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WORK TITLE: The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://historiann.com/about/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://history.colostate.edu/author/amlittle/ * https://www.libarts.colostate.edu/history/wp-content/Cimy_User_Extra_Fields/amlittle/file/CSUofficialCV.pdf *
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:Bryn Mawr College, A.B. (cum laude), 1990; University of Pennsylvania, M.A., 1991, PhD., 1996.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Catholic University of America, visiting lecturer, 1995-96; Wellesley College, visiting assistant professor, 1997; University of Dayton, assistant professor of history, 1997-2001; Colorado State University, Fort Collins, assistant professor, 2001-04, associate professor of history, 2004-. Lecturer at numerous other institutions, including Miami University and Wright State University, both 2007.
AWARDS:John Nicholas Brown Center for the Study of American Civilization fellowship, 1996; Mayers fellowship for Huntington Library, 1998; Monticello College Foundation fellow at Newberry Library, 1998; Mellon Foundation fellow at Huntington Library, 2001-02; Dana and David Dornsife fellow at Huntington Library, 2014-15; also Massachusetts Historical Society fellow.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including Lethal Imagination: Violence and Brutality in American History, edited by Michael Bellesiles, New York University Press (New York, NY), 1999; The Practice of U.S. Women’s History: Narratives, Intersections, and Dialogues, edited by Jay Kleinberg, Eileen Boris, and Vicki Ruiz, Rutgers University Press (New Brunswick, NJ), 2007; Under the Veil: Feminism and Spirituality in Post-Reformation England and Europe, edited by Katharine M. Quinsey, Cambridge Scholar’s Press, 2012; and The Politics of Age in America, edited by Corinne Field and Nicholas L. Syrett, New York University Press, 2015.
Contributor of articles and reviews to academic journals, including Eighteenth Century Studies, History Compass, Journal of Women’s History, Maine History, New England Quarterly, and Pennsylvania History.
SIDELIGHTS
Ann M. Little has taught history at Colorado State University since 2001, but her research is focused far to the east. She studies the history of women, gender, and sexuality in and around colonial New England. Where many historians of competing cultures focus on differences, Little has attracted notice for her focus on similarities.
Abraham in Arms
In Little’s first book, Abraham in Arms: War and Gender in Colonial New England, she explores deeply embedded attitudes about masculinity and gender that permeated the lives of the Anglo-American colonists, Native tribes, and French settlers who inhabited the northeastern borderlands prior to the American Revolution. Historians of that unsettled period have tended to focus on conflict, competition, and war, but Little looks at comparable standards of the patriarchal family, the division of work into gender-defined categories, and the male-dominated areas of governance, politics, diplomacy, religious leadership, and military activity. She points out that each group understood what was important to the other and how to discredit the “enemy” by insult, accusation, or outright warfare. The key issue was the perception of manliness.
Little discusses markers of manliness like clothing, weaponry, and social status. She also comments on comparative attitudes toward captivity and imprisonment, devoting two whole chapters to the experiences of both white and Indian women in captivity, a topic that she would later explore in greater detail. She goes beyond the typical focus on the English experience by examining both the testimony of English women returning from captivity in Native enclaves and documented accounts from French Canada. A commentator in Reference & Research Book News deemed Abraham in Arms both “fascinating and nuanced.” In a review posted at H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online, Erika Gasser credited Little for “weaving French and Native sources into a skillful analysis of how gender shaped the ways early New Englanders understood themselves, their allies, and their enemies.”
The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright
During her research for Abraham in Arms, Little was reminded of the story of Esther Wheelwright. She realized that Esther’s experiences among three colonial-era cultures offered an ideal opportunity for comparison. In The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright her focus was, once again, more on similarities than differences.
Esther and her family were living in a fortified garrison house in Wells, Massachusetts (now part of Maine), in 1703. At the age of seven, the little girl was captured during an Indian raid and, according to Little, spent the rest of her life in one form of confinement or another. The child lived for five years in a Wabanaki community under the name Mali, presumably as more of a daughter than a prisoner, during which time she was converted to Catholicism. At the age of twelve Esther showed up, somewhat mysteriously, in the household of the governor of New France, which would later become part of Canada. She was enrolled in a boarding school for Native children operated by the Ursuline sisters of the province of Quebec. By age seventeen she had been accepted into the order, where she spent the rest of her life as a cloistered nun, dying at the age of eighty-four as Sister Marie-Joseph de L’Enfant-Jesus. Although her membership in the religious order was presumably voluntary, Little nonetheless classifies Esther’s cloistered confinement as a type of captivity.
There are very few documented references to Esther’s life. She never wrote a memoir or kept a journal; her surviving correspondence is limited to a mere four letters. Remaining sources include brief biographical references in convent documents and records of her “career progress” from student to choir nun to skilled embroiderer to mother superior of the provincial order. Little augmented these snippets with deeply researched descriptions of typical eighteenth-century life, with special emphasis on material culture like food, clothing, and daily routines. She wrapped this generic information around the recorded facts to build a likely biography that critics found to be remarkably credible.
This life story, in turn, sheds light on the three cultures in which Esther spent her life, two of which—Wabanaki and French colonial—remain largely outside the domain of conventional histories. Little also offers a perspective that tends to be missing from typical colonial histories: the female point of view. She pointed out to Sara Damiano in an interview posted at the Junto, a group blog hosted by the Society of Early Americanists, that the history profession continues to be largely white and male. She observed: “I think we should look at North America as a place in which women’s leadership, work, and prayer were centrally important.”
By retracing a likely trajectory of Esther’s multicultural life in an era fraught with warfare, Little told Damiano, “I can see the similarities among French Canadian, Native American, and Anglo-American people in this region. … They’re fighting because of their similarities, not their differences. They’re fighting over … the same resources they all need.” John R. Burch reported in Library Journal: “The author deftly details the lives of women,” from English Protestants to Canadian Catholics, including “indentured servants, slaves, Wabanakis, French aristocrats, and nuns.” A reviewer in Publishers Weekly summarized: “Though detail-rich and slow going, … Little’s work offers deep insight into the era.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Library Journal, August 1, 2016, John R. Burch, review of The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright, p. 107.
Publishers Weekly, August 22, 2016, review of The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright, p. 104.
Reference & Research Book News, February, 2007, review of Abraham in Arms: War and Gender in Colonial New England.
ONLINE
Ann M. Miller Website, http://historiann.com (May 31, 2017).
Colorado State University History Department Website, http://history.colostate.edu/ (May 30, 2017), author profile.
H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online, http://www.h-net.org/ (July, 2007), Erika Gasser, review of Abraham in Arms.
Junto, https://earlyamericanists.com/ (November 7, 2016), Sara Damiano, author interview.
Maura Elizabeth Cunningham Website, https://mauracunningham.org (October 3, 2016), review of The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright.
Theresa Kaminski Website, https://theresakaminski.com/ (September 26, 2016), author interview.
