First Generation Women In Colonial America Chapter Summary

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In her book, First Generations Women in Colonial America, Carol Berkin depicts the everyday lives of women living during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Berkin relays accounts of European, Native American, and African women's struggles and achievements within the patriarchal colonies in which women lived and interacted with. Until the first publication of First Generations little was published about the lives of women in the early colonies. This could be explained by a problem that Berkin frequently ran into, as a result of the patriarchal family dynamic women often did not receive a formally educated and subsequently could not write down stories from day to day lives. This caused Berkin to draw conclusions from public accounts and the journals of men during the time period. PUT THESIS HERE! ABOUT HOW YOU FEEL ABOUT THE BOOK. Within each chapter of First Generations, Carol Berkin takes the opportunity to address a different regions, cultures, and race of women. Berkin opens each chapter of her book with a story of a woman, she then uses the women’s story to …show more content…

It begins with the story of Wetamo and her husband Wamsutta the leader of the Wampanoag people. It describes the struggles that the couple faced when the settlers of Plymouth decided that the people's land, in fact, belonged to the Plymouth government. The story follows Wetamo as she became a widow and the new leader of her people. Wetamo spent the rest of her life fighting English settlers, one day it was reported that “ … an Indian squaw in Metapoiset newly dead, cut off her head and it happened to be Weetamoo” . Throughout this chapter Berkin uses Wetamo to explore the early lives of American Indian peoples, marital interactions and the rights of passages that the peoples perform. Along with the relationship that children and mothers

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