[Activity: Dip a Candle]
Happy Women's History Month!I have a new book to celebrate-- Women of Colonial America, 13 Stories of Courage and Survival in the New World (Chicago Review Press). The 13 stories add spice and detail to the larger story of what it meant to be a woman in America's fledgling days-- a Native American woman, an African woman, a European woman. As often as possible I relied on women's own words and on period documents to tell these stories.
Life seemed a blur of never-ending work for women, both free and enslaved and indentured. Courtship, marriage, childbirth, education, building a community, joys and suffering, often basic survival-- all this is part of the story. Lives changed forever for both the new-comers and for the native women who already lived in a well-loved land. It was a world defined entirely by men where recording what a woman said or thought seemed unnecessary.