1Ann M. LittleDepartment of History,Colorado State UniversityFort Collins, CO 80523ann.little@colostate.eduNAME:Ann M. Little, Associate Professor, History DepartmentADDRESS:1641 Montview Blvd., Greeley CO 80631PHONE:970.301.3971EDUCATION1996Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania1991M.A., University of Pennsylvania1990A.B., cum laude, Bryn Mawr CollegeACADEMIC POSITIONS2004-presentAssociate Professor, History, Colorado State University2001-04Assistant Professor, History, Colorado State University1997-2001Assistant Professor, History, University of DaytonSpring 1997Visiting Assistant Professor, History, Wellesley College1995-96Visiting Lecturer, History, the Catholic University of AmericaCURRENT JOB DESCRIPTIONIf there has been a significant change in your job description during the past 5 years, please note.50 % Teaching 35 % Research/Creative Activity 15 % Service/OutreachTEACHINGList all courses taught at Colorado State University during the last 5 years. Include laboratory sections and independent study courses, if any. If course is team-taught, indicate the actual number of contact hours.YearSemesterCourse No./TitleCr. Hrs.Enrollment2009FallHIST 150: U.S. to 187631002009FallHIST 358: Am. Women to 18003332010SpringHIST 492: CapstoneSeminar3132010SpringHIST 340: Colonial North America3342010 FallHIST 511: Am. History to 1877 3142010FallHIST 358: Am. Women’s Hist.3372011SpringHIST 341: 18thC America3322011SpringHIST 492: Senior Research Sem. 382011FallHIST 501: Historiography 3102011FallHIST 480A4: Hist. Am. Sexuality 364*2012SpringHIST 150: U.S. to 1876394
22012SpringHIST 340: Colonial North America3362012FallHIST 358: Am. Women’s Hist.3282012FallHIST 511: Am. History to 18773152013SpringHIST 341: 18thC America3252013 SpringHIST 492: Senior Research Sem.3182013FallHIST 480a4: Hist. Am. Sexuality340*2013FallHIST 501: Historiography3122014SpringHIST 150: U.S. to 18763602014SpringHIST 340: Colonial North America3352014FallSabbatical*co-taught with Professor Ruth AlexanderPUBLISHED WORKSBooks:Ann M. Little, 2007, Abraham in Arms: War and Gender in Colonial New England, University of Pennsylvania Press, 264 pp.Refereed Journal Articles:Ann M. Little, 2010, “We’re All Cowgirls Now,” Journal of Women’s History 22:4, 220-234.Ann M. Little, 2009, “Gender and Sexuality in the North American Borderlands, 1492-1848,” History Compass7, 1-10.Ann M. Little, 2006, “Cloistered Bodies: Convents in the Anglo-American Imagination in the British Conquest of Canada,” Eighteenth Century Studies39:2,187-200.Ann M. Little, 2002, “The Life of Mother Marie-Joseph de l’Enfant Jesus, or, How a little girl from Wells became a big French politician,” Maine History40:4, 276-308.Ann M. Little, 2001, “‘Shoot that rogue, for he hath an Englishman’s coat on!’ Cultural Cross Dressing on the New England Frontier, 1620-1760,’” New England Quarterly74:2, 238-273.Ann M. Little, 1997, “Men on Top? The farmer, the minister, and marriage in early New England,” Pennsylvania History 64:special supplemental issue, 123-150.Non-refereed Journal Articles:Ann M. Little, 2014, “Historians Respond to MOOCs: Can Teaching be Taken ‘to Scale’?,” AHA Perspectiveson History,February (1,595 words).Ann M. Little, 2013, Contributor to“AHA Roundtable: Historians’ Perspectives on Web Ethics,”Perspectives on History (541 words).Ann M. Little, 2011,“Silence Dogood Rides Again,” Common-place12:1 (4,343 words), http://www.common-place.org/vol-11/no-02/reading/ Ann M. Little, 2011 “It’s My Misfortune and None of Your Own: Thoughts on Being a Cussedly
3Independent Academic Blogger,” OAH Outlook(November, 2011), 1 page.Refereed Chapters in Books:Ann M. Little,2015(forthcoming), “‘Keep me with you, so that I might not be damned:’ Age and Captivity in Colonial Borderlands Warfare, in The Politics of Age in America,eds. Corinne Field and Nicholas L. Syrett (New York University Press)Ann M. Little, 2013, “Indian Captivity and Family Life in Colonial New England,”an abridged excerpt of chapter 3 from Abraham in Arms,in Major Problems in American Women’s History (5thedition, Cengage Learning, edited by Sharon Block, Ruth M. Alexander, and Mary Beth Norton, 2013), 49-57.Ann M. Little, 2010, “Captivity and Conversion: Daughters of New England in French Canada” an abridged excerpt of chapter 4 from Abraham in Arms, in Women’s America: Refocusing the Past,edited by Linda K. Kerber, Cornelia Hughes Dayton, and Jane Sherron DeHart (7thedition, Oxford University Press), 103-116.Trevor Burnard and Ann M. Little,2007,“Where the girls aren't: women as reluctant migrants but rational actors in early America,”In: The Practice of U.S.Women's History: Narratives, Intersections, and Dialogues, eds. Jay Kleinberg, Eileen Boris, and Vicki Ruiz (Rutgers University Press),12-29.Ann M. Little, 2002, “Building Colonies, Defining Families,” In: A Companion to American Women’s History, ed. Nancy Hewitt, (Blackwell), 49-65.Ann M. Little, 2001, “Ideals of Colonial Womanhood,” In: The Encyclopedia of American Cultural and Intellectual History,Mary Kupiec Cayton and Peter W. Williams, editors (Charles Scribner’s Sons), 137-145.Ann M. Little, 1999, “‘Shee would bump his mouldy britch’: Authority, Masculinity, and theHarried Husbands of New Haven Colony, 1638-1670,” In Lethal Imagination: Violence and Brutality in American History, ed. Michael Bellesiles (New York University Press),43-66.Non-refereed Chapters in Books:Ann M. Little, 2012, “Wabanaki and Ursuline Catholicism in Quebec and Acadia: A Comparative Perspective,” Under the Veil: Feminism and Spirituality in Post-Reformation England and Europe,ed. Katharine M. Quinsey (Cambridge Scholar’s Press, 2012), 43-66.Other: book reviewsAnn M. Little,2014,“Goodnight Ladies,” a review essay of Elaine Forman Crane, Witches, Wife Beaters, & Whores: Common Law and Common Folk in Early America(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011); Mary Beth Norton, Separated by their Sex: Women in Public and Private in the Colonial Atlantic World.(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011); and Rosemarie Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash: Women in Politics in the Early American Republic. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), for Journal of Women’s History26:2 (2014), 170-79.
