she had any mony due her for her work , went to the people and insisted on payment, and to obtain it took considerable less than was due and immediately absconded again and hath never returned to her since or afforded her any assistance ... " 11 Though clearly abusive of the right, Asa was nevertheless enabled to collect Ann 's earnings by right of his marriage to her. Indeed, Ann had to plead with the 8  100 men were to be part and parcel of the feminine character. Understanding this, the Newporter Sarah Osborn assured a doubter about her relation to the men who congregated at her house for spiritual guidance in the late 1760s that "she was 'Greatly distresst' lest she move 'beyond my Line' [and] ... explained ... that she had 'no thing to do with' the young men who met weekly at her house, that she did not pray with tenaged boys, and that, with respect to those older men who also came regularly to her home, 'I by no means Set up for their instructor'." 22 Because marriage was so integral to the societal construction of feminine character, women existing outside of marriage -such as widows and spinsters -maintained an anomalous identity in colonial society. As women they were expected to conduct themselves in an amiable manner, or as it was put in the Newport Mercury, women were to "Learn to command Respect by your obliging, agreeable, modest, and virtuous Behavior." 23 Yet because they were not protected by a husband, the courts acknowledged that women outside of wedlock must be able to protect themselves and so granted them the ability to formulate and execute wills and contracts , buy and sell real estate on their own , as well as sue and be sued in their own names, privileges denied their married sisters and normally reserved only for men. Thus could the widow Barsheba Loveland threaten Timothy Wetherel to dig in her garden at his "Perrile" and vow that 'ifhe did she would sue him ... " Women out of wedlock muddled colonial gender dist inctions by their not uncommon assumption of roles associated in the colonial mind with masculinity. 22  which she did affix her name and referred to herself not as John's widow , but rather as the administratrix of his estate and the "Subscriber" of the ad.29 Apparently, the sale of John's personal estate was not enough to satisfy all Subscriber [Margaret], at the House where he now lives ... " 31 (Catching the mistake, the newspaper reprinted the ad correctly the following week.) Were this a unique event, one could dismiss it as a mistake devoid of any real meaning for assessing gender relations in colonial Newport ... but it was not umque.
By law, any case brought before the colony's courts was to be transcribed by a clerk into a court record book, a tedious job indeed considering that by the mid-l 700s the Court of Common Pleas in Newport, for example, handled roughly 1,000 cases each year. When the Court of Common Pleas met in Newport in May of 1760, the widow Alice Shearman of nearby Portsmouth brought an action of trover against George Shearman. Despite seeking two hundred pounds in damages, Alice dropped the suit and was ordered to pay George the cost of the suit. Perhaps out of habit, since female litigants appeared in only approximately ten percent of that court's cases, did the clerk in 1760 mistakenly record that Alice "discontinued his suit." 32 Nevertheless, the mistake clearly illustrates the extent to which, even psychologically, the court system had become masculinized and women's presence there rendered an anomaly.
Not coincidentally, both cases of mistaken gender identity involved widows. As previously mentioned, their position in colonial society was ambiguous, and more than other women widows complicated gender norms and distinctions. Released from the bonds of matrimony, the widow was released from that institution which defined femininity. 105 circumstance, was most frequently immersed in masculine spheres of colonial activity, particularly the courts.
Very often widows appeared in the colony's courts as executrixes or administratrixes of their deceased husbands' estates. The function entailed much responsibility, subjecting women to the rigors of the colonial financial and legal systems. As accountability for the deceased's debts and credits devolved upon the executor or administrator, the role increased the likelihood of confrontation with men. It is unlikely, for instanee, that Sarah Shaw had much familiarity with Abiel Cook while her husband Lemuel was alive.
Before his death, Lemuel contracted numerous debts through promissory notes -no less than twenty-five between 1753 and 1754 -to a multitude of persons. To Abiel, he pledged the "some of one hundred and sixetey five pound olde tennor for a black horse." 33 But when Lemuel passed away, it was Sarah who became liable for Lemuel's debts as administratrix of his estate.
And Cook went after her. Though she maintained that she had nothing left to give him, Cook insisted to the Court of Common Pleas that she "hath other Goods and Chattles of the Estate" which could be used to satisfy his claim. 34 Finding out otherwise, he dropped the suit.
Though administering an estate was rarely financially rewarding and often full of trial and tribulation, widows were generally desirous of the role.
