Women's Agency in Early Modern Britain and the American Colonies

'This is a remarkable achievement, involving [] a prodigious amount of research in a vast range of printed and unprinted sources, and covering four distinct, if related, worlds: England, Scotland, Ireland and North America....[ODays] is surely the fullest and most comprehensive demonstration of what we might mean by agency that has yet seen the light of day. Patrick Collinson, Emeritus Regius Professor of History, University of Cambridge

From culture to childbirth, money to marriage and wooing to widowhood, Rosemary ODay introduces us to the lives of women in early modern Britain and the North American colonies.

Dispelling the myth that women during this period were weak characters dominated by husbands and fathers, ODay reveals these women to be important agents in the social, economic, religious and cultural lives of their societies who exercised considerable influence on the world around them. Strong women, she argues, were not the exception but the norm at this time and in many, even most, cases their menfolk valued and colluded in their strength.

These women did not exist in a vacuum. In examining the differing lives of married women in the old and new worlds ODay challenges the assumption that women of the North American colonies had more agency than those in Britain. She demonstrates that gender is indeed a social construct and that different societies will construct it differently. However, far from leading us into the realms of abstract speculation, ODay focuses on the real lives of real women, exploring how far their experience was determined by their family roles and to what extent they existed as individuals, expanding their own horizons and those of future women.

Rosemary ODay is Professor of History at the Open University. She has written and published extensively on the religious and social history of early modern Britain and America. Her earlier publications include: The Debate on the English Reformation (1986), The Family and Family Relationships (1994), and The Professions in Early Modern England (2000).