| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Not All Wives: Women of Colonial Philadelphia. By Karin Wulf. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000. xx, 217 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-8014-3702-4.)

Marital status constitutes the key category of analysis in Karin Wulf's important and provocative study of colonial women in Philadelphia. She chose the port city because, as in most premodern Western cities, single women made up a significant minority of the population. 1

Wulf puts to rest any lingering doubts that everyone passively accepted marriage as an inevitable state. A widely dispersed popular literature challenged marriage's privileged place in society by offering commentary on the hierarchy inherent in marital relationships and by promoting the virtues, primarily liberty, of the single life for women. Although the majority of women married, they did not enter the institution uncritically, and widows who might have elected to remarry seldom did. . . .

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