Mary Beth Norton - Founding Mothers & Fathers

As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, I studied political theory and intellectual history, and I enrolled in graduate school at Harvard University intending to become an intellectual historian. While at Harvard, though, like many other scholars of my generation, I became enthralled by social history andin particularthe excitement of studying the lives of ordinary Americans in the colonial period. Subsequently, I was drawn to the newer field of womens history and even more recently to its broader incarnation, the study of gender in its many and varied manifestations. Thus the research reported in this book, which has occupied me for more than a decade, combines an earlier interest in political theory and intellectual history with my more recent fascination with social history and especially women and gender.

The first stages of the intellectual odyssey just described owe much to the influence of three men: Frank Grace, who taught me political theory at the University of Michigan; John Higham, who introduced me to intellectual history and directed my undergraduate honors thesis; and Bernard Bailyn, who became my graduate mentor. That I have chosen to dedicate this book solely to the last is not to slight the influence of the other two but rather to highlight the great debt I owe to Bud Bailyn, who over the years has become friend as well as teacher. I only wish that Frank Grace were still alive to see that I have not forgotten those intriguing gentlemen to whom he first systematically introduced meSir Robert Filmer, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke.

This book could never have been written without the assistance of many former Cornell graduate and undergraduate students, who spent innumerable hours immersed in the court records of seventeenth-century America, translating the details of civil and criminal cases into numerical values that could be analyzed by computer. My thanks go to Ruth M. Alexander, Daniel Alonso, Gavin Campbell, Yong Chen, Julia Chu, Joanne Gernstein, Alan Ginet, Eric Mitnick, Celia Naylor, Susan Steigerwald, and especially to Vivian Bruce Conger and Julie Curry, the two who devoted more years to this project than they probably care to recall. As I was in the final stages of preparing the book manuscript, A. Paige Shipman served as my general aide and research assistant, cheerfully tackling every assignment I gave her with good humor and assiduity.

Although this book has taken considerably longer to research and write than I anticipated when I began to work on it in 1982, it would have taken far longer had it not been for the generosity of several funding agencies. I gratefully acknowledge the financial assistance of the American Antiquarian Societys Peterson Fellowship, which supported a month of research in the societys collections in 1984; the Rockefeller Foundation, which awarded me a Gender Roles Fellowship in 198687 and served as my host for a productive month at the Villa Serbelloni International Center for Scholars in April 1992; the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, which designated me a resident fellow in 198889; and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, for a fellowship that supported the writing of this books first draft during the 199394 academic year. In addition, I received ongoing assistance from the Humanities Research Fund, the Return Jonathan Meigs III Fund, and the Mary Donlon Alger endowment at Cornell University.

Although much of this work is based on published materials, archivists at the American Antiquarian Society, the Connecticut State Library, the Massachusetts State Archives, the Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Maryland Hall of Records helped in essential ways. I am grateful to them all, and to the county clerk of Dukes County, Massachusetts, for dealing with a variety of inquiries.

I have learned much from the comments offered by many audiences and individual historians who have listened to or read pieces of this project over the years. In particular, I express my thanks for useful and often spirited criticisms to those who attended my Commonwealth Fund lecture at University College London in February 1987 (especially the commentators, Roger Thompson and Gwenda Morgan); to the other participants in the Harvard conference in honor of Bernard Bailyn in October 1987, especially the ever-generous Lois Green Carr; to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and John M. Murrin, the commentators on my paper at the 1990 Berkshire Conference on Womens History; to Cynthia Herrup, who read some early article-length drafts; and to my colleagues in the Cornell Womens Studies program, who have discussed several parts of this project at different times. Drafts of the book manuscript have been read and commented upon by my graduate students Jackie Hatton and Leslie Horowitz, my former colleague Clive Holmes, and my current colleagues I. V. Hull and Rachel Weil. My editor, Jane N. Garrett, has offered sage advice. The book is definitely the better for all their contributions. Any errors of judgment that remain are mine alone.

Finally, I thank my friends on Marthas Vineyard and in Ithaca (especially the other members of the SPCC) for many years of listening to me recount at too-great length the latest seventeenth-century scandal. They have put up with my eccentric obsession with a world three centuries gone for far too long. I appreciate their forbearance and their support.