Frequent were the appeals of widows to the town council requesting administration of their husbands' estates. As was required of potential calculate, most historians agree they numbered in the thousands . As many men left behind wives, "[t]he rapid creation of scores of bereaved women who were younger than normal, whose husbands were more likely to have died intestate, and who were left with relatively small estates made it necessary to adopt new means of dealing with widows." 36 Given the swift enlargement of court business occasioned by the war and the "sudden appearance of so many indigent widows, most of them with minor children ," the courts were more liberal in according widows entrustment of their husbands' property, Ricketson argues, than even the husbands themselves would have been. 37 As by the late colonial era the Newport Town Council found its daily business increasingly variegated and complicated by an expanded population base, as more and more of the city's men were exposed to the hazards of the seas, and as the colony found itself embroiled in the French and Indian War (Sydney James estimates that "Rhode Island supplied in the early war years almost a 35 Newport Town Council Meeting Notes , September 6, 1751, Newport Town Council Record Book , Volume 11 (1750Volume 11 ( -1755 . as "an office of trusteeship and stewardship," felt the sting of his loss of faith 38 James, Sydney V ., Colonial Rhode Island -A History, (New York, N.Y.: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1975), 285. 39 The will of Francis Bissell, Newport Town Council Record Book, Volume 11 (1750-1755), pg. 56 . 40 The will of Humphrey Walters, Newport Town Council Record Book, Volume 11 (1750-1755), pg. 55. 108 in her one last time. 41 The women who approached the Council praying they be granted administration of intestate estates, then, may well have felt not only an obligation to administer but also a sense that they were competent enough to be trusted with the estates.
Mary Ward certainly felt Isabel Marchant capable of executing her will, and requested that Marchant do so. As Ward's executrix, Marchant in the spring of 1769 forced payment of a debt owed the estate by William Cranston.
Incidentally, representing Isabel in this case and others was her step-son, the esteemed Newport lawyer Henry Marchant, whom as a youth had been "educated by his step-mother, aided by the liberality of Henry Collins."42 After the death of Isabel's husband Huxford, she and Collins had battled over the terms of his will, with Isabel asserting her right as his wife to her proper dower. "Because the common law denied femes coverts the right to own property, it had a strong moral obligation to provide support during widowhood ... " 43 What may have been at issue in this case, however, was the nature of Isabel's support. As the executor of Huxford's will, Collins argued that since the will's named wife, Sarah, died before Huxford (probably in childbirth or shortly thereafter, since in that 1743 will Huxford refers to her as "now bigg with [child]") her widow's portion did not apply to Isabel and thus should go to Huxford's children. Collins may have expected the children to assume responsibility for Isabel's welfare. Several historians have noted a preference among men of means in the late colonial era, men like Henry Collins, to grant children (particularly sons) greater control over property and leave widows more dependent on good will for support than on dower rights.
Carole Shammas has observed: 41 Dayton, Women Before the Bar,76. 42 Index File, Newport Historical Society .. 43 Salmon, Women and the Law of Property in Early America, 142.
The richer a husband was, the less likely he was to leave his wife more or even the same share as intestacy statutes provided .... They required that whoever receive the homestead, usually an elder son, furnish the widow with food, firewood, and room space .... Widowhood frequently meant becoming a lodger in your own household .44 Isabel was of a different mind. She argued that her husband died intestate, since no will named her as his wife, and as such she was entitled to her dower right of one-third his personal estate. Perhaps observing or hearing of instances in which dependent mothers were mistreated by offspring, Isabel may understandably have been wary of making her welfare contingent on that of others. Indeed, only five years after Isabel's dispute with Collins went to court, the Rhode Island General Assembly passed an enactment entitled "An ACT declaring how far Parents and Children are liable to maintain each other." Clearly, maintenance of mothers was not always achieved willingly.
