Brides from Bridewell: Female Felons Sent to Colonial America

by Walter Hart Blumenthal, Unknown .

An account of American colonial settlement of English female felons in Virginia and Maryland and French female convicts in Louisiana.

139 pages, Hardcover

First published June 15, 1962

Reviews

[Jules · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm giving this a conflicted three stars. Maybe two stars would be better? On the one hand, it has excellent data on the numbers and circumstances/context of women and children forcibly shipped from the British isles to the colonies. If you're interested in British and North American colonies' history relating to women and children, prisons and corrections, and gender/class roles, this has lots of great info and was clearly deeply researched in archival source material. However, to say that this book contains dated, biased, and offensive views is an understatement. It's a valuable informational resource, but it needs to be used with caution and with an understanding of how problematic his analysis is in his attitudes towards poverty, crime, women, gender roles and expectations, etc. If it wasn't for the quality of the source materials and the data and excerpts from those, I wouldn't have been willing to wade through the garbage. But the data and excerpts are good. And lord, is this a low bar, but at least he doesn't try to to create a false equivalency between forcibly transported Europeans and enslaved Africans, unlike many books on this topic.

[Anne · Rating 1 out of 5]

Very boring. Just 100 pages of lists and numbers. No plot line at all. Reads like an academic report, which it likely may have been initially.