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Married women in particular were not allowed to hold positions of authority, land, or goods (Thompson 149). However, as Demos points out, women of the Plymouth Colony did have more rights than their counterparts in seventeenth-century England (85).
Women in Plymouth Colony had more extensive legal and social rights compared to 17th-century European norms. They were considered equal to men before God from the perspective of the Church. Women were, however, expected to take traditionally feminine roles, such as child-rearing and maintaining the household.
- Journey to the 'New World' The Mayflower in Plymouth Harbor. Among the group traveling on the Mayflower in 1620 were close to 40 members of a radical Puritan faction known as the English Separatist Church.
- Surviving the First Year in Plymouth Colony. For the next few months, many of the settlers stayed on the Mayflower while ferrying back and forth to shore to build their new settlement.
- The First Thanksgiving. The first Thanksgiving. In the Fall of 1621, the Pilgrims famously shared a harvest feast with the Pokanokets; the meal is now considered the basis for the Thanksgiving holiday.
- The Mayflower Compact. The signing of the Mayflower Compact. All the adult males aboard the Mayflower had signed the so-called Mayflower Compact, a document that would become the foundation of Plymouth’s government.
While the court records of Plymouth Colony reveal much about the daily activities of the law-abiding men of the Colony, they tell us little about the women (except for those few women who broke the law). There was, in fact, no officially recognized role for the law-abiding married woman.
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Probably in 1623 she and John were married. They lived in Plymouth until about 1631, when they and others founded the settlement of Duxbury (now in Massachusetts). They had 11 children, but virtually nothing else is known of Priscilla’s later life.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
When the Mayflower left Plymouth, England on September 6, 1620, eighteen of its passengers were adult women. Most we know by name, but William Bradford’s list of Mayflower passengers records a few merely as “his wife,” in relation to their husbands.
Two of their members, William Brewster and William Bradford, would go on to exert a profound influence on American history as leaders of the colony at Plymouth, Massachusetts, the first...