In 1750 the widow Elizabeth Coggeshall brought suit against her daughter Elizabeth in order to recover her dower. The court awarded her the one-third of the house and stable she requested. N ewporter Sarah Dunbarr was forced to sue the executor of her husband's will, John Usher, to receive her legacy Yet it was not only widowed women who found their way into court over inheritance and other disputes. Then as now, a variety of disputes, frequently involving monetary affairs , could place loved ones at odds, and it was not unknown for in-laws, siblings, and even parents and children to prosecute one another. Colonial America was a litigious society and "[m]ost householders at some point in their lifetime could expect to be threatened by a creditor with a lawsuit, see a cow led away in attachment for an unpaid debt, or be forced themselves to sue a debtor whom they feared was about to leave the country."47 The spinster Mary Rodman prosecuted her younger brother Thomas as the administrator of their father's estate. In his will, Mary's father had stipulated that she was to have of his estate one thousand pounds old tenor "to be paid her by my Executor at the age of Twenty one Years or day of Marriage which shall first Happens ... " Mary insisted that her brother "hath in his Hands sufficient of the Goods and Chattels of the said Clarke Rodman, to satisfy and pay the Plaintiff who is arrived at the age of Twenty one Years, the aforesaid Legacy. " 48 As Mary was single, and would remain so the rest of her life, her father's legacy was of the utmost financial importance to her and she was willing to take her brother to court in order to receive it.
(Interestingly, the shopkeeper Sarah Rumreil took Thomas to court the same session to recover the value of goods she had given his late father on credit but for which she never received payment.) In 1751, Joseph Cooke agreed to make repairs on that part of the Long Wharf owned by his mother Susannah and did so again in 1753. When Joseph sued his mother in 17 55 to collect the money owed for his repairs to her part of the wharf, she countersued to recover the value of two loans her son had long failed to repay. Susannah likely came by her share of the Long Wharf through widowhood and seems to have been living a comfortable existence in the 1750s. A testament to the city's growing prosperity and trade networking, the Long Wharf was symbolic of all that Newport had become in the eighteenth century. Organized as the Long Wharf proprietors, the city's leading merchants sought to facilitate larger vessels entering the harbor, and so had designed a dock that would extend further into Newport Harbor than any previous wharf. "In addition to their practical motives, the Long Wharf proprietors saw their project as part of an effort to give Newport the status of a major seaport. " 49 The wharf, then, was laden with symbolism and attests to the power of economic interests to shape and mold the city's image. As such, it is particularly significant that several women at various times after the wharfs construction owned portions of that prized dock.
When the proprietors of the Long Wharf approached the General Assembly in 1769 requesting a lottery to defray the costs of expanding the wharf an additional 170 feet beyond its current distance, three women -Mrs. Turner, Mrs. Mary Carr, and Mary Rodman -appeared on the petition as proprietors. 50 The presence of these women in such a prominent commercial rank as Long Wharf proprietor problematized gendered notions of trade and business, inverting the p:;iradigm of male economic control and dominance over women.
When the shopkeeper John Miller sought in 1766 to let half of his "large Store on the Long Wharf," he directed prospective lessees to negotiate not with him, but rather to "Enquire of Mary Rodman, at the Point. "5 1 The prosperity of the seaport allowed some women to exert economic influence over Newport's development. Cornelia Hughes Dayton writes of such women that "the court records provide indirect evidence that well-propertied widows in the most expansive decades of New England's preindustrial history played a role similar to that of wealthy widows in commercializing regions of early modern England: they were an important source of both consumer and commercial loans and therefore, it must be acknowledged, played a modest but significant part in the capitalization and commercial development of the countryside. " 52 Newport women not infrequently came into court to recover the value of loans furnished by them to the city's men. AB mentioned, the singlewoman Mary Durfy sued her employer for the recovery of money she had lent to him.
Mary Briggs was probably sorry that in the early 1750s she, like so many 56 Beyond court data, the records indicate that many women in colonial cities worked and lived in close quarters. In A Dependent People, Elaine Forman Crane notes this tendency of Newport women. Moreover, of Philadelphia women in 1775, Carole Shammas has found that women out of wedlock were more likely to board in the homes of other women. In Newport, some women chose to keep school at the homes oflocal widows. It was also not unknown for women like Ann Rathbun and Margaret Mitchell to set up business together. Interestingly, as was standard for men's jointly-run enterprises, when the two women together sued Joshua Bills in 1753 for sundry expenses owed their boardinghouse, their partnership was described by the court as a "company." So adventurous were some women financially that they actively lent the Similarly, Isabel Marchant petitioned the Assembly in 1777 in regard to her loan to the government, ... that some time since she lent the general treasurer a sum of money, to supply the necessities of government upon a very pressing occasion; and that she hath now an opportunity of making use of the same, to her advantage; and thereupon prayed this Assembly, that the general treasurer might be directed to pay her the said sum , by her lent, with the interest due thereon . 58 The two women's requests for the interest due them make clear that they regarded their loans to the treasurer as investments and themselves as investors, as does Marchant's disclosure that she could better use the capital in question "to her advantage" elsewhere. Elaine Forman Crane has discovered the names of several women among the Newport real estate investors oflots located in Woodstock, Connecticut in the 1760s. Such women were certainly not of the same character as the seventeenth century Rhode Island women Lyle Koehler has described as essentially inert in the public economic realm . Rather, they more closely resemble the New York women who fired off a public letter to a local newspaper in 1773 "demanding their 57 Petition of Joseph Jacobs and others before the Rhode Island General Assembly, Januar y 25, 1757. 58 Colonial Records of Rhode Island , 312.