4Ann M. Little, 2014, book review ofJan Noel, Along a River: The First French-Canadian Women (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), for The William and Mary Quarterly 3rdser. 71:2 (2014), 291-93.Ann M. Little, 2011, “Bodies, Geographies, and the Environment,” and “Where the Boys Were, a review essay and comment in a forum on Kathleen Brown’s Foul Bodies: Cleanlinessin Early America, The William and Mary Quarterly 3rdser. 68:4(2011),679-85 and 697-98.Ann M. Little, book review of Francis J. Bremer, John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father(New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), for Journal ofBritish Studies 47: 1(2007),189-90.Ann M. Little, book review of Nancy Shoemaker, A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth Century North America(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), for TheWilliam and Mary Quarterly,3rdser., 62:3 (2005), 540-42.Ann M. Little, 2003,book review of Ann Marie Plane, Colonial Intimacies: Indian Marriage in Early New England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), for Law and History Review21:3 (2003),630-31.Ann M. Little, 2002, book review of Richard Archer, Fissures in the Rock: New England in the seventeenth century(University Press of New England, 2001), for The Journal of American History89:1 (2002),195-96.Ann M. Little, 2002, book review of Lisa Norling, Captain Ahab Had a Wife: New England Women and the Whalefishery, 1720-1870(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), for The Journal of American History88:4 (2001),1507.Ann M. Little, 2000, book review of Carolyn Brekus, Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740-1845(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), for Social History 25:2 (2000), 243-45.Ann M. Little, 1999, book review ofA Shared Experience: Men, Women, and the History of Gender,eds. Laura McCall and Donald Yacavone (New York: New York University Press, 1998), for The William and Mary Quarterly,3rd. ser. 56:3 (1999), 624-28.CONTRACTS & GRANTSFunded Projects as PI2013:“The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright,” Dana andDavid Dornsife long-term fellowship, the Huntington Library, 2014-15, $50,000.2012: Supplemental travel funds for the American Studies Association annual meeting, Professional Development Program, College of Liberal Arts, $1,089.2011: “Esther Wheelwright (1696-1780),” Professional Development Program, College ofLiberal Arts, $1,019.2008“Esther Wheelwright: A Life Across Borders,” William and Mary Quarterly-Early Modern Studies Institute Workshop on “Territorial Crossings: Histories and Historiographies of the Early Americas,” at the Huntington Library, San
5Marino, CA, May 21-22, 2009, all expenses paid.2008“Esther Wheelwright (1696-1780), an eighteenth-century life across borders,”Professional Development Program, College of Liberal Arts, CSU, $1032.74.2007“Graduate student support and development for the U.S. and Canadian History Program Committee Co Chair for the Fourteenth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women (2008),” Colorado State University College of Liberal Arts Professional Development Program, submitted 11/13/06, $1,000 requested; $600 awarded.2007Request for Sabbatical Leave, Colorado State University, submitted 9/11/06, $27,000.2006“Sister in the Wilderness: Esther Wheelwright, Religion, and the Struggle for North America,” Colorado State University College of Liberal Arts Research and Artistry Enhancement Initiative Academic Enhancement Program, $3,500 for a course release in Spring 2007.2006“Sister in the Wilderness: Esther Wheelwright, Religion, and the Struggle for North America,” Faculty Development Fund, Colorado State University College of Liberal Arts, $5,000.2002Course release, “Abraham in Arms: Gender and Power on the New England Frontier, 1620-1760,” Career Enhancement Grant, Colorado State University, $4,000.002002Travel grant to attend “Re-visioning American women's history: women and gender history in America from settlement to the twentieth century,” London, England, Professional Development Program, Colorado State University, $1,200.002001“Abraham in Arms: Gender and Power on the New England Frontier, 1620-1760,” Mellon Foundation Fellowship, The Huntington Library (1 month), 2001-2002, $1,500.002000“Abraham in Arms: Gender and Power on the New England Frontier, 1620-1760,” Society of Colonial Wars of Massachusetts Fellowship (1 month), Massachusetts Historical Society, $1,500.001998“Abraham in Arms: Gender and Power on the New England Frontier, 1620-1720,” Monticello College Foundation Fellowship (6 months), The Newberry Library, $12,5001998“Abraham in Arms: Gender and Power on the New England Frontier, 1620-1720,” Mayers Fellowship, The Huntington Library (3 months), $3,000.001998, 2000, and 2001, “Abraham in Arms: Gender and Power on the New England Frontier, 1620-1760,” Summer Research Seed Grant, University of Dayton, various amounts totaling perhaps $6,000.00 or $7,000.001996Research Fellowship (2 months), John Nicholas Brown Center for the Study of American Civilization, Brown University, $1,200.00Not funded projects as PI2013“The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright,” Massachusetts Historical Society, $50,000 (withdrawn after acceptance of the NEH-Huntington fellowship)2012“Esther Wheelwright,” long-term fellowship, Huntington Library, $50,0002012“Esther Wheelwright,” long-term fellowship, Massachusetts Historical Society, $50,0002010“Esther Wheelwright,” long-term fellowship, Huntington Library, $50,0002010“Esther Wheelwright,” Women’s Studies in Religion Program, Harvard Divinity School,$45,0002009“Esther Wheelwright,” Howard Foundation Fellowship, $25,0002009“Esther Wheelwright,” Women’s Studies in Religion Program, Harvard Divinity School, $45,0002007“The Physical Evidence: Bodies, Gender, and Culture in Early America,” AmericanPhilosophical Society Sabbatical Fellowship, $27,000.
10Conference of the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture, Salt Lake City, UT, June 12. 2009“Esther Wheelwright: A Life Across Borders,” presented at Territorial Crossings: Histories and Historiographies of the Early Americas, A William and Mary Quarterly& USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute Workshopat the Huntington Library, May 21-22.2008“Gender and Sexuality in the North American Borderlands,” a paper delivered at the Front Range Early American History Consortium, Tucson, Arizona, October 11.2008“L’Étrangère: Leadership and Identity Politics in an Eighteenth-Century Ursuline Convent,”a paper presented at the Western Society of French Historians’ annual conference, Quebec City, P.Q., November 7. (I organized this panel.)2008Roundtable, Dual Careers in Academia: Challenges, Experiences, Strategies(Chair), at the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Minneapolis, MN, June 13.2008Panel, Women and Religion in the Atlantic World (Chair), at the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Minneapolis, MN, June 13.2007Invited Lecture: “War and Gender in Colonial America and Today,” Women’s Studies, Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio, March 6.2007Invited Lecture: “War and Gender in Colonial America and Today,” History Department, Miami University, Oxford , Ohio, March 5.2007Invited Lecture: “War and Gender in Colonial America and Today,” Great Conversations lecture series, College of Liberal Arts, Colorado State University, February 20.2006“Sister in the Wilderness: Esther Wheelwright, Religion, and the Struggle for North America,” Front Range Early American Consortium, Salt Lake City, October 14.2006“Masculinity and Empire: New England’s Visions of New France,” presented at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies annual conference, Montreal, P.Q., March 31.2005“Mother Esther and Emily Montague: Names and Bodies in the Northeastern Borderlands,” presented at the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, Claremont, CA, June 5.2005“The Cloistered Body: Life In (and Out) of the Ursuline Convent in Eighteenth-Century Quebec,” presented at the American Historical Association annual conference, Seattle, WA, January 7.2004“Introduction,” Abraham in Arms(book manuscript), presented to the History Department Colloquium, October.2004Comment for a panel, Gender, Religion, and War: Revolutions of Faith in early New England and Virginia, Organization of American Historians annual meeting, Boston, Mass., March 26.2003Invited lecture, “Manhood, Power, and Historical Memory: Anglo-Indian encounters in early New England,” the Mayflower Society, Golden, CO, May.
