Two Worlds.

The historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich has compared women's and men's roles in early British American society to a checked fabric of contrasting threads that could make a whole cloth—or a whole society —only when woven together. Men and women lived portions of their lives in separate, complementary spheres, but their daily experiences overlapped at many significant points. Within the colonial household women were expected to occupy a position of subordination to the authority of their husbands, who were conceived to be the heads of house and family in a system known as patriarchy. The realities of day-to-day living may have resulted in more-mutual cooperation than the ideal suggests. While men dominated the political and legal life of the world outside the household, women were not excluded from larger social life. Only men could vote and hold office, while women were seen as...