Woman’s Life in Colonial Days

On a ship bound for Virginia, a pregnant woman offered twenty shillings for a rat. Its owner refused—and, the account says, she died.

Carl Holliday looks back to seventeenth-century America, where the promise of a new life met winter, sickness, and hunger. Beginning with the Puritan women of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay, he draws on early accounts to show wives and mothers facing hardships that could strip a household to its last peck of meal. Yet they gathered shellfish, tended the sick, and strengthened one another with faith when help seemed far away. Their courage, Holliday argues, helped shape a society whose story is often told through its men. What did these women endure—and what did their quiet strength make possible?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.