Life in the 1700's
Everyday life in the United States is very different today than it was in the 1700's. Life was harder and the settlers did not have nearly as many luxuries as society has today. Some aspects of the colonial times that were different then are today include family, employment, and social activities. Life in the United States in the 1700's was filled with hard work, cooperation, and dedication to one’s land and family.
Family life in the 1700's was highly valued and prioritized. Back in those times families were extremely large in size. There was much inter-marriages from generation to generation, Therefore, everyone in a community was most likely related to each other. Because of these extreme connections between communities, visiting fellow family members was very popular. Many of these visits were informal and prolonged. Out of everyone in a family, the women usually corresponded the most with other relatives. The lack of decently designed roads and great distances made the matter of traveling very important in social activities. In addition, the family was looked upon as a unit of production and enterprise. Most families in the 1700's contained usually twenty to thirty people. These large numbers were due to the fact that the families were extended. Every relative lived together, even if they were distant relatives. Families with ten or twelve children were common and those with twenty or twenty-five children were not regarded as abnormal. But, usually not all the children survived. Typically, four in ten children dies before they reached the age of sixteen.
Marriage is another aspect of families in the 1700's that is very different from today. Most girls in the 1700's married extremely early around th...
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...ads. While in Virginia the governor’s mansion brought balls, banquets, and dancing to the communities. But overall, colonial America was considered to be pretty mundane, monotonous, and dull. The main events were marriages, funerals, and church-goings. While daily events consisted of farming and trading. But as the seventeenth century progressed, visiting and socializing, dinner parties, dances, and hunts in the south became more and more popular and brought more happiness to society. In addition wealth was gained through tobacco sales and trade
Bibliography:
- Holliday, Carl. Woman's Life in Colonial Days. Fredrick Unger Publishing Company,
New York: 1964.
- Nash, Gary B. Race, Class, and Politics. University of Illinois Press, Chicago: 1986.
- Nettles, Curtis P. The Roots of American Civilization. Meredith Publishing Company,
New York: 1963.
Because of the way that the New England and Chesapeake regions set up their colonies, they became entirely different societies. One was community based, while the other sought gold and wealth; in one region a poor person had the same opportunities are a wealthy person, while in another place they could not; and one came seeking religious freedom while the other came for gold.
In the 1720’s to the 1820’s there were several events, changes, and processes that occurred in America. The three events I am choosing to analyze are: The Great Awakening, The Revolution, and The Market Economy. Each one of these events had a cultural, social and economic aspect. Each one of these events had different impacts and was manifested in several different ways.
...arate societies by the time of the 1700's. Agriculture, motive, people, religion, and terrain are all factors that affected how they grew apart. However, it is also through the actions of the men and woman who settled in the regions and the choices they made that led to the development of two societies. The Chesapeake region became a society of money-driven, wealthy plantation owners, virtually no middle class workers, and those in extreme poverty. The New England colonies, in contrast, developed into a society of middle class family men who placed extreme emphasis on religion. The two societies in what would become one nation may have had effects on America in the future. The dispute over slavery, the imbalance of workers, and the class differences cause rifts between the two regions over time. Two radically different cultures cannot coincide in harmony forever.
Compared to people in the twenty-first century, with all their modern conveniences and technological advances, the life of any early-American seems difficult. However, the lives of children were among the most arduous. Linda Pollock states in her book Forgotten Children that between 1660 and 1800 families -and society in general- became more affectionate, child-oriented, and permissive of uniqueness and unstructured time (67). Although this may be true, many other sources depict the lives of children as taxing and oppressive at best. Children of the time were either forced to abandon education for their family contributions, or had to balance school with a full day's work ("Education"). Even when they were not in school or doing manual labor, their day-to-day lives were uncomfortable and harsh (Kids). Social status, as is expected, was a key factor in determining how hard a child's life would be (Murray 9). Although many children at the time had it easier than others they were all asked at an early age to take on adult responsibilities. The lives of all children in 1800 were mundane and difficult due to family and societal expectations for labor, schooling, and maturity.
It seems important to understand the similarities of the colonial regions in order to comprehend the implications they had. By comparing the Middle Colonies and New England, and by contrasting the future North to the South, it becomes relatively easy to draw patterns.
Puritans in the colonies had established communal and family hierarchal orders to govern themselves. At the top of the power structure was the village Pastor who over saw all community grievances and disputes, being either spiritual or worldly in nature. In the family structure the power belonged to the father or the male elder of the household. David Goldfield said, women in Puritan New England were held in high regard and given great responsibilities though they were assumed to be legally and economically dependent on the men of the families. Women’s economic contributions were indeed central to the family’s success. In addition to caring for children, cooking, sewing, gardening, and cleaning, most women engaged in household p...
The American colonies new England ,middle and southern colonies were very similar but different.The New England, Middle, and Southern Colonies grew differently over the period on 1619-1760. The three sets of colonies will prove that they were all different. There is hugely different between each other and style to lived. Such as, economics and agriculture.In this essay,
Farming was no longer a way for many people to make a living as the land passed down continued to decrease. According to Katz, Doucet, and Stern, the turn of the Puritan Era consisted of five main changes within the family: the separation of home and work, increased nuclearity of families, decline in number of children, children living with their parents longer, and spouses living together longer even after children leave (qtd. in Coontz 51). From my interview, I found these changes to be true. By the time my great-grandparents had my grandmother, many of these changes were already visible. My great-grandparents were able to own their own hotel in Mississippi. Although they lived in the hotel, they had a clear separation of home life and work life. My grandmother and her brother were rarely asked to help around the hotel. With many employees, my great-grandparents were able to manage the hotel without too much effort. This allowed my great-grandparents to spend a lot of time with their two children. During this time, it was just the four of them, living in their place in the hotel. Unlike, my great-great-great-grandparents who had ten children, the visible decrease in the number of children was seen as it was just my grandmother and her brother. My grandmother, as reflected in Katz, Doucet, and Stern five changes theory, lived at home with her parents longer than most
In the years leading up to the American Revolution, important economic changes took place within the colonies as their economies transitioned from the previous subsistence farming and subsistence living type of economies into true consumer economies. (Devore, Lecture #3.) This shift toward a true consumerism society in the colonies, also known as Anglicizing the colonies, began to make the colonies more uniform and began to bring the colonies together into more of a cohesive unit. (Devore, ...
Hello today i will be talking about what life was really like in the original 13 colonies in the 1750s. More specifically life in the country and the city. There were two main ways of life
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Robson, Ruthann. "The Reader's Companion to U.S. Women's History: Marriage." Houghton Mifflin Study Center. 19 Nov. 2005. http://college.hmco.com/history/readerscomp/women/html/wh_022200_marriage.htm.
Marriages were arranged. Because girls lived such sheltered lives, they usually had never even met the men their fathers agreed for them to marry. Men were mostly in their twenties when they got married, the girls were usually 15.