Goodwives and Witches: Women in Colonial America

Goodwives and Witches: Women in Colonial America (GOOD) is a Humanities course in the CTY program. It is offered at Lancaster and Saratoga Springs. It was previously offered at Carlisle, Baltimore and St. Mary's.

Course Description

[1] From the CTY Course Catalog] (1999):

When people think about the Colonial Era in American history, they generally think about wars and Indians and brave men carving out a new society in the new world. The list of women from the colonial era that people can recall is a short one, and includes few more than Betsy Ross, Abigail Adams, and Pocahontas.

In this class, students will not only gain a greater appreciation of the contributions women made to the enterprise of constructing a new society, but they will also discover new ways to study history. The course begins with an overview of gender history, with close attention paid to the development of patriarchy. From there, students will begin to examine the different roles women played in colonial life: from housekeeper to religious leader to town gossip. They will study the day-to-day lives of "ordinary" women, as described in such primary documents as diaries, court records, and kitchen inventories, as well as the lives of women like Anne Hutchinson whose impact reverberated throughout the Massachusetts Bay Colony and beyond. Events such as the Salem Witch Trials and the American Revolution will be studied from a woman's perspective.

Because women's history is still a growing field, it requires new and sophisticated research techniques. Students will have the opportunity to work with a variety of primary sources, as well as to study how some of the leaders in the field have been able to piece together the untold stories of these early pioneers.