First Generations: Women in Colonial America.

Carol Berkin's new book, First Generations: Women in Colonial America, is a significant addition to the literature of early American women's history. This work is particularly welcome in that it synthesizes many of the specialized studies that have appeared in journals and monographs over the past ten to fifteen years. Consequently, Berkin's book takes a more comparative approach than much of the scholarship that has preceded it and provides a more inclusive survey of the period. This approach has allowed the author to emphasize the diversity of women's experiences based on their racial, ethnic, class, or regional identities while at the same time recognizing women's more universal experiences such as childbirth and childrearing. Berkin never essentializes those experiences, however, but is intent on demonstrating how gender identities across space and time are social constructions. While this work is not exhaustive in its coverage, Berkin has managed in one concise volume to narrate the stories of a wide-range of women, including individuals of European, American Indian, and African descent, who lived either in or near the English colonies that in the eighteenth century became parts of the new American republic. This work is thus a likely candidate for classroom use in colonial American or women's history courses, and its lack of footnotes and meager index perhaps reflect this intention.

Berkin, in fact, notes in her introduction that she organized First Generations chronologically to facilitate classroom instruction. Opening with chapters on the experiences of seventeenth-century white women in both the Chesapeake and the New England colonies, Berkin follows with an essay on native American women whose lives were dramatically changed as a result of European immigration. Despite the fact that the title of this last-noted chapter is "The Sisters of Pocahontas," Berkin makes no mention of this most famous of all Indian women in her text, but focuses her discussion on the native peoples of the Northeast woodland region. In subsequent chapters Berkin turns her attention to women settlers in the middle colonies, particularly to Dutch and Quaker women, and to the experiences of African women throughout the English colonies of the eastern seaboard. In these chapters Berkin focuses on two clear themes: 1) while there may have been a certain degree of intra-regional homogeneity, overall there was not one, but rather many experiences of womanhood in colonial America; and 2) that change, however drastic or slight, was an integral part of these women's lives. Berkin is particularly sensitive to religious, ethnic, racial, and class differences, and to the significance of generational change as early English colonies become established settler communities.

The themes of diversity and change are even more prevalent in Berkin's final chapters, which deal specifically with the lives of eighteenth-century women. It was during this century, Berkin argues, that intra-colonial class, ethnic, religious, and racial diversity increased, shattering the gender unity that existed to a great degree among white women in the seventeenth century. This increasing stratification, according to Berkin, occurred because of the maturation of colonial society, particularly the expansion of intercolonial trade and increasing numbers of immigrants, and the creation of a genteel culture. Consequently, during the first half of the eighteenth century female members of elite families found themselves surrounded by a "range of material comforts, luxuries, resources, and the opportunity to deploy them that went far beyond those available to most colonists." This growing access to consumer goods and a genteel lifestyle, however, did not necessarily mean expanded independence for women. In fact, Berkin argues that the social conventions of gentility placed additional burdens on women's time and energy, while at the same time giving them little control over the wealth of their society. Consequently, despite all the differences among women in colonial America that Berkin delineates so carefully, in the end women of all sorts were united in their dependence on men for their economic status.

In her final chapter, on the American Revolution, Berkin develops this theme of commonality more fully as she emphasizes women's shared experience of war and political activism. While Berkin notes that women disagreed about which side to support, she is more interested in their common engagement in war-related activities, particularly their activities as deputy husbands, propagandists, petitioners, spies, camp followers, and as participants in boycotts and crowd actions. It was these endeavors that provided women of the revolutionary generation with an opportunity to reconfigure their gender roles, at least temporarily. Berkin ends her book with a brief epilogue in which she discusses the implications of war for women's lives. In particular, she analyzes the new gender ideology of "republican womanhood," offering a concise and insightful interpretation of this subject that reflects Berkin's constant, and much appreciated, sensitivity to differences of experience.

While one can always criticize an author for shortshrifting certain topics or for emphasizing others, I would prefer to note that in this case Berkin should be praised for including so much information and interpretation into such a slim volume. Indeed, the gaps that are apparent often reflect gaps in the existing scholarship. This work certainly isn't encyclopedic, but it does serve as an excellent introduction to the complicated history of women in colonial America.

Jacquelyn C. Miller Seattle University