112002Chair, panel discussion: Native American history and the ‘inevitability’ question, Front Range Early American History Consortium, Boulder, CO, September.2002Program Committee Co-chair, Front Range Early American History Consortium, Boulder, CO.2002“‘Who will be Masters of America The French or the English?’ Manhood and Imperial Warfare, 1730-1760,” presented to the History Department chapter draft reading group, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO.2002“Captivated: Family and Identity on the Eighteenth-century New England Frontier,” presented at the eighth annual conference of the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture, College Park, MD.2002Panel discussion of www.common-place.org, American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies annual meeting, Colorado Springs, CO.2001“Where the girls aren't: women as reluctant migrants but rational actors in early America,” paper co-authored with Trevor Burnard, presented at Re-Visioning American Women’s History, Brunel University, London, England.2001“The Life of Mother Marie-Joseph de L’Enfant Jesus, or, How a little English girl became a big French politician and why nobody remembers it now,” presented at the seventh annual conference of the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture, Glasgow, Scotland.2001“Insolent Squaws and Unreasonable Masters: Captivity and Family Life, 1675-1760,” the OhioState University Early American History Seminar, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH.2000Comment for a panel: “A Polite, Ordered and Masculine Society: The Politics of Gender, Space, and Nation in Transatlantic Perspective,” Social Science History Association, Pittsburgh, PA.2000“Insolent Squaws and Unreasonable Masters: Captivity and Family Life, 1675-1760,” women’s history and literature chapter reading group, Oxford, OH.2000“Unreasonable Masters: Gender and Captivity,” brown bag presentation, the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, MA.2000Invited lecture, “Sisters and Strangers: Captivity, Intermarriage, and Family Politics on the New England Frontier,” Daughters of the War of 1812, Beavercreek, OH.2000“What Are You an Indian oran English-Man? The Contest of Masculinities on the New England Frontier, 1620-1713,” presented to the Michigan Seminar for Colonial Studies, The Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI.1999“Fields of Screams: Contested Masculinities on the New England Frontier, 1620-1760,” presented at the American Society for Ethnohistory Annual Meeting, Ledyard, CT.
121999“‘Shoot that rogue, for he hath an Englishman’s coat on!’ Cultural Cross-Dressing on the Colonial Frontier,” presented at the Fellows Seminar, The Newberry Library, Chicago, IL; also at the History Department Faculty Colloquium, University of Dayton, Dayton, OH.1999Invited lecture, “Sisters and Strangers: Captivity, Intermarriage, and Family Politics on the New England Frontier,” the Daughters of American Colonists Endowed Lecture Series, Wilmington College, Wilmington, OH.1999“Unreasonable Masters: Gender and Captivity, 1675-1760,” brown bag presentation for the D’Arcy McNickle Center for the Study of the American Indian, The Newberry Library, Chicago, IL.1999“His Sister’s Keeper: Brothers, Sisters, and the Household Laboratory of Patriarchy in Early New England,” presented at the Organization of American Historians’ annual meeting, Toronto, Ontario.1999“Shoot that rogue, for...he hath an Englishman’s coat on,” preliminary research presentation, The Newberry Library, Chicago, IL.1998“The Boy who Cried ‘Indian’: a New England Murder Mystery,” presented at the fourth annual conference of the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture, Worcester, MA.1998“‘What are you an Indian or an English Man?’ Gender and Politics on the Anglo-Indian Frontier,” presented at the Newberry Seminar in Early American History, The Newberry Library, Chicago, IL, and atthe Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, MA.1997“What do you mean ‘faction,’ white man? Or, What Tonto knew that James Madison Didn’t,” comment on panel presented at Rhode Island Reconsidered, Brown University, Providence, RI. 1997“A ‘Family’s Good According to Rule’: New England Families, Politics, and Seventeenth-century ‘Republican Fathers,’” presented at the Carleton Conference on the History of the Family, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario.1996“Men on Top? The Farmer, the Minister, and Marriage in Early New England,” presented at the John Nicholas Brown Center for the Study of American Civilization, Brown University, Providence, RI.1996“‘Shee would bump his mouldy britch’: Authority, Masculinity, and the Harried Husbands of NewHaven Colony, 1638-1670,” presented at Pure Richard’s Almanack: A Conference in Honor of Richard S. Dunn, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA.1996“‘A Wel Ordered Commonwealth’: patriarchy and the frontier in New Haven Colony, 1638-1643,” History Department Colloquia, Catholic University, Washington, DC.1995“Men on Top? Domestic Patriarchy in New Haven Colony,” presented at the first annual conference of the Institute for Early American History and Culture, Ann Arbor, MI.1994“The Comfortable Colony: family and community in New Haven Colony, 1650-1665,”
13presented to the Philadelphia Center for Early American Studies, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA.1994commentator for a panel, “The Practice of Religion,” at Possible Pasts: Encounters in Early America, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA.COMMITTEESCollege Committee: Teaching awards committee,College of Liberal Arts, 2011-2014College Tenure and Promotion Committee, fall 2006 (substituting for Thaddeus Sunseri); and full term, 2008-2011PDP Grant Committee, 2004-05Department Committees:Graduate Studies committee, 2012-14Public History search committee, 2011-2012Chair, Undergraduate awards committee, 2011-12Undergraduate Studies Committee, 2001-02, 2006-07Chair, Graduate StudiesCommittee, August 2005-July 2006Chair, Public History and U.S. Early Republic search committee, 2004-05Tenure and Promotion Committee, 2004-presentHistory Department Executive Committee, 2002-2003, 2005-06, 2008-09, 2012-13African American search committee, 2002-03Public History, U.S. History, and military history search committee, 2001-02 STUDENT ADVISING/GRADUATE SUPERVISIONUNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS:# Current Undergraduate Advisees: 30# Previous Undergraduate Advisees: 38GRADUATE STUDENTS:Current Graduate Advisees: 1
14Clarissa Jansen, M.A., continuing enrollmentCurrent Graduate Committee Memberships (excluding those chaired):____# Plan C_# Plan B_# MS/MA# PhDGraduate Committee Memberships (for past 5 years, not including those above)10# Plan B4# MS/MA# PhDGraduate Degrees Completed Under Your Supervision (past 5 years):Jacquelyn Stiverson, 2014, M.A.Matthew Diven, 2009, M.A.Garrett Matthias, 2009, M.A.OTHER ACTIVITIES/ACCOMPLISHMENTSSpecial service to the state/community related to professional expertise (past 5 years)Participated in a discussion of my book, Abraham in Arms, in Prof. Nicholas Syrett’s graduate seminar at the University of Northern Colorado, February 11, 2014Invited talk on feminist blogging for Feminism and Co. lecture series at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, March 28, 2013.“Haudenosaunee/Iroquois Life in the Colonial Period,” a presentation for Becky Buhler’s third grade class, St. Mary Catholic School, Greeley, CO, January 26, 2012.“Pilgrims and Wampanoags,” a presentation for Donna Bornhoft’s second grade class, St. Mary Catholic School, Greeley, CO, November 24, 2010.
Ann M. Little
Contact Information
Phone: 970.491.3112
Email: ann.little@colostate.edu
Twitter: Historiann
Website: http://historiann.com
Office: Clark B-341
Office Hours: Mondays 9:30-11 and by appointment
Role: Faculty
Position: Associate Professor
Concentration:
Early North America; women's and gender history; history of sexuality; religious history; history of the body
Department: History
Biography
Specializing in the history of women, gender, and sexuality along with Professors Alexander Hindmarch-Watson, Jones, and Payne, Ann M. Little is the author of Abraham in Arms: War and Gender in Colonial New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2007), and of The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright (Yale University Press, 2016). Abraham in Arms was recognized with an Honourable Mention for the Albert B. Corey Prize/Prix Corey awarded jointly by the American Historical Association and the Canadian Historical Association in 2008. She has held fellowships at the Newberry Library the Huntington Library and the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Professor Little has also written for Common-place and chapters from Abraham in Arms were excerpted in Women s America: Refocusing the Past edited by Linda K. Kerber Cornelia Hughes Dayton and Jane Sherron DeHart (7th ed. Oxford University Press 2010) and in Major Problems in American Women's History(5th edition Cengage Learning edited by Sharon Block Ruth M. Alexander and Mary Beth Norton 2013). In addition to her purely scholarly work, Little blogs about history feminism and the academic life at Historiann. You can find her on Twitter at @Historiann.
