In The Beginning Essay, Research Paper

In the Beginning

This article talks about the role of many different types of women in early America. It also has the thoughts of men about these women. The area of black slavery is also covered in this article and it touches on who the slaves were before the blacks came. The different women that are covered are the Indians, then the whites, and finally the African Americans.

First, the Indian women were covered. The Englishmen as promiscuous thought of the women living with their tribes. They came to this conclusion because they were allowed to have sexual relations with different men, practice polygamy and they noticed that the children had lighter hair than the Indians. This said that the people the women were having sex with were people from other than their tribe. They mentioned that the Indians had more rules about when, where and who they could have sex with. For example they were not allowed to have sex while they were pregnant, men who were going or coming from war were not allowed to have sex either because they needed to keep their minds on the battle. The English were also surprised at the fact that women did all the work and were allowed to dress nicely. Another freedom that women had in their tribes was that they had ownership of their land, houses and their children.

As time went by the Americans, French, and the Spanish took the Indian women to be their wives. As far as sex between them went, the English were used to paying for sex and the Indian women were used to trading for it so it worked out pretty well for the two parties. At one point in the 1500 s a man named Cartagena captured three-hundred Indians, and two-hundred African Americans and took them to Florida, they figured that this was an attempt to allow the Spanish and the two groups he had captured to become allies.

As the first American colony was settled there were few white women in the population. The ones who were there were usually rich. This was of no fault of their own, they just had rich fathers or they married into money. After some time of being settled in Jamestown the first Christian women was born, the King realized that the men needed women to reproduce and to keep them sane. This way they would own land there forever because the mothers would have children and they would have children and so forth. He sent over about one hundred women and children who got sick when they arrived. The sickness spread and many died and the ones that were left had no food or money.

In the early seventeenth century the Americans decided once again that they needed women to help them with their lives. So they brought over another hundred women. This time they offered crops to anybody that married any of these women. Because of the ratio of men to women many women were engaged to lots of men at one time but the house ruled that unlawful. Problems arose from the crops for women pitch; these problems resulted in a lot of lower class people instead of higher-class people.

Women were being turned into slaves and doing housework that was very invigorating. Their main purpose was to have children for their husbands/masters. They usually bore three to five children.

In the early seventeenth century blacks were introduced to slavery in America. However black slavery did not become prominent until the seventeen hundreds. The typical black person was thought of as property and could be sold, given away, abused, or whatever their master could think of and it didn t matter. Slavery for blacks first came big in Virginia. These slaves were not permitted to have sexual relations with one another and the masters and the masters wives were not supposed to have sexual relations

with their slaves. This, of course still happened happened, which was proven by all of the illegitimate children.

Some of the things in this article was pretty upsetting and it s hard to realize that women and people of different races were treated so unfairly. The nice thing is that these terrible things have ended. If I was alive in those ages, it seems that I would ve liked to be an Indian. This article proves that they had the most rights of all and were a pretty civilized community, and for those times that s a pretty good statement.