| 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

Ebb Tide in New England: Women, Seaports, and Social Change, 1630–1800. By Elaine Forman Crane. (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998. x, 333 pp. Cloth, $50.00, ISBN 1-55553-337-X. Paper, $17.95, ISBN 1-55553-336-1.)

In this wide-ranging and nicely written book, Elaine Forman Crane examines the early history of women in the four New England seaport communities of Boston, Salem, Newport, and Portsmouth. Situating her story in a transatlantic context, she argues that European ideas and customs shaped colonial gender conventions and that women's status steadily deteriorated in urban New England, as in western Europe, in the early modern era. Women, she asserts, "were central to the process of city-building, but were persistently and effectively marginalized in subtle and not-so-subtle ways as that process intensified." More broadly, Crane finds the roots of a persistent American female underclass in the patriarchal laws and social arrangements of the colonial era. . . .

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