In academic year 2014-15 she was at the Huntington Library in San Marino California as the Dana and David Dornsife Fellow to complete her book, The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright. Esther Wheelwright was an English girl taken captive by the Wabanaki in 1703 who became an Ursuline choir nun in Québec and the order's only foreign-born Mother Superior. Her life offers an opportunity to explore many different early American women s experiences: she crossed between three cultures in childhood and adolescence exchanging the Protestantism of her childhood for Catholicism among Wabanaki Indians and ultimately assumed in old age the powerful position of Mother Superior of the Ursuline convent in Qubec. Wheelwright chose her own captivity and through her life we may explore the possibilities and limitations of gender in three North American cultures. Questions about the nature of captivity and liberty constraint and movement and security and danger pulse throughout the chapters.
Professor Little appeared on the TLC show Who Do You Think You Are on Sunday night, August 30, 2015 with Tom Bergeron to help him understand more about his French Canadian roots. You can also see Professor Little on C--SPAN 3: American History TV delivering a lecture in her American Women's History class on October 22 2012 on the subject of Stays and Colonial-era Clothing. She was also the subject of a recent "Humans of CSU" profile in the Rocky Mountain Collegian.
Education
A.B. Bryn Mawr College; M.A. and Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania
Curriculum Vitae
Download Curriculum Vitae
Courses
HIST 340: Colonial North America
HIST 358: American Women’s History to 1800
About Historiann
Historiann is the not very clever pseudonym of Ann M. Little, the author of Abraham in Arms: War and Gender in Colonial New England (2007) and several scholarly articles and book chapters on early American women’s and gender history. She is an Associate Professor in the History Department at Colorado State University. Congratulatory messages, words of praise, and all other fan mail should go to historiannmail ATthingie gmail DOT com.
Please note: This blog does not accept advertising or do product placement.
An Interview with Ann Little Nov
7
by Sara Damiano
ann-littleToday at The Junto we’re featuring an interview with Ann Little, an Associate Professor of History at Colorado State University, about her new biography, The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright. Little has previously authored Abraham in Arms: War and Gender in Colonial New England. She also writes regularly at her blog, Historiann: History and Sexual Politics, 1492 to Present.
In The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright, Little chronicles the life of a New England girl, Esther Wheelwright, who was captured by the Wabanakis in 1703 when she was seven years old. After living with the Wabenakis for several years, Wheelwright entered an Ursuline convent in Quebec at age twelve. She lived the remainder of her life there, voluntarily becoming a nun and taking on several leadership positions in the convent, including that of Mother Superior, during old age.
JUNTO: You wrote in an interview with Theresa Kaminski that you first encountered Esther Wheelwright when writing your first book, Abraham in Arms. How did your understandings of eighteenth-century New England and Canada change as a result of writing a biography with a woman as its central figure?
ANN LITTLE: I don’t know if my understanding of the world I studied changed so much as I used Esther’s story to make an argument about how <> Although allegedly we all know this already and we’re all enlightened non-sexist historians, I’m continually astonished by the numbers of early American women—even very well-known American women—are nearly invisible in the scholarly literature as subjects in their own right.
Have you ever read Bonnie Smith’s The Gender of History? If you haven’t, you should. She’s very pessimistic that history will ever be truly open to women historians or women as historical subjects because of its disciplinary roots. Our profession still remains overwhelmingly white and largely male. White men will write about nonwhite men, and in fact many white men have made fine careers writing and teaching about nonwhite men. But only a very few men of any race identify themselves as women’s historians, or put women at the center of their scholarship. So if women historians won’t write women’s history, who will? The answer is no one.
JUNTO: As you’ve noted, Esther Wheelwright is a challenging subject for a biography since there are so few sources concerning her early childhood, and only four surviving letters that she authored during her adulthood. Can you describe your research strategy for this book? How did you formulate a research plan?
LITTLE: I’m not so much a planner as a noodler. I just noodle along in a pile of sources—or with a few sources and get interested in one detail, which leads me to another detail, which might lead eventually to a story. Although by and large it was a disadvantage not to have a pile of primary sources about or by Esther, it was also a little bit of a relief because Quebec City is pretty far from Colorado, and I was only able to get away for (at most) two weeks of research at a time. I was able to conduct most of the traditional primary source research in four or five one- or two-week trips, and then figure out most of the rest of it from afar.
The richness of both the historical sources as well as the aural, visual, and material sources available to me via the internet were incredibly important in helping me bring Esther’s world to life, especially her life in Québec and inside the convent. I had never heard the Te Deum sung, so I looked up a YouTube video of it sung by some nuns. I also happened to stumble on a website that has a video of an older Ursuline dressing up a woman in an eighteenth-century habit. These helped her distant world feel a little more knowable to me across space and time.
esther-wheelwright-coverJUNTO: As someone who has spent many hours researching at the Massachusetts Historical Society, I was fascinated to learn that Esther Wheelwright’s self-commissioned portrait is hanging in the MHS seminar room! At what point in your research did you come across the painting, and how did this painting shape your understanding of Wheelwright?
LITTLE: See what I mean? Hiding in plain sight!
I must have learned about the portrait from the amazing books by Emma Lewis Coleman New England Captives Carried to Canada Between 1677 and 1760 During the French and Indian Wars (Portland, ME: The Southworth Press, 1925; reprint, Bowie, MD: Heritage Books, Inc., 1990) and C. Alice Baker, New England Captives Carried to Canada in two volumes, and True Stories of New England Captives Carried to Canada During the Old French and Indian Wars (Greenfield, Mass.: E. A. Hall & Co., 1897; reprint, Bowie, MD: Heritage Books, Inc., 1990). They both feature photos of her portrait. (Incidentally, there’s a terrible copy of the painting in the Ursuline archives in Québec. Dreadful!)
The portrait was interpreted by Anne Bentley of the MHS one day in a fascinating private meeting. We peered over the portrait, which Anne had taken down for our study. It helped me understand more about the artistic accomplishments of the Ursulines, as Anne believes (and I agree) that it must have been painted by a fellow Ursuline. I write in chapters 4 and 6 about the Ursuline dedication to artistic production in all kinds of media—oil and watercolor painting, embroidery, gilding, and objects for the tourist trade that grows up rapidly during the British occupation.
JUNTO: I was impressed by your careful attention to material culture throughout The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelright. You have suggested that this focus on clothing, grooming, food, and material objects originated as a way for you to reconstruct Wheelwright’s life in the absence of other sources. But it seems that material culture is also an essential component of your arguments that “crossing political borders required cultural transformation” (90). How did you realize this was what you wanted to argue? And for those who have not yet read your book, can you describe an episode in Wheelwright’s life where this kind of cultural transformation is particularly apparent?