rights as property-owners and citizens. 1159 Their economic leverage and outof-wedlock legal status afforded such women identities unavailable to their wedded sisters. Cornelia Hughes Dayton has observed that in the late colonial era more women were entering the Connecticut courts to pursue their own debts than were pursuing them for others as administratrixes and executrixes. Moreover, when they did enter the court system in this period they overwhelmingly entered as the litigant of initiative, the plaintiff, rather than as the defendant. 60 Likewise, women in this era were approximately twice as apt to enter the Newport Court of Common Pleas as plaintiffs than as defendants. Dayton suggests that such a pattern "indicates that most widows continued to actively avoid coming into court as debtors and that wealthy widows engaged in frequent lending, but not borrowing. 1161 Yet in the stagnating and uncertain economy of the Revolutionary era, both the Rhode Island General Assembly and the colony's court system were saddled with a number of men and women whose fortunes were washed away. proceeds among the creditors on a proportional basis." 62 Peter J. Coleman notes that with his petition granted, Gardner was able to make a "fresh start" and was soon prospering again. Instead of languishing in prison, which "pushed many a debtor into a more or less permanent state of pauperism," Gardner was plugged back into the economy by the act. As the case of the innholder Mary Pinnegar suggests, the 1756 act potentially benefited businesswomen as well as businessmen.
In   Though the present study of Newport's female population does not extend into the post-Revolutionary period, there is evidence to indicate a pre-Revolutionary antecedent to the processes Wilson finds at work in the early Republic. As the seaport hurtled toward revolution, an effort was made, from a myriad of motives, to remind the city's female inhabitants that the preferred station for them was as wife. Somewhat paradoxically, as Newport's men worked to free themselves from their traditional relationship to mother England, they simultaneously sought to edify their women as to the virtues of wedlock and the traditional feminine calling of wifehood.
Tremendous anxiety and instability characterized Newport in the years following the cessation of the French and Indian War. were widowed at a young age due to tragedies at sea, evidence suggests that there were many older widows in the city as well.
In her study of the early nineteenth century Massachusetts seaport community of Newburyport, Susan Grigg has determined that, on the whole, colonial women were much less likely to remarry when widowed than were men and, in fact, age was an important factor in governing rates of female discourse with which to promote their convictions. Of this development, Sheila Skemp writes, "Indeed the Newport Mercury in this period almost supplanted the sermon as a means of moral propaganda. 1148 While much of the newspaper's moralizing on matrimony reflected the republican celebration of the institution, evident within many of the pieces are anxieties over the state of marriage in the seaport as well as implicit, and at times explicit, antipathy toward women existing out of wedlock.
The capacity of certain types of women to arouse anxiety and enmity in men has been well documented by historians. The rise of commerce in England as early as the sixteenth century, for instance, proved a formula for a verbal backlash against women. Women participating in the new economy were accused by some as exhibiting an "unfeminine" assertiveness and autonomy. Of these critics, Carol Karlsen writes that "more than likely it was not so much women's increasing independence in the wake of commercial development that troubled these commentators; rather it was the increasing visibility of women within their traditional but increasingly commercialized occupations," a situation, remember, that also characterized late eighteenth century Newport. 49 The proposed solution to some Englishmen then, to "keep their wives in their houses" as one London manifesto put it, was one that would be later reconfigured by their American descendants in Newport.
