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Congregationalist minister, thinking him unconverted and a “blind guide,” she sought out equality-minded Quaker and evangelist Baptist churches that welcomed questioning women such as herself and treated “saved” women equally with men. However, by the 1760s, many evangelical congregations had reinstituted men’s dominance over women. “The government of Church and State must be . . . family government” controlled by its “king,” declared the Danbury (Connecticut) Baptist Association. Farm Property: Inheritance By contrast, European men who migrated to the colonies escaped many traditional constraints, including the curse of landlessness. “The hope of having land of their own & becoming independent of Landlords is what chiefly induces people into America,” an official noted in the 1730s. Owning property gave formerly dependent peasants a new social identity. Unlike the adventurers seeking riches in other parts of the Americas, most New England migrants wanted farms that would provide a living for themselves and ample land for their children. In this way, they hoped to secure a competency for their families: the ability to keep their households solvent and independent and to pass that ability on to the next generation. Parents who could not give their offspring land placed these children as indentured servants in more prosperous households. When the indentures ended at age eighteen or twenty-one, propertyless sons faced a decadeslong climb up the agricultural ladder, from laborer to tenant and finally to freeholder. Sons and daughters in well-to-do farm families were luckier: they received a marriage portion when they were in their early twenties. That portion — land, livestock, or farm equipment — repaid them for their past labor and allowed parents to choose their marriage partners. Parents’ security during old age depended on a wise choice of son- or daughter-in-law. Although the young people could refuse an unacceptable match, they did not have the luxury of falling in love with and marrying whomever they pleased. Marriage under eighteenth-century English common law was not a contract between equals. A bride relinquished to her husband the legal ownership of all her property. After his death, she received a dower right, the right to use (though not sell) one-third of the family’s property. On the widow’s death or remarriage, her portion was divided among the children. Thus the widow’s property rights were subordinate to those of the family line, which stretched across the generations. A father’s duty was to provide inheritances for his children so that one day they could “be for themselves.” Men who failed to do so lost status in the community. Some fathers willed the family farm to a single son and provided other children with money, an apprenticeship, or uncleared frontier tracts. Other yeomen moved their families to the frontier, where life was hard but land was cheap and abundant. “The Squire’s House stands on the Bank of the Susquehannah,” traveler Philip Fithian reported from the Pennsylvania backcountry in the early 1760s. “He tells me that he will be able to settle all his sons and his fair Daughter Betsy on the Fat of the Earth.” Freehold Society in Crisis Because of rapid natural increase, New England’s population doubled each generation, from 100,000 in 1700, to nearly 200,000 in 1725, to almost 400,000 in 1750. Farms had been divided and then subdivided, making them so small — 50 acres or less — that parents could provide only one child with an adequate inheritance. In the 1740s, the Reverend Samuel Chandler of Andover, Massachusetts, was “much distressed for land for his children,” seven of them young boys. A decade later, in nearby Concord, about 60 percent of the farmers owned less land than their fathers had. Because parents had less to give their sons and daughters, they had less control over their children’s lives. The traditional system of arranged marriages broke down, as young people engaged in premarital sex and then used the urgency of pregnancy to win permission to marry. Throughout New England, premarital conceptions rose dramatically, from about 10 percent of firstborn children in the 1710s to more than 30 percent in the 1740s. Given another chance, young people “would do the same again,” an Anglican minister observed, “because otherwise they could not obtain their parents’ consent to marry.” Even as New England families changed, they maintained the freeholder ideal. Some parents chose to have smaller families and used birth control to do so: abstention, coitus interruptus, or primitive condoms. Other families petitioned the provincial government forfrontierland grants and hacked new farms out of the forests of central Massachusetts, western Connecticut, and eventually New Hampshire and Vermont. Still others improved their farms’ productivity by replacing the traditional English crops of wheat and barley with high-yielding potatoes