What Is The Difference Between Colonial Women North And South

Colonial Women, North & South
As the settlements in the North and South began to develop throughout the colonial period (seventeenth century), the experiences of northern women and southern women began to differentiate due to contrasting economic systems, survival imbalances, and dissimilar prominence of religion. Despite the differences between the North and South, some themes remained similar and consistent throughout the colonies, such as gender imbalance and the importance of marital status.
One main factor that differentiated northern women’s lives from southern women’s lives was the significant differences between their northern and southern economic systems. Throughout the seventeenth century, northern settlers began to utilize maritime

As a result, the economy in the North began to flourish and develop, allowing women to establish some degree of a role within the economy and earn wages. In particular, “women exchanged work and produce, employing each other’s skills and easing their own burdens in the process” (Norton 605). Contrastingly, this integration of women’s work in the economy did not exist as prominently in the South where cash crops (tobacco and sugar cane) were the main source of income (DuBois, 88). Due to the amount of manual labor that is necessary to maintain the production of these crops, slavery became the foundation of the Southern economy, and “enslaved Africans were employed in a modern, commercial, globally oriented form of production (Dubois, 90)”. Subsequently, women in the South did not have a large role in the economy compared to women in the North; rather than contributing economically, elite southern women were responsible for the raising of their children and the maintenance of the property. This is

Since women were learning to read religious texts as well as educate their children on the Catholic faith, women in the North had more freedom, status, and “religious expression” compared to their southern counterparts (Norton 600). Furthermore, having an established role in the church was a commonality in the northern colonies that gave women some degree of a higher status. However, in the South, the concept of status heavily relied on the ownership of property, marriage status, and social class rather than having a role in the Catholic church (Lecture). Additionally, southern communities were not founded on religious principles in the ways that northern colonies were established. Therefore, it is evident that the prominence of religion in Puritan society undoubtedly impacted women’s experiences since northern women had an outlet for leadership and expression through their roles in the