Given the republican significance attributed to marriage in the Revolutionary era, it was suggested (after all, marriage was now supposed to be voluntary on the part of the woman) that marital bondage was a far superior state of existence for females than was anything outside the institution. 48  Indeed, what is truly striking about references to women and marriage in the Newport Mercury is the extent to which they incorporated the language of the great political and economic issues of the day, and so substantiate the conclusion that matrimony would come to constitute a crucial locus for Revolutionary ideology. An early expression of this can be found in the Mercury's 1763 reprinting of an anonymous composition entitled "THE MAID'S SOLILOQUY." Originally published in South Carolina, the soliloquy was introduced to the printer of the Mercury by an individual who supposed that "[t]he following Lines ... will not be disagreeable to any of your Readers, except those who have, or intend to have, no Connection with the Fair Sex." Obviously directing this preface to the soliloquy toward men, who were regarded as the "Readers," the writer meant by this language that the piece would not appeal to the few men uninterested in marriage. For the rest of the city's men, however, the composition would indeed be pleasing, as it reinforced the notion that though marriage entailed the loss of autonomy for women they would still voluntarily choose to forfeit their independence in order to marry.
"Marriage, thou pleasing, and yet anxious thought!" the soliloquy proclaims, "Through what variety of hopes and fears, Th' unchanging state in prospect lies before me ... in wedlock, women must obey ... I wed ---my liberty is gone forever ... " 65 By existing outside the institution of marriage Newport's from pointing out a Remedy. 1169 By "restoring them to their primitive and most ancient Dignity and Employment," Newport's women, the author contended, promised to be the means by which to restore prosperity to the troubled seaport.70 The source of the problem, the articles intimated, was twofold: 1) the colony's overwhelming dependence (most evident in Newport) on commercialized shipping and 2) the women's abandonment of that most domestic of occupations, spinning. As Mary Beth Norton reminds us, "no household task was more time-consuming or more symbolic of the female role than spinning." 71 The conviction that such a traditionally feminine responsibility needed to be "restored" suggests a contemporary recognition of the correlation, detailed throughout this work, between changes in the nature of the local economy and the nature of women's livelihoods. It indicates that women were indeed spending more time on other endeavors. As the transformation of the area's economy had effected a shift away from home production, Rhode Islanders were left dangerously dependent on other colonies and other nations for its prosperity. "The People of this Colony are daily taught, from innumerable Lessons or Instances that are but too conspicuous in the numerous Shops, Stores, and Warehouses, how backward and ignorant we are in the manifold Branches of Manufacture necessary or superfluous." 72 The result, it was argued, was the "decaying" condition of the colony, where, as the Town Council had noted some months earlier, shipping interests was only exacerbating an already unpleasant situation.
The articles proposed that the solution to the region's economic woes lay with industrial development, specifically the cultivation of cloth production, as "Without Industry no Country can Flourish. " 74 In fact, it was promised, "Industry will retrieve any Kingdom, Colony, or Family." 75 One need only look to Londonderry, New Hampshire for evidence of its restorative potential.
The Township of Londonderry, in New-Hampshire, is the most industrious of any in New-England, and therefore its Inhabitants are better-cloathed, have better Houses, and are not only free of Debt, but, in general, moderately affluent. The flourishing Circumstances of these honest, frugal People, can be ascribed to no other Cause, but an early, constant Employment of their Men, Women, and Children, but more especially of their women. 76 Indeed, women were the crucial component to the success of such a plan.
Adding an economic dimension to a republican formula which made women the keepers of political virtue, the essayist stressed that "I firmly believe the Fair Sex are more capable than our's of introducing this System ofVirtue." 77 If Rhode Island women placed more emphasis on the virtues of spinning and weaving, they could systematically reduce the colony's dependence on foreign goods and induce a pride in local manufacture bordering on patriotism.
Significantly, there is evidence that some did not take too kindly to the suggestion that women need to return to the loom, for the following week the author was forced to explain to readers that "it is not my Intention to demean or debase [women], but exalt and adore them." 78 Still, his suggestions were popular enough to be given substantial space in the Mercury over the course reprinted in both Boston and Portsmouth, indicating that in both of these seaports women needed to be "restored" to their natural roles as well.
