Title: Teachinghistory.org
Headings: Labor and Trade in Colonial America
Labor and Trade in Colonial America
Common Misconceptions
Transformation: Raw Material to Practical Substance
Marriage: A Multifaceted Agreement
Native Americans: Encounters and Labor Systems
(Un)triangular Trade

Content: Even when manufactured cloth was available, it was a woman's job to transform that fabric into wearable trousers, skirts, shirts, and coats. A colonial wife might make her own soap—boiled from fat and lye—and she was always responsible for washing clothes and bedding. Herbs grown in a garden or gathered locally constituted the basic materials for healthcare, and healing the sick was an overwhelmingly female task. Food came into the home in its raw form. It was female labor that turned wheat into bread, milk into butter, grain into beer, and meat into bacon. With few options for the long-term preservation of food, the survival of households through long winters depended on women's work in stocking root cellars, drying fruit, and salting meat. All of this labor enabled work outside the household to continue. Colonial bodies owed their function to the women who fed, clothed, washed, and healed them (see Primary Source Letter from Abigail Adams to John Adams [1776]). This labor was arduous; it was often done under duress, or compelled of those who did not have the freedom to refuse.