The Analysis Of Martha Ballard And Elizabeth Murray

The analyses of Martha Ballard and Elizabeth Murray’s lives serve as interpretations of the experiences and roles of women in colonial times specifically those in early America. Both Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and Patricia Cleary evaluate evidence that shows women played necessary and important roles even in a society that often restricted their lives to a sphere of domestic activities. The authors’ analyses demonstrate that even in their usual compliance with those social constructs both Elizabeth Murray and Martha Ballard demonstrated ways in which women could act as successful individuals undeterred by the constraints placed upon their sex. Martha Ballard may appear to have lived her life as a more reserved and easy-going woman than Elizabeth

The way in which Elizabeth found her success was through business, and after that she saw being a shopkeeper as the path for women wanting to begin their lives and support themselves. From then on Elizabeth strived to help other women- not only her family members but friends as well- find the same autonomy that she achieved in her time as a shopkeeper. Elizabeth learned the hard way what marriage could do to women especially in her first marriage, “As a married woman, a femme covert, she had no legal identity separate from her spouse, no command over her resources, and no property of her own.”(Cleary 40), while this line is in reference to her sister-in-law Barbara the same applied to Elizabeth when she married her first husband Thomas Campbell. If it wasn’t clear that the spheres of men and women in shopkeeping and mercantilism were different, the point of view of Benjamin Franklin on female shopkeepers emphasized a distaste for women engaging in similar activities to men. “Franklin’s point was that shopkeepers were dishonest traders who sought to take advantage of their clients.”(Cleary 47), however, “While Franklin may have been intimating that women in trade were more precariously positioned economically and therefore more likely to find deceptive practices a necessity, he offered a general depiction of shopkeepers’ problems that applied equally well to women and men.”(Cleary 47). These lines define the general trend of the period, which suggests that women’s inferiority and incapability had been ingrained for generations. The way women were treated goes back to the very beginning when women were seen as sinners and temptresses, the same ideas carried through the years in order to justify a world “more easily controlled” by a single sex. With those beliefs still in place