Good Wives

Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750

By: Laurel Thatcher Thatcher Ulrich

Narrated by: Susan Ericksen

This enthralling work of scholarship strips away abstractions to reveal the hidden - and not always stoic - face of the "goodwives" of colonial America. In this book, we encounter the awesome burdens - and the considerable power - of a New England housewife's domestic life and witness her occasional forays into the world of men. We see her borrowing from her neighbors, loving her husband, raising - and, all too often, mourning - her children, and even attaining fame as a heroine of frontier conflicts or notoriety as a murderess. Painstakingly researched, lively with scandal and homely detail, Good Wives is history at its best.

©1980, 1982 Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (P)2020 Tantor

Learn to pronounce local place names!

Excellently written, solidly researched. The only reason I didn’t give five stars overall was the truly awful inability of the narrator to pronounce New England place names. I lost count at 12 egregious errors; made the book hard to listen to if you’re actually from around here. How hard would it have been to look those up?

Great research by a great scholar!

I first read this book when I was a graduate student of Professor Ulrich in the early 1990s. Listening to it as an audio book evokes many memories of my time in her classes, her research methods, and her engaging class discussions. I’m grateful it’s now on audible.

My only complaint, though, is that the narrator could easily have taken the time to correctly pronounce place names, such as Piscataqua, Saco, etc. I found it distracting and annoying. I am confident calling a local librarian in NH of ME would have provided correct pronunciation.