Abstract
Dutch women in seventeenth century New Amsterdam/New York were often expected to participate in important economic affairs. This paper considers two such women: Alida Schuyler van Rensselaer Livingston and Maria van Cortlandt van Rensselaer. Each had a significant role as a trader and manager of property. However, they were quite different in that Maria lived most of her adult life as a widow, whereas Alida lived hers as a wife. We are able to examine these different gender roles as these were enacted and embodied through a corpus of wonderful letters written by each woman to a number of family members. I suggest that the expressions of gender (seen mostly in clothing and house furnishings) were quite different for these two women, and that the ability to present a “feminine” aspect depended on the presence of a man.
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.I am extremely grateful to Marie-Lorraine Pipes who provided me with the Van Rensselaer letters.
References
Primary Sources
From the Franklin D. Roosevelt collection of Hudson River and Dutchess County, NY Mss. Livingston family papers in Dutch (LFPD), c. 1680–1726 (A.P.G. Jos van der Linde Trans.).
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Acknowledgements
I have depended in writing this paper on information from a number of colleagues, many of them much more knowledgeable than I about life in the seventeenth century Hudson River Valley. First, I want to thank Diane Dallal and Meta Janowitz for inviting me to participate in this session and persisting in its publication, and Meta has answered many factual questions for me along the way. Marie-Lorraine (Sissie) Pipes has scanned all of Maria’s and Jeremias’s letters and generously provided them to me. Brian Boyd was an important consultant on embodiment, and Paul Huey gave me an extensive bibliography on Fort Crailo. Paul Stansell was also helpful on the question of whether the Van Rensselaers lived at Crailo. Finally, Michael Cooper, Emily Rothschild, and Diana Wall all read drafts of this paper, providing helpful comments. However, any errors of fact or interpretation are, unfortunately, solely mine.
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Rothschild, N.A. (2013). Maria and Alida: Two Dutch Women in the English Hudson Valley. In: Janowitz, M., Dallal, D. (eds) Tales of Gotham, Historical Archaeology, Ethnohistory and Microhistory of New York City. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5272-0_6
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