Poverty or Happiness

Even with the leniency of today’s open-minded culture between men and women, it is often assumed that the male character is the head breadwinner of the family. The importance of the woman’s role, to the contrary, has been prevalent since the colonial days. Dating back to the 1700s, English naturalist, surveyor, writer, and founder of one of the first settlements in North Carolina: Bath and New, John Lawson played an considerable role in revealing the importance of family in the social and economic life in his journal. According to Lawson, the female role in a given family in North Carolina is not to be overlooked; the role of women often set the foundation for the family and its economic health through the impact they make on maintaining day-to-day household duties, male support and setting the foundation for a stable family life.

The contribution of women in the household not only dictated the degree of happiness for all family members, but also determined whether the family would be successfully self-sufficient or live in poverty (Lawson, 69). In this excerpt, Lawson demonstrates the importance of women both at the start of colonial life into the 18th century once colonial society was settled. Given the rough situations of life during this time and it was only natural for women to marry very young at thirteen or fourteen (Lawson, 69) to start a family, often with little choice of whom they wed. Women worked countless hours doing domestic chores such as gathering wood for fire, providing clean water to brew teas and ciders, weaving and sewing their own textiles to make clothes, and often worked side by side their husbands in their own crafts. Feeding, raising and educating children in both religion and mathematics also fell into the category of a woman’s duty. Despite these rigorous and grueling lifestyles during early colonial America, women in North Carolina not only played a crucial role in the economic health of their own respective families,