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Question: What was life like in virginia in the 1600's!?
just need some info about what life was like!.Www@QuestionHome@Com


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It was tough!. Colonial kids would use the internet to tray and get other people to do their homework for them, but Indians kept cutting the ethernet cable!. Finally the children were forced to read their school books and do their own work!. The end!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

Life was precarious!. At least 6,000 people came to Virginia between 1607 and 1624, by 1625, only 1,200 surivivors were still there!. Large numbers of people died of malaria!. In 1622, 347 settlers lost their lives in an Indian attack!.

There was a shortage of female settlers, so marriageable women were recruited from England to go out to Virginia as 'tobacco brides!. When they married, their husbands had to repay the company with 120 pounds of good leaf tobacco!. The first shipment of 90 tobacco brides arrived in 1620!. The youngest, Jane Dier, was fifteen or sixteen when she left England!. The oldest was Allice Burges, at twenty-eight, said to be skillful in the art of brewing beer - important in a place where the water was generally undrinkable!.

Some women came to Virginia as indentured servants, bound to service for a certain number of years, and then to be freed at the end of their term (though about a quarter of the indentured servants died before their time was up)!. Indentured servants could be very brutally treated by their masters and mistresses, and it was difficult to get legal protection!. The law most often tended to side with the masters, no matter how harsh they were!.

Almost everyone lived on a farm - the whole point of the colonial dream was to get your own land and grow a profitable cash crop like tobacco!. The farms were almost all isolated, surrounded by endless forests, down winding waterways without any real roads to connect them!. Plantation owners were forced to be away from home for long periods of time on business, and they often depended on their wives, or even daughters, to drain swamps, tend cattle, cultivate the tobacco, and otherwise manage things while they were gone!.

It was virtually impossible to get a divorce, but thanks to the malarial swamps, few people wound up married for life!. The average union ended with the death of one partner within about seven years!. During the first half of the seventeenth century, the mortality rate in the Chesapeake was about 80 percent!. It created patchwork families made up of widows, widowers, and several degrees of stepchildren!. People developed new terms for their father's "now-wife" or their "new husband's children"!. Men who made it through their first year in the Chesapeake could claim the title of "seasoned", but their life expectancy was still only about forty-five years!. The colonies were crowded with widows, many of the managing large estates!. Nearly a third of the children in the Chesapeake region lost at least one parent by the age of nine, and a quarter were completely orphaned by the time they reached eighteen!.

Few women stayed single long in the South: some went through five or six husbands!. (One minister sued a newly married couple for his fee - for performing both the marriage service and the funeral of the bride's first husband a few days earlier)!. Some women built large estates through their serial marriages, moving up in the world with every widowhood!.

Over a quarter of the early male settlers in the Chesakpeake never managed to find a wife, and women were very aware of the advantage the skewed gender ratio gave them!. Men complained bitterly about hard-hearted and evasive women, and Virginia passed a law prohibiting women from promising themselves to more than one suitor In 1624, Eleanor Spragg was sentenced to apologise before her church congreation for the "offence of contracting herself to!.!.!.several men at one time!." In 1687, William Rascow was so insecure about his fiancee, Sarah Harrison, that he got her to sign an oath promising not to marry anybody else!. Oath notwithstanding, Sarah dumped Rascow for James Blair, who she married in a ceremony that did not include the promise to "obey"!. Www@QuestionHome@Com

Life in Early Virginia

In the 1600s three-quarters of all English colonists experienced a term of servitude!. Half of them died before their service was completed!. One quarter remained poor afterward!. The other quarter achieved a degree of prosperity!. Even so, the raw conditions of society before 1690 permitted a degree of social mobility impossible in England!. As a whole, women fared somewhat better than men!. Because of the preponderance of men in early Virginia, wives were highly prized!. A female servant who had completed her service could easily find a husband, perhaps one of those fortunate servants who, having gotten fifty acres upon completing his service, had saved enough money for the legal fees, tools, seed, and livestock needed to become a planter (which then meant farmer)!.
Apart from Pocahontas, women do not appear prominently in histories of early Virginia!. Yet, in 1619, the General Assembly declared that "In a newe plantation it is not knowne whether man or woman be the most necessary!." Women were central to the economy, producing not only necessities of life such as food and clothing, but also adding to the work force by bearing and raising children!. In that age of inequality, however, women were seen as inferior to men in mind and body, and a woman's duty was to find a man to govern her--hence the "obey" in the marriage vows!.

Slaves, servants, and mistresses of typical households worked from dawn to dusk grinding corn, milking cows, butchering meat, brewing beer (water was usually contaminated), growing vegetables, and washing and mending clothes!. Slave women were as likely as men to be sent into the fields!. All this was in addition to bearing, nursing, and raising children, often losing them to early death!. Life was fleeting!. Early Virginia was a land of widows, widowers, and orphans!. Of necessity, men often made their wives their executors and legal guardians of their children, leaving them more than the widow's customary one-third of an estate!. Daughters often were the only heirs!. The ironic result of these otherwise lamentable conditions is that women had more freedom in the primitive Virginia of the 1600s than in the more stable conditions of the 1700s!. As colonists moved inland and acquired immunity to disease, the death rate dropped!. But with increasing stability came a return to the ideal, and the ideal then was patriarchy--the absolute authority of the husband and father!. Thereafter, white women had few rights, free black women fewer, and slave women none!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

During the 1600s, Virginia was a tough place to be in especially Jamestown (1st colony)!. The colonists who arrived suffered from diseases like malaria, unsufficient food, and the search for gold was nowhere to be found to repay proprietary companies that sponsor them to be here!. also, the early people who settled in Virginia were all men, NO womens!. Therefore, households and gathering for food was difficult!. Www@QuestionHome@Com

i dont think anybody on here is that old to tell you!.!.!.but!.!.you can try a libraryWww@QuestionHome@Com