Significantly, while Newport's women later participated in several spinning contests during the Revolution, this particular campaign was never realized. Indeed, its designer would acknowledge that "I am sorry to tell you, that I have not been waked in a Morning by the Music of a Spinning-Wheel. "79 Unlike the later meetings, this scheme necessitated a lasting change, a permanent "Reformation" as the author of the Mercury articles put it, in women's economic behavior. At a time when the city's women were increasingly diversifying their role in the local economy, the program in essence advocated a constriction of economic opportunity. By contrast, temporary spinning meetings possessed completely different connotations. AB Laurel Thatcher Ulrich suggests, these gatherings may well have constituted "an early form of women's religious or charitable activity, a precursor of the nineteenth-century missionary or educational societies that raised money or sewed shirts for traveling ministers or divinity students." 80 Hence were these latter gatherings well attended among women, while the former design was criticized for "the Severity of [the] Plan, when it falls in Course (as in Truth it often may) to address the Ladies .... " 81 Still, though controversial for its frankness, the proposal represents only the most extreme application of gender as a response to the turmoil wracking the once prosperous and harmonious city by the sea.
It is important to bear in mind that such pieces were emerging at the very time order and stability were disintegrating within the city. Mob scenes were growing all too common and 11 [a]s Thomas Vernon noted with disgust, law and order no longer meant very much in Newport. 1182 By no means were females immune from the chaos of the era, and, as the widow Charity Whitford discovered in the autumn of 1775, women as well as men could be victimized in such a highly charged atmosphere.
On the evening of September 15, Charity was the target of mob violence.  11 When her brother arrived to rescue Charity from further harm, he himself was seized by the mob, dragged through the streets, and beaten so severely that "he was faint and sick thro' the great loss of Blood." 85 Newport had truly become, as Elaine Forman Crane puts it, "a town at war with itself." Replete with political and economic connotations, the local discourse on gender also reflected the social dislocation brought on by the turmoil of the era.
Linda Kerber has hypothesized that the celebration of domesticity evident by the early nineteenth century may well have been at least in part a reaction to the strains placed on family unity during the Revolutionary war.
"The war was so disruptive to family life," she writes, "that one begins to wonder whether the cult of domesticity -the ideological celebration of women's domestic roles -was not in large measure a response to the wartime disruption and threat of separation of families. " 86 If so, evidence from Newport suggests that this process may have begun even before the war commenced. Historians have noted the ways in which political loyalties and economic anxieties could splinter individual families as well as the larger communities and have discovered such rifts in numerous Newport households during the Revolutionary era, even in prominent families like the Vernons, Wantons, Coggeshalls, Almys, and Malbones. 87 Remember the various court cases documented in the preceding chapter that pitted relatives against one another. It is not unreasonable, then, to suggest that the celebration of matrimony in the local discourse was developed as a rejoinder in part because familial instability within the seaport renewed interest in and affection for the institution. Homilies praising marriage, such as the one appearing in a 1770 edition of the Mercury entitled "The Bachelor's Reason's for taking a Wife," consequently addressed social as well as political and economic problems in Newport by urging residents to recognize "That honest Wedlock is a glorious thing." 88 Not coincidentally, the composition is laden with correlation between wedlock and social, political, and economic stability and security. Of such a gendered discourse, Carol Cohn writes, "human characteristics are dichotomized, divided into pairs of polar opposites that are supposedly mutually exclusive ... 1189 By implication, then, singlehood is associated in these pieces with the instability being endured by Newporters at the time.
The consistent message of "The Bachelor's Reasons for taking a Wife" is the stability offered a man through marital union. The wife constitutes an anchor by which he can steady his world and "Secure at once himself and heaven to please." The wife is variously referred to in the piece as [emphasis mine] the "constant spouse," that "One solid comfort," and "our eternal wife" as well as a divine blessing that "lasts ... As long as e're a heart can with -and longer too," language that explicitly links her with solidity and security.
Though circumstances might threaten disaster, marriage would endure and calm troubled waters, for "Tho' fortune change, his constant spouse remains, Augments his joys, or mitigates his pains." In passages that speak to the political and economic instability of Newport and the anxiety of its inhabitants on the eve of revolution, the composition assures its reader that though "Vain fortune's favours, never at a stay, Like empty shadows glide and pass away; One solid comfort, our eternal wife, Abundantly supplies us all our life." "Can he That has a wife," the piece asks, "e'er feel adversity?" Absolutely not. An appealing message in a city wracked by conflict, the reason for taking a wife is thus made distinctly clear -to construct a foundation upon which to weather misfortune and overcome adversity. Less than two months before anxieties over the community's fate exploded with the sinking of the Liberty in Newport harbor, readers of the Newport Mercury were presented with another vision of the sheer bliss borne by matrimony in an idyllic composition entitled "The Contented Pair." The piece weaves together issues of political, economic, and social import to create a model of republican life likely very attractive to residents of the battered seaport.
