ABSTRACT
Over the course of the seventeenth century, the initially shaky foothold of European colonization in North America became a firmly established foundation upon which imperial powers would look to build, the English pushing westward from the Atlantic coast, the French moving across what is now Canada and the central continent, and the Spanish working their way through the South and West. Among the British colonies, cash crop farming was coming to dominate the middle Atlantic and southern regions, laying the groundwork for an agricultural economy built on racialized slave labor. While scholars have made significant efforts in the last fifty years to expand our understanding of early American literatures outside this narrow scope. This chapter focuses largely on circulated and printed texts written in English, but writing was not the primary form of cultural expression for most women in this period.
