Part I : Race, ehtnicity, and gender --Gender and the longhouse : Iroquois women in a changing culture / Gretchen L. Green -- Women of the New France noblesse / Jan V. Noel -- Princesses, wives, and wenches : White perceptions of Southeastern Indian women in 1770 / Eirlys M. Barker -- Freedom among African women servants and slaves in the seventeenth-century British colonies / Lillian Ashcraft-Eason -- Part II : Religion -- "My dear liberty" : Quaker spinsterhood and female autonomy in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania / Karin A. Wulf -- Women, religion, and freedom in New France / Terrence A. Crowley -- Wise virgins and pious mothers : Spiritual community among Baptist women of the Delaware Valley / Janet More Lindman -- Part III : Work and the colonial economy -- "What Providence has brought them to be" : Widows, work, and the print culture of colonial Charleston -- "To have a sufficient maintenance" : Women and the economics of freedom in frontier Pennsylvania, 1750-1800 / Judith A. Ridner -- Women and economic freedom in the North Carolina backcountry / Johanna Miller Lewis -- Part IV : Marriage and the family -- "Whers gone to she knows not" : Desertion and widowhood in early Pennsylvania / Merril D. Smith -- The marriage metaphor in seventeenth-century Massachusetts / Elizabeth Dale -- "If widow, both housewife and husband may be" : Widows' testamentary freedom in colonial Massachusetts and Maryland / Vivian Bruce Conger -- Part V : Society and the courts -- Women of "No particular home" : Town leaders and female transients in Rhode Island, 1750-1800 / Ruth Wallis Herndon -- The free women of Charles Parish, York County, Virginia, 1630-1740 / Julie Richter -- Mitigating inequality : Women and justice in colonial New York / Deborah A. Rosen.