Plantation

“As in most households Hugh and Mary shared the extra work, drawing on mutual understanding and goodwill. To encourage this, the marital ideal was, according to one puritan writer, a 'continual stream of familiar conversation': honest, amiable chatting throughout the day about everything that needed doing. Mary collected eggs and fruit, weeded the garden and looked after the goats, whose milk they drank and sold." In the autumn she would be expected to help Hugh bring in the maize harvest. Her workload did not abate as her baby quickened inside her, and matrimony began to seem more like service - except with greater responsibility. 

Hugh, too, felt the weight of expectation. With a child on the way, he would have to make a crib, with a hood against draughts, or borrow one from neighbours enjoying a brief respite between births; but that was only the beginning. Reaching the estate of A Householder conferred esteem yet also put Manhood on trial, weighed it against custom. 

He had to balance Patriarchal Dominance with DEPENDANCE on His Wife - as hard to maintain as the temperature in a kiln. 

Order was everything. 

As one New England minister preached that year: 'You husbands, wives, masters, servants : remember if you are not good in your places, you are not good at all.' Falling short of ideals, however, was the more usual outcome.

Marriages were like flawed bricks that exploded during firing, or which looked sturdy but cracked and crumbled under pressure: often, things like a forthcoming harvest or the arrival of a child in a couple's lives. They may not have understood what was happening, what had changed.

It may have felt like some malign intervention, unseen and beyond reason or obvious heavenly design. After all, one reliable proof for Witchcraft, scholars taught, was 'when married people formerly loving very well, hate one another without any evident cause'. It was easier, perhaps, to imagine a curse inflicted from without than some affliction incubating within. Unhappy marriages were devastating to the reputations of men and women alike because in the sight of God and The Community it meant they had FAILED.' ”