– Colonial Women

Do you know the answers to these questions?

America’s Women Chapter 1:

1. What was the difference between English women first coming to America and their Native counterparts?

2. How does Collins portray Pocahontas?

3. What were the experiences of the women who first came to America? Why did they come?

a. Would you have been enticed with those perks?

4. What role did the government have in encouraging settlement?

5. What did you think of indentured servants? Could that be a good life?

6. What types of jobs did colonial women do? Were these “female” jobs?

7. Collins says “virtually all the colonial women wanted to marry” – why? (12)

8. Why would they want to get out of their marriages?

9. Why were there so many widows? What were people dying of? How could widowhood be beneficial?

10. What types of opportunities were there for black women?

11. What did you think of the part on 19 about legislators giving masters “free rein to molest their female slaves?”

12. Why would frontier wives be so nervous about Indians (seen through Bacon’s Rebellion)?

13. When you look at how women were involved in Bacon’s rebellion, does it change your understanding of how women acted at the time?

America’s Women Chapter 2:

14. How does Collins describe the way the women acted in New England?

15. Why were things different in New England than in the Southern Colonies?

16. Was women’s work different in New England? If so how?

17. Why is Anne Hutchinson Important?

18. How did Quakers view women and their place in society? Why would Puritans be threatened by that?

19. How did King Philip’s War (Metacom’s War) affect New England women (Indian and white)?

20. Why was the witch scare only in Mass or Connecticut? Any ideas?

Cultural Literacy