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MODULE 2.3b The Regions of British Colonies 93

often cared for apprentices, journeymen, and laborers as well as their own children. Hus-
bands, meanwhile, labored alongside their subordinates and represented their families’
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interests to the larger community. Both spouses were expected to model godliness and to
encourage prayer and regular church attendance among household members.
The way of life of rural Puritans closely resembled the ways most land-owning, but not
plantation-owning, farming families lived in all the colonies. On farms, where the majority
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of Puritans lived, women and men played crucial if distinct roles. In general, wives and
daughters labored inside the home as well as in the surrounding yard with its kitchen gar-
Strictly for use with its products. NOT FOR REDISTRIBUTION.
den, milk house, chicken coop, dairy, or washhouse. Husbands and sons worked the fields,
kept the livestock, and managed the orchards. Some families in all the colonies supple-
mented their own family labor with that of indentured servants, hired field hands, or, even
in New England, a small number of enslaved Africans or African Americans. Most families
exchanged surplus crops and manufactured goods such as cloth or sausage with neigh-
bors. Some sold at market, creating an economic network of small producers.
Indeed, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, many farm families in
long-settled areas participated in a household mode of production. Men lent each other
tools and draft animals and shared grazing land, while women gathered to spin, sew, and
quilt. Individuals with special skills like midwifery or blacksmithing assisted neighbors,
adding farm produce or credit to the family ledger. One woman’s cheese might be bartered
for another woman’s jam. A family that owned the necessary equipment might brew bar-
ley and malt into beer, while a neighbor with a loom would turn thread into cloth.
The system of exchange, managed largely through barter, allowed individual
households to function even as they became more specialized in what they produced.
Whatever cash was obtained could be used to buy sugar, tea, and other imported goods.
New England colonial mothers combined childbearing and child rearing with a
great deal of other work. While some affluent families could afford wet nurses and nan-
nies, most women fended for themselves or hired temporary help for particular tasks.
Puritan mothers in New England with babies on the hip and children under foot hauled
water, fed chickens, collected eggs, picked vegetables, prepared meals, spun thread, and
manufactured soap and candles. In this way, they shared common experiences with the
rural women of every other British North American colony.

REVIEW

■ How did Puritan society change between 1630 and 1700?
■ What aspects of Puritan society remained the same between 1630 and
1700?

The Middle Colonies

The most important developments of the middle colonies occurred in the context of the
restoration of the English monarchy in 1660, when English kings began granting North
American land to men loyal to the crown. These land grants served both as rewards for
the nobles who had secured the monarchy for Charles II and also as part of a larger
quest to build a North American empire that would produce vast wealth for the monar-
chy and English nation-state. During his reign, Charles II appointed English gentlemen
as the proprietors of a string of colonies stretching from Carolina to New York.
The middle colonies grew in the coastal lands the British seized from the Nether-
lands in the 1660s, sandwiched between Maryland and the Puritan New England

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