Not far from hence, there dwelt,
an honest Man a Weaver,
He had a Wife she was witty and fai•,
but her Wit it did deceive her;
She was a Grain too light,
she calls him Fool and Ninny;
Which made the Man then often say,
I'll go unto Virginny.
...
She lov'd a lusty Lad,
and vow'd she'd love him ever,
At last her Husband found a Trick
these loving Mates to sever:
Yours notes, quoth he, I'll quickly change,
that now so sweetly sing ye; Vnto a Merchant straight he went
that sailed to Virginny:
He coming then unto the Ship,
Of Women you are lacking,
And I have one that I can spare,
and her I will send packing:
The Times are very hard,
I'll sell my Wife for Mony,
She is good Merchandize you know,
Early Jamestown does not hold a position of prestige in any time-travel agency brochure. Disease, starvation, and violent death awaited an extraordinary number of fortune-seekers. Even for men and women who survived, the seasoning period exacted a harsh psychological and physical toll.
Toward the end of 1608, the only English women present at Jamestown --and throughout the rest of the colony named for Elizabeth I’s unsullied bed-- were Mistress Forrest and her servant, Anne Burras. They were shuttled across the Atlantic Ocean by a Captain Newport to a colony on the eve of the infamous Starving Time of 1609-1610. Whether or not Mistress Forrest survived is not known. The fifteen-year-old Anne Burras, however, became Anne Laydon and in 1609 gave birth to an infant daughter. Both survived the brutality of that winter, as did the “honest and industrious” Joan Pierce and her daughter Jane, Thomasine Causey, and Temperance Flowerdew Yeardley. Some were not so fortunate, such as the unknown pregnant woman who was murdered and cannibalized by her husband, according to George Percy’s account (see page 3 of this modernized version, and this article about the archaeological evidence of at least a similar event). I mention them to highlight that it was not only men who suffered through the first decade of what historian Bernard Bailyn termed “the barbarous years.” In the very early years of colonial America, punishment was indiscriminate.
The presence of these earliest women notwithstanding, by 1619, the Virginia Company feared for the future of a permanent English venture in the male-heavy seesaw of New World fortunes and enacted an aggressive recruitment program for, as Company treasurer Edwin Sandys put it, “maids young and uncorrupt to make wifes to the inhabitants and by that meanes to make the men there more setled and lesse moveable who by defect thereof (as is credibly reported) stay there but to gett something and then to returne for England…”
Intermarriage between English men and Indian women did happen (most famously between Pocahontas and John Rolfe), but these instances were the exception rather than the rule. Though anti-miscegenation laws in Virginia were still nearly a century away, these marriages did not happen at anywhere near the rate they did in cases concerning the Spanish or French. Further, when they did happen, men were quite often prone to abandon the English settlement in favor of living amongst the region’s Algonquian-speaking societies. Virginia families could offer a method by which to offset death and desertion through natural population growth. They would also serve as a vehicle by which to translate English cultural norms across the Atlantic.
Between 1620 and 1622, 147 women arrived on the shores of Virginia; the so-called “tobacco brides.” Their passage was paid for largely by the Company itself, under the stipulation that they were to be married to Virginia shareholders and tenant farmers. The exclusive subsidy was meant to mitigate the possibility that servants and lower-class laborers enjoyed opportunistic upward mobility at the expense of the Virginia Company, and a fee of 120 lbs. of tobacco was intended in part to ensure this. But, the maidenly features of these women were in no way to be plundered by the undeserving; on the rare occasion that a woman was not delivered directly to her new husband, she would be quartered with families until a suitor appeared. Sandys was clear in the necessity of “uncorrupt” women to stay the transient English men breaking ground in North America. As Kathleen Brown writes, “Good prospects for finding husbands would attract more of the right sort of woman to migrate, believed the Company, while reports of grueling years of service would dissuade all but the most destitute and least respectable women.” Except in extreme cases, these women were not to be utilized as servant labor.
You also aren’t supposed to use Q-tips to clean your ears.
English women often married outside of their intended class and they rarely stayed inside the bounds of “within” and “without” household governance. English labor in the 17th century, though in a state of flux, was divided along gender lines that only occasionally did not tie women to domestic upkeep that included dairy production, manufacture of textiles, cooking, raising children, cleaning, mending clothing and runny noses…you know the drill. The use of women in farming was most often limited to reaping crops at harvest and a few other specialized tasks.
Despite the best efforts of men like Sandys, adherence to these norms was even more tenuous in Virginia than it was becoming in England. The economic shake-up of the enclosure movement had helped create markets for the domestic output of women in England (as well as rampant poverty), but there was no room for these in the unpitying soil of Jamestown. Pamphlets in England might expound on the importance of domestic women to domestic tranquility, but realities in Virginia positioned “the weaker sexe” right beside their husbands in tobacco fields. Most households contained the barest minimum components to supply the comforts that women would have been expected to produce. There was no cottage industry for cloth manufacture, butter production, brewing, etc. The shortage of women also put the burden back on single men to fend for themselves, though in a few cases they did manage to employ the spare time of married women. Male servants often filled in to complete the domestic tasks left undone by the upper-class single men…a sitcom-level emasculation. A return to more normalized (patriarchal) division of labor would not truly be underway in Virginia until the turn of the 18th century with the rise of slave labor.