LITTLE: To answer your last question first: I think Esther’s cultural transformation is apparent in all of her moves—from Wells to Wabanakia, from Wabanakia to Québec, and from secular to religious life. This is how she not only survives, but thrives: she’s a kind of a Zelig, able to transform herself into the best Wabanaki girl, the most studious and devout French Canadian student, the most pious young nun.
Anyone paying attention can probably tell that I’m a lumper, not a splitter. I look for connections and common ground. When I thought about the story I wanted to tell about the northeastern borderlands, I saw in my mind’s eye the satellite that Bernard Bailyn evoked in a Braudellian flourish thirty years ago at the beginning of The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction. From maybe a little closer up—the height of a hot air balloon or a glider—<> Yes, they’re fighting constantly in this century, but <
JUNTO: You contend that Esther Wheelwright was overlooked—even “doomed to obscurity”—by mainstream biographers because she was a woman whose life was marked by “transnationalism as a New England-born Catholic nun in New France” (226). What would you most like history professors to change about their teaching of early North American history in light of your book?
LITTLE: I want them to take women seriously and see them in their own research and teaching.
I’m not optimistic that anything is going to change any time soon. Take a look at Bonnie Smith’s book about the discipline of history systematically erasing women in history and as historians, then take a look at the books that win the Bancroft Prize, the National Book Awards, or really any list of prizewinning books outside of prizes specifically for women’s and gender history. Books with “Empire” in the title have been doing really well (#BecauseEmpire!) Biographies of male political and military leaders are still huge.
I know I chose poorly in writing about Esther Wheelwright. I chose to write about a little girl and a woman in a man’s world using the tools of a male-dominated discipline. I wrote about a Catholic in a language and historiography that privileges Protestant men and sees Catholics as superstitious, backwards, and anti-democratic. I wrote about a victim of warfare and captivity in a culture that privileges winning and winners at all costs. I wrote about someone who crossed borders and so doesn’t fit into any one national history or historiographical tradition. What was I thinking?
I was thinking that what we see as important and who we see as central to the story are choices, not self-evident truths. Nothing is inevitable. Everything is eminently evitable.
JUNTO: You have been blogging at Historiann since 2007, and you thank other academic bloggers in your acknowledgments. How did your experiences as a blogger shape your writing of The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright?
LITTLE: My fellow bloggers—most of them fellow mid-career women and a few men—were kind of an online support group for me. Many of us were struggling with the realization that tenure and promotion wasn’t a “promotion” in the sense that the rest of the world understands. All it means is that we didn’t get fired, so it’s up to us to find ways of making our work interesting.
Truly they are among the nicest, smartest, and most fun people I’ve met in the past decade. I really wish we could be an actual community rather than a virtual one.
JUNTO: What will you be working on next?
LITTLE: I’ve got a project in mind that combines fashion, material culture, and the history of the body in the period just after the American Revolution. Yes, I’m leapfrogging entirely over the American Revolution and moving full speed ahead into the Early Republic.
I don’t know how long I’ll last. Once you get close to 1800, the number of written, visual, and material sources alike just explodes. I don’t know if I can handle this surfeit of primary sources. Once you get comfortable with almost no primary sources, finding gobs and gobs and gigabytes of the stuff just laying around libraries and on the internet almost feels like a cheat.
Then again, I never ask questions that the sources just reveal to me. I always have to make it hard for myself, somehow.
An Interview with Historian Ann Little
POSTED ON SEPTEMBER 26, 2016 BY THERESA
4
I have dubbed today, September 26, as Esther Eve. It marks the night before Yale University Press’s official publication of this marvelous book.
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Its author, Ann Little, is an associate professor of history at Colorado State University. I first became acquainted with her through her popular academic blog, Historiann. When I finally got around to setting up a Twitter account, she was one of the first people I followed. She’s an accomplished historian, and her new book is, simply, captivating. I’m delighted that Ann agreed to answer some questions about her writing process and about Esther Wheelwright.
Q. How did you first encounter Esther Wheelwright and what made you decide she would be a good subject for a biography?
A. I learned about her in the course of researching my first book, Abraham in Arms: War and Gender in Colonial New England, which explored in some chapters the experiences of Anglo-American women and child captives in borderlands warfare. Esther’s life stood out because she became a nun, not a French Canadian wife and mother. That, and the fact that she was the Ursulines’ first and still the only foreign-born mother superior meant that I just had to learn more about her.
Her life was extraordinary because she lived in all three major cultures in the northeastern borderlands: Anglo-American, Native American, and French Canadian. Through her life and times, we can learn about all of the girls and women she lived with.
Q. Did you confront any challenges in researching Wheelwright’s life? How did you deal with them?
A. This was an impossible book to write, because Esther never wrote a captivity narrative describing her experiences. For all that, however, her life was better documented than most middling North American women because she entered a convent, and the convent recorded her progress through the ranks there from student to novice to choir nun. Convent records also recorded a few brief versions of her biography, but I have almost nothing in her own hand about her own life and family ties.
I was told by a senior male scholar that writing this book was “daft”—both my ideas for it and the fact I was spending time pursuing them. I was lectured by a literary agent that my introduction was just out-of-date feminist cant. Feedback like this only made me more determined to write this book and to write it on my own terms. The fact of the matter is that it’s still controversial to insist that women’s lives are important and of historical significance.
Q. What was the most intriguing piece of information you found about Wheelwright? Did it confirm something you already knew or suspected? Did it cause you to see her in a new light?
A. I’m probably most excited about my explorations of eighteenth-century material culture that Esther would have experienced and contributed to as a skilled embroiderer in the Ursuline workshop.
Material culture was critical in helping me to fill in the (major!) gaps. I used the lives of the girls and women around her whose lives were sometimes better documented to make educated guesses as to what Esther was experiencing at any given time. I also thought about her immediate sensory environment: how did the world look, smell, sound, feel, and taste to a seven year-old girl in an Anglo-American or a Wabanaki village? To a twelve year-old student in early Québec? To an elderly nun coping with the British invasion and military occupation of her convent? What did they eat and wear, and even how did girls and women deal with menstruation in these different cultures? I loved immersing myself in these details, and I hope my readers find them at least as interesting as I did.
Q. What was it like to be a nun in the 18th century?
A. The important thing to remember is that nuns in the early modern period were no longer mystics who merely prayed and sought to have ecstatic visions. These nuns, especially those who came to the New World, were nuns with jobs.
Ursuline choir nuns were the higher-status nuns who taught and prayed the hours as well as performed all of the administrative labor or running an order with 45-60 nuns and dozens of boarding students at any given time, in addition to the day school. (The Augustinian nuns in other convents in Québec offered nursing care.) Lay nuns, also called converse sisters, performed the continuous and exhausting domestic labor required to provide all of these girls and women with three meals a day, clean clothing as well as bed and table linens, and tidy work spaces and living quarters.
In short, convents were a means by which French Canadian women could serve God as well as the French imperial state. They couldn’t be priests, and they couldn’t join the Troupes de la Marine or serve as colonial officials like their fathers and brothers did, but they could evangelize within their convent and serve the crown.
Q. Are there any ways in which this book project contributed to your skills as a writer?
A. At the risk of making necessity a virtue, not having many traditional historical sources at my disposal forced me to be creatively speculative. Readers will have to judge whether or not it worked, but I thought Esther’s story was so exciting and important that Americans and Canadians alike need to know about her life and to think about its implications.