In contrast to the cramped, crowded conditions of the bustling city, "The Contented Pair" is set in the serenity of a country estate in which beauty and fertility prevail. The couple's garden is always "full of fruits and flowers," their "orchard richly stor'd with fruit," "Daisies o'er spread th' enamel'd ground," and in general they find "The fertile Lands and fruitful fields, Enlivening all that nature yields. 1190 Such productivity, of course, contrasted greatly with the predicament of Newport at the time, where fishing boats were frequently inactive "from fear of an Impress on Board his Majesty's ship[s], 11 firewood was perpetually in short supply, and a number of the city's many women were "oblig'd to borrow and some beg. 1191 Surrounded by plenty and "Blest with two lovely girls and boys," the sanguine couple "cheerful pass the time away." The fruits of their marriage have brought the two contentment, for "Tho' some would call our cottage mean ... We neither ask nor wish for more." The message being conveyed here is distinctly republican.
Historians have noted the employment of works such as those of Thomas Gordon and John Trenchard that used classical thought to attack extravagance and greed as the bane of freedom. Gordon Wood insists that "Invoking these classical ideals became the major means by which dissatisfied Britons on both sides of the Atlantic voiced their objections to the luxury, selfishness, and corruption of the monarchical world they lived in. 1192 The fictitious couple of the said to consume more Beef and Butter than a hundred Farmers?," 93 the composition's characters decried "pride, with all her haughty train: Or blaze and splendour of a Court, where Honour's often but a Sport." Given the aggrieved circumstances of their once prosperous and harmonious seaport , it is likely that Newporters were also to understand from the piece that living with less could in fact be a gratifying experience, as readers were instructed that "To wish for more were but a jest, To Providence we leave the rest." The foundation of such contentment, however, rests with the institution of marriage. The whole composition is built around the couple's union and without it the scenario quickly collapses. As both a veiled attack on aristocratic corruption and a discourse on local conditions, "The Contented Pair" illustrates the fusion of anxieties over gender with those over the great political and economic issues of the day in Newport. As if to underline this connection, the publishers of the Newport Mercury chose to publish directly below "The Contented Pair" a discourse entitled "Shall I go to war with my American brethren?" 93 Newport Mercury , August 27, 1764.

Conclusion
The emergence of a commercialized economy in eighteenth century Newport and the implications of that development for its inhabitants profoundly shaped the city's conception of itself and provided the framework for a discourse that could at once embrace radical change yet extol the virtue of women's "primitive and most ancient" conditions. A city so dependent on commercial shipping indeed left its economy dependent on the caprices of others, an uncomfortable position in an era that was quickly coming to condemn dependency as the bane of true freedom. The fragility of Newport's economy in the eighteenth century was made readily apparent when the British government determined to enforce its perceived dominion over the colonial economy. Significantly, however, Newporters encountered during the Revolutionary era threats to individual and community prosperity at the very time both the populace and the local economy experienced a conspicuous feminization, a condition shared by other colonial cities as well.
Historians such as Kenneth Lockridge have noted the impact of such a development on men in the eighteenth century. "[N]ot only marginal and anomalous elites, but also established ones faced with the feminization of marginal and central areas of public life, were prone to misogyny, and to a nervous masculinization of power. 111 Steeped in a culture that emphasized material gain, community leaders attempted various schemes to preserve prosperity and status in Newport amid the growing chaos of the Revolutionary era. Arising from the friction within the city and fashioned by republican ideology was a discourse that linked economic fortune and personal happiness to a particular mode of gender relations, matrimony, and hence implied that the loss of either of the former was somehow attributable to the decline of the latter. Such a formula accorded woman a crucial role in maintaining comfort and stability within the seaport, but only a certain type of woman -a married woman. It was this pattern of pre-Revolutionary thought that would yield such post-Revolutionary concepts as the Republican Wife and/or the Republican Mother. As such, the linkage between economic fortune and the wife/mother evident in the Newport discourse adds an economic dimension to these concepts that has remained relatively unexplored by historians, who have instead focused on the political significance of the Republican Wife and the Republican Mother. And it is important to bear in mind that the political rhetoric of the Revolution was always intimately tied 'to economic concerns, thus necessarily making such political concepts as the Republican Wife and Mother economic concepts as well.
