ld in general have felt more closely tied to England than did their northern sisters, for example, and women living in the Western regions of both the United States and Canada would most likely have felt more closely tied to the New World than to Europe. Differences of opinion would have existed between urban and rural women, between the poor and the wealthy, and between those who still had close family in England and those who did not.
A caveat must also be entered here as to the grouping and women and children together. In at least one significant respect this is problematic, for the personal status laws of the early English (and French) settlements in the New World considered children to belong to their father should the need for division of the family arise. It was also common for children of the 17th and 18th centuries to be apprenticed out at fairly young ages (in either formal or less formal arrangements) thus placing them within the care and concern of a non-natal household . Moreover, women left widowed (or left through other means) with a number of young children that they could not care for would send their children to the homes of friends or relatives in both formal and informal adoption procedures. In all of these ways, the roles and statuses of a mother and her children were not necessarily the same.
Weighed against this is the fact that a mother with her child or children do form what may be seen as a sort of natural family unit and the status of both a wife and mother and her children was in many ways linked together and subordinated to that of the husband and father. Moreover, one may make some generalizations about all household dependents in a given period of history: Throughout the time under consideration here those dependents could have included women, children, household servants and slaves. Each of these types of individuals would have been subject to the will and opinion of other people, and so almost all ...