We in the U.S. and in Canada have enjoyed the world’s longest and most lightly policed international border for more than 200 years now. We need to remember that it wasn’t always that way, and that our peaceful border is not the norm in the world today.
Q. Is there anything I should have asked but didn’t?
A. You didn’t ask if Esther was really pregnant at age 13 in the Ursuline convent as a student, as some in New England claimed! But you and your readers will just have to read the book to find out—
Intrigued? You can order your own copy of Ann’s book by clicking here. And when you’re finished reading, make sure to leave a review on Amazon and/or any of your favorite online sites. A review, no matter how brief, will boost the profile of this wonderful book.
The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright
Publishers Weekly. 263.34 (Aug. 22, 2016): p104.
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The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright
Ann M. Little. Yale Univ., $40 (304p) ISBN 978-0-300-21821-3
In this meticulously researched biography, Little (Abraham in Arms), associate professor of history at Colorado State University, traces the life's journey of Esther Wheelwright (1696-1780), a New England--born nun who ended up as the mother superior of a French-Canadian Ursuline convent. Wheelwright was captured by Wabanaki Indians at age seven, spending five years immersed in their culture. Little follows Wheelwright's life among the French-Canadian Ursulines, whose order she joined at age 12 and where she rose to prominence and influence, "the only foreign-born superior in the order's nearly 400-year history." Little thoroughly reconstructs the everyday aspects of the era, addressing food, clothing, education, and religion to demonstrate that the English, Wabanaki, and French shared many similarities despite their differences. The book is as much about Wheelwright's environment and multiple cultures as about the woman herself: a "story of whole communities of women, arid how they lived and worked, and suffered and thrived in Early America." It is also "about families that are formed by choice as well as blood," and the things that "bind the generations of North American women, one to another across the centuries and down to the present, and beyond." <
Little, Ann. The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright
John R. Burch
Library Journal. 141.13 (Aug. 1, 2016): p107.
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* Little, Ann. The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright. Yale Univ. Sept. 2016.304p. photos, notes, index. ISBN 9780300218213. $40. HIST
In August 1703, seven-year-old Esther Wheelwright (1696-1780) was captured by Wabanaki warriors during their attack on the New England frontier town of Wells. Adopted into a native family, the author became known as Mali and converted to Catholicism. At age 12, she moved to Quebec where she was enrolled in a school for native children. By 17, she had assumed the name of Sister Marie-Joseph de L'Enfant-Jesus and joined the Ursulines of Quebec as a choir nun. Her service to the order culminated with election to the post of Mother Superior. Using fragmentary resources, Little (history, Colorado State Univ.; Abraham in Arms) has produced a fascinating biography of an extraordinary woman. Notably, <
Burch, John R.
Abraham in arms; war and gender in colonial New England
Reference & Research Book News. 22.1 (Feb. 2007):
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Abraham in arms; war and gender in colonial New England.
Little, Ann M.
U. of Pennsylvania Pr.
2007
262 pages
$45.00
Hardcover
Early American studies
F7
The close attention to attitudes concerning manliness and gender among both the English, whose histories have dominated perceptions of this era, and the Native Americans and French who they fought, provides the reader with a thought-provoking twist to received ideas about colonial New England. Little (history, Colorado State U.) examines sermons, letters, satirical prints, and other first-hand accounts of the wars, skirmishes, and daily encounters of English and non-English. Detailed treatment is devoted to imprisonment on both sides and the impact dressing in English or Indian clothing had on the wearer's self-image. The result is a <
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Ann M. Little. Abraham in Arms: War and Gender in Colonial New England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. xi + 272 pp. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8122-3965-2; $22.50 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8122-1961-6.
Reviewed by Erika Gasser (Department of History, California State University-Sacramento)
Published on H-NewEngland (July, 2007)
Contesting Manhood in Colonial New England
Because so many of the extant sources about contact and conflict among the English, French, and Native Americans in colonial New England were written by the English--particularly by Puritan ministers and propagandists--historians have understandably reproduced some of the English perspective in studies of the period. Ann M. Little's new book, however, goes beyond the familiar, <
From the start, Little shows how gendered assumptions constituted a crucial common ground between the English and northeastern Indians. This claim places her book alongside recent monographs that find similarities where historians once primarily saw differences.[1] The English were outspoken about the superiority of their own views of gender and the family, but the Algonquian tribes with whom they had primary contact in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries shared related standards. Their division of labor differed by task, but both English and Algonquian societies organized families, villages, and communities around gendered ideals. The similarities were even more evident in political diplomacy and military service, over which men had near-total authority in both English and Native cultures. Ultimately, Little argues that the gendered strategies used by the English to discredit their Native opponents (and, at times, their allies) were levied at them in return. And as New England's enemies began to look less like Indians and more like French Catholics, English writers adapted their language to suit the shifting circumstances while maintaining gender as a central component.
For the English and Indians in colonial New England, manhood was defined not only in opposition to women but also to youths, children, and servile creatures. Little demonstrates that both sides insulted their opponents' manhood, and shared enough of a sense of gendered hierarchy to feel the sting of such challenges. Chapters 1 and 2 establish the pertinence of gender in English and Indian conceptions of war, mastery, and defeat. When northeastern Indians captured English colonists they stripped and redressed them as part of a transformation into subjects recognizable within Indian communities--either as victims of ritualized retribution killings or as adopted replacements for fallen tribe members. The English understood enough about the latter ritual's significance to fear its implications for captives and, more broadly, for any of the English in close association with Algonquian and Iroquois peoples. In both Indian and English societies, clothing, armor, and weaponry performed the important cultural work of communicating one's sex, age, status, and identity as English or Native. The kind of "cultural cross-dressing" (pp. 59-60) that took place on frontiers proved threatening to English observers because of what it suggested about the potential blurring of these crucial social markers. Little astutely notes that the adoption of European clothing and blankets had more varied meanings for Indians than the English perceived, and uses a broad range of examples to support her claims about the gendered significance of such incidents on all sides of the conflicts that raged throughout the period.
Little devotes chapters 3 and 4 to English and Indian women whose experiences in captivity have figured less prominently in the historiography, making her contribution all the more likely to influence future scholarship on borderland and imperial wars in New England. The experience of captivity allowed the English to take a closer look at Indian families, and those who returned published accounts marked by considerable ambivalence. Indian men were described both as irrational brutes and hag-ridden fools, while Indian women resembled timid drudges, whores, or harpies. Each of these configurations helped the English to justify their conquest of those they encountered on the northeastern borders. Little manages to extrapolate Indian women's experiences of integrating English captives into their communities, providing a reading that is both imaginative and grounded in evidence. Another innovation is the book's treatment of English women who chose to remain in French Canada after converting and/or marrying French or Indian men. Little's attention to French Canadian accounts supports her argument that political and cultural differences help to explain why the French encouraged significant numbers of female captives to stay in Canada, while English officials did their best to induce male captives to return (p. 156). The English reluctance to grant inheritance portions to returning female captives, coupled with women's greater economic and legal status in French Canada-which Little is careful not to overstate--helped reinforce this trend.
