Virginia Magazine of History and Biography
Volume 111 / Number 2
ABSTRACT:
"They Will Be Adjudged by Their Drink, What Kinde of Housewives They Are": Gender,
Technology, and Household Cidering in England and the Chesapeake, 1690–1760
- By Sarah Hand Meacham, pp. 117–50
Sarah Hand Meacham's essay, "'They Will Be Adjudged by Their Drinke, What Kinde of Housewives They Are':
Gender, Technology, and Household Cidering in England and the Chesapeake, 1690–1760," draws on traditional
social history sources (court records, account books, promotional literature, newspapers, almanacs, diaries,
prescriptive literature, probate records, and almanacs) as well as sources that have been neglected, such as
cookbooks, to analyze why Chesapeake colonists depended on female-produced cider for their daily drink,
when men and women in England, New England, and the Middle Colonies had shifted to consuming
male-produced beer. The essay reflects the influence of the "Maryland School" by stressing that early
Chesapeake colonists' seeming backwardness in the area of alcoholic beverage production was
actually a rational response to the extraordinary amount of labor required to survive in the region.
In addition to reminding us that traditional social history analysis still has much to teach us, the
essay also highlights one way in which, as James Horn has put it, Chesapeake colonists "adapted
to a New World." By using alcoholic beverage production as a lens, Meacham describes some
of the gendered social conventions of the Chesapeake, discusses how labor was divided, and
reveals a little-known facet of life in the early Chesapeake: that making alcohol was women's
work.
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