Nice Cosas De Us Historia

Growth and Crisis in Colonial Society 1720-1765 (Chapter 4)
Freehold Society of New England
Farm Families
1. “The Well-Ordered Family” advised that social equality not extend to woman. Women learned to lead subordinate roles throughout their lives.
2. In rural New England, woman assumes the role of dutiful helpmeets to their husband. Woman bore and reared children. They married intheir early twenties, and had given birth to six or seven children by their early forties. Large families sapped physical and emotional strength of mothers, yet most Puritan congregations filled by woman.
3. Shrinking of farm sizes led couples to have fewer children. Yet, women’s lives remained tightly bound by legal and cultural restrictions, and by 1760s gender roles were reinstituted by manyevangelical congregations
Farm Property: Inheritance
Farm Property: Inheritance
1. Owning property gave dependent peasants a new social identity. Property ownership and family authority were closely related.
2. Parents who could not provide offspring with land placed them as indentured servants in more prosperous households. (Agricultural ladder)This repaid children for their pastlabor and allowed parent’s to choose their children’s partners.
3. A father’s duty was to provide inheritances for his children. Yeomen families moved inland to find cheap and abundant land in hard life. This would form a creation of whole communities of independent property owners.
The Crisis of Freehold Society
1. New England’s population doubles from each succeeding generation, andfarms had been divided and subdivided. Now parents could only provide one child with adequate inheritance.
2. Traditional system of marriage broke down from young people going against traditions and engaging in premarital sex to win permission to marry. Some chose to have smaller families and used premarital control.
3. Families petitioned for frontier land grants to improve farmproductivity of English crops of wheat and barley (grain to livestock economy).
4. Adoption of “household mode of production” for system of community exchange for swapping labor and goods (store credit and freehold ideal)
The Middle Atlantic
Economic Growth and Social Inequality
1. Ample fertile land attracts migrants to middle colonies in 1770s. Grain exports to Europe and West Indiesfinance rapid settlement.
2. Many refused to settle in Hudson River Valley due to the presence of wealth Dutch and English families whom presided over huge manors. Many Europeans gentry preferred to labor as peasants, and the lords attracted tenants to long leases to sell improvements.
3. Tenant families expected own farmsteads from hard work and selling enough wheat. The cradle scythe tripledthe amount of grain a worker could cut.
4. Expanding trade and influx of poor settlers sharpened social divisions. Pennsylvania landowners took advantage with labor of slaves and poor migrants by dividing small tenancies for profitable leases
5. Merchants and artisans took advantage of ample labor supply to set up and outwork system. The buying of wool and flax from farmers toproperty-less workers to spin into yarn and weave into cloth.
Cultural diversity
1. Middle colonies were a melting pot (ethnically and religiously diverse communities. Migrants preserved their cultural identity by marrying within own ethnic group.
2. In Pennsylvania and New Jersey, Quakers shaped culture by their number and wealth along with social cohesion. Quakers were pacifists whomcondemned slavery
3. Quakers saw “peaceable kingdom”. A third wave of Germans and Swiss landed in Philadelphia as individuals and families for promise or religious freedom. They were propertied farmers and artisans in search of better opportunities.
The Enlightenment and the Great Awakening
The Enlightenment in America
1. Most Christians believed the earth stood at center of universe and God...