Chapter 5 follows the development of conflicts among English, French, and Indians into the mid-eighteenth century, as the English responded to the shift from an Indian to a French threat by changing traditionally gendered depictions of war into a newly virulent anti-Catholicism. This transition necessitated an emphasis that relied less upon ideas of manly Christian piety and family headship and more upon a self-conception tied to a sense of soldiering on behalf of the Anglo-American empire (p. 167), complete with images of neo-Cromwellian warriors. Despite these changes, Little finds continuity in the gendered nature of English representations of their enemies. Just as English writers had justified assaults on Indians by describing them as naked and impoverished, they later depicted the French as poor, filthy, and dependent on supplies from France. From the Pequot War in 1636 to the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763, Little sees an ongoing commitment to the use of gendered language and practices to justify war, conquest, and imperial competition.
In addition to the strength and breadth of Little's research, Abraham in Arms provides scholars of colonial New England with an insightful analysis of masculine and military legitimacy. Too often, historians replicate the inability of English writers to distinguish between the various Native groups with which they engaged in trade, diplomacy, and combat. Little acknowledges the frequent inability (and unwillingness) on the part of the English to distinguish between Indian tribes, and notes the ways Natives capitalized on such patterns in their strategies of diplomacy and resistance (p. 57). This attention to detail, along with careful analysis of the gendered nature of victory, defeat, and mastery, makes Little's book a particularly useful addition to the literature.
Abraham in Arms is enriched by Little's engagement with the existing literature on gender in colonial New England, and her analysis of men and manhood acknowledges the contingent nature of patriarchal mastery without erasing the power dynamics inherent in men's relations with women and other men. Little's early New England is a space in which no group wholly dominated, and in which real men and women acted alongside the roles assigned them by their sex, age, race, and status. The same density of research that supports the argument may make the book challenging as a teaching tool, but its clear and lively exposition recommends it for teachers who wish to provide students with a gendered analysis of events that have traditionally been viewed along political and religious lines.
Note
[1]. Richard Trexler, Sex and Conquest: Gendered Violence, Political Order, and the European Conquest of the Americas (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995); James D. Drake, King Philip's War: Civil War in New England, 1675-1676 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999); Pauline Turner Strong, Captive Selves, Captivating Others: The Politics and Poetics of Colonial American Captivity Narratives (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999); Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000); Joyce Chaplin, Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500-1676 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001); John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730-1830 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2003); Nancy Shoemaker, A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-Century North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-newengland.
Citation: Erika Gasser. Review of Little, Ann M., Abraham in Arms: War and Gender in Colonial New England. H-NewEngland, H-Net Reviews. July, 2007.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=13375
Bookshelf: The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright
OCTOBER 3, 2016 ~ MAURACUNNINGHAM
little-coverPublishers like it when a book falls into a clearly defined category, especially if that category is a popular one that might rate a table display at a bookstore. A biography of George Washington, obviously, gets shelved with those of other Founding Fathers, and they are all, unquestionably, grouped under the larger heading of “American History.” If you liked that book about George Washington, may we recommend this book about John Adams?
Easy. Clear. No fuzzy boundaries.
I find it pretty impressive, then, when a historian convinces a publisher to take a risk on a book that’s all about fuzzy boundaries. Add in the fact that the subject of said book is a woman—and not only a woman, but a cloistered Catholic nun—and I’m even more impressed. “Biographies of cloistered Catholic nuns” isn’t going to get a table display at your local Barnes & Noble. There may not be enough biographies of cloistered Catholic nuns to fill a table at Barnes & Noble.
If there were, though, I’d hope that they’d all be as thoroughly researched and well written as this one, Colorado State professor Ann Little’s extraordinarily good new book, The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright*, just out from Yale University Press.
Esther Wheelwright was born in Wells, Massachusetts (now part of Maine) in 1696, the fourth of John and Mary Wheelwright’s eventual ten children. The family lived in a garrison house, surrounded by a formidable fence meant to protect the Wheelwrights and their neighbors from Native attacks, which were not uncommon in this frontier community. The garrison’s palisade fence was the most visible boundary circumscribing young Esther’s life, but Little points out many others, from the corset-like stays that encircled her torso to shape it, to the societal expectations of the girl and woman she would become. As Little writes,
But for an accident of fate, [Esther] probably would have grown up to marry, bear children, and die like her sisters as a mostly forgotten woman, her name scratched into a few church and court record books, remembered in our day only by the dissolving letters of a porous gravestone in New England.
In 1703, however, that accident of fate changed the course of Esther’s life: apparently having ventured outside the security of the garrison house, she was captured during a Wabanaki raid on Wells. Esther lived with the Wabanaki for the next five years, most likely treated not as a prisoner but a daughter of the community, and during this time she converted to Catholicism. Through some unclear arrangement, Esther was brought to Québec in 1708, where she initially lived with the governor of New France, the Marquis de Vaudreuil, and was then enrolled in the city’s Ursuline boarding school. This move proved to be Esther’s last: except for one short trip to Montreal in 1711, she lived the remainder of her eighty-four years with the Ursulines—first as a student, then a nun, and eventually Mother Superior.
What was it like for Esther to experience so much upheaval? We can conjecture, but we don’t really know; she didn’t write a captivity narrative or other autobiography, and fragments of her story are scattered among the many different archives that Little consulted. She often doesn’t write about Esther directly, but instead discusses events in other people’s lives that might have been similar to those experienced by Esther. Little admits that the scarcity of source material about Esther herself means she has to engage in a lot of speculation, and she works hard to bolster her suppositions with evidence.
And in some ways those moments of speculation aren’t make-it-or-break-it ones, because this book isn’t just about Esther Wheelwright’s life. It’s a look at the three cultures of the northeast borderlands (Anglo-American, Native American, and French Canadian), and especially their domestic rhythms and material cultures, from the clothes people wore to the foods they consumed. For all the differences among those three cultures, Little is more interested in the similarities, particularly when it comes to gender relations. She emphasizes that the women who surrounded Esther—her family in Wells, the Wabanaki women who raised her, and the other Ursulines—all lived under various forms of captivity, whether physical, legal, or social. At the same time, it’s all relative: “captivity” in one group might have represented liberation from another. For some young women, the rules and restrictions of the cloister might have felt stifling; Little argues, however, that after many years of upheaval and uncertainty, dedication to a lifetime of religious routine might have seemed like a relief to Esther. And within the convent walls, Esther had experiences and opportunities not shared by “free” women outside: she worked as a teacher and needleworker, and rose through the Ursuline administration to occupy various roles before achieving the summit of three terms as Mother Superior.
Everywhere she went, Esther lived in communities of women; while we know so much about the lives of the eighteenth century’s Great White Men, those female communities have been largely overlooked. As exceptional as Esther’s life was, there’s no reason to think that other women in her day didn’t also lead interesting and eventful lives. (Jill Lepore’s Book of Ages* makes a similar argument, also quite successfully.) But again, the lives of those women can be difficult to research, and books about them equally difficult to sell to a publisher.
Esther’s story doesn’t fit cleanly into the narrative of any one nation—not England or the United States, France or Canada. As Little explains, “Each border crossing turns her into a different person who speaks a new language, practices a new religion, wears different clothing, and is embedded within a different family.” Those multiple transformations have made it easy for Esther Wheelwright to fall through history’s metaphorical cracks.
Luckily for Ann Little and Yale University Press, there are plenty of readers out there like me: those who also prefer to dig around in those cracks rather than just accept the biographies of famous men that are presented on the silver platter of a bookstore table display.
* Amazon Associates link. If you make a purchase via this link, I will receive a small commission from Amazon. Thanks for your support! ~Maura