Joan Hoff has noted that "[p]rivatization and patriotic feminization of virtue came at the very moment when postrevolutionary leaders were getting on with the business of carving out political privileges and economic opportunities for themselves and for many succeeding generations of white males." 2 In cities like Newport, however, the paramount significance given women in the conception of virtue through matrimony and child-bearing emerged also at the very time women were increasingly carving out independent existences for themselves through the commercialization of feminine occupations. "Republican motherhood," Jeanne Boydston has discovered, "emphasized women's child-rearing responsibilities almost to the exclusion of the remainer of their work -a vision of domestic labor which was sharply at odds with the reality of their lives." 3 it seems likely , then, that the curious disjuncture between ideology and reality of women's lives was more than a mere oversight. In a place like Newport, it represented a bid to render women economically inert by convincing them of the importance of returning to the alter and the home. "More telling, if more diffuse ," writes Boydston, "was that the ideology of civic republicanism revived a rationale for denying women's significance as economic agents. " 4 Prior to the outbreak of war , the ardent patriot Ezra Stiles of Newport expressed his hope that one day "Free polity, free religion, free prosperity, and matrimony [would] soon populate a fertile country in a good climate. " 5 A revealing comment, Stiles's remark captures in many ways the interconnectedness of politics , religion (Stiles was then a Congregational minister) , the economic order, and gender in the mind of one Newporter . Far from being understood as a distinctly private institution that possessed little relevance for the health of the public realm, matrimony was given equal billing by Stiles in his vision for the colonies. Like so many of his contemporaries, matrimony had a significance for him beyond an expression of love and God's will ; it was constructed as a central pillar of societal progress. Progress , however, was not to be the lot ofNewporters.
As the waves of revolution continued their relentless assault on the shores of Newport , the anxiety over imminent war proved too much for many city residents to handle. After the British warship Rose fired on the city and made clear its orders to "lay the town in Ashes," few maintained any 156 pretensions that war could still be avoided. As the chronicle of all goings-on in the once-proud community, the Newport Mercury reported in October of 1775 that so many inhabitants were quitting Newport that "[t]he carts, chaises, riding chairs and trucks, were so numerous that the streets and roads were almost blocked up with them. " 6 Many who left would never return. The atmosphere of wartime Newport could hardly have been conducive to the maintenance of cohesive personal relationships, either for those who left or for those who stayed, despite the rhetoric to the contrary.
Months later, a more somber Ezra Stiles noted of his city that "more than three quarters of the Inhabitants are removed ... " and after the British military took complete control of the city in December of 1777 that "the town is in Ruins." 7 Newport, Rhode Island, would never regain its former greatness.
If interactions within the late colonial American cities presaged the evolution of life for nineteenth century Americans, as some historians suggest, then we must look long and hard at the tenor of thought and action in colonial urbanity to properly assess continuity in American history as well as change. Many of the trends Newport experienced just prior to the American Revolution -intense commercialization, greater transiency and disparity in wealth, sexual imbalance, more and more widowed and single women, and increased female presence in wage-earning capacities among others -were experienced by other colonial cities as well. And though Newport as a functioning city was largely destroyed by the War for Independence, these trends were carried into the nineteenth century by those cities like Boston and Philadelphia that did survive the war. For instance, Lee Virginia Chambers-Schiller contends that "[t]he expansion of the single population from 1790 to 1865, ... was rooted in the transformations of American society from a production-based domestic economy to a consumerbased household economy," a process most advanced in the cities on the eve of independence. 8 In his investigation of early American inheritance patterns, Daniel Scott Smith discovered that before and after independence, young widows residing in urban areas, like those we have examined in Newport, consistently managed gainful employment. "An astonishing 80 percent of the female household heads (a group overwhelmingly composed of widows) enumerated in the 1810 census in the central sections of Philadelphia were listed with occupations. " 9 Even among those historians who hail the American Revolution as a positive step forward for American women, the conservative nature of republican rhetoric as it pertained to gender is generally acknowledged. The conservatism of such discourse as that found in Newport in the 1760s and 1770s is frequently recognized as the foundation of the nineteenth century "Cult of Domesticity." "The legacy of the American Revolution for women," Mary Beth Norton concedes "was thus amibiguous [as] Republican womanhood eventually became Victorian womanhood ... " 10 Joan Hoff more forcefully insists that "the terms republican wife and republican mother obfuscate how male ideology and the law upon which it functioned confined women to their private sphere." 11 Revolutionary discourse such as that found