Puritan families treated their children differently that those today. Puritan parents had children so that they could help tend to the work, and such children learned the various jobs required of them at a very early age. Puritan parents made education and bible study a high priority, and the literacy rates among those living in New England were unusually high. Gender Roles The Puritans were an industrious people, and virtually everything within the house was made by hand - including clothes.
The men and boys took charge of farming, fixing things around the house, and caring for livestock. The women made soap, cooked, gardened, and took care of the house. Puritan society and politics were dominated by men. Puritan men believed they were the stronger gender. When Puritan settlers weren't at work, they were likely at church or at prayer.
Church was an extremely important part of the daily lives of Puritans, and attending church was mandatory. Read This Issue. Subscribe to Christianity Today and get instant access to past issues of Christian History! Get the best from CT editors, delivered straight to your inbox! Previous Article Theology On Fire.
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Why I left a promising boxing career behind after coming to Christ. It was one thing after another, after another, after another…. Subscribe to CT to continue reading this article from the archives. These first frame houses were small, often with only one room in which all the indoor activities took place.
They ate and worked there. They slept there on mattresses stuffed with straw, corn, or feathers, which were rolled up during the day. Sometimes there was a loft above the room used to store food and other goods. The floor was usually hard-packed earth. The small early windows lacked glass, and were closed with a wooden shutter.
The hearth dominated one end of the room. Chimneys, when present, were built of wood and clay like the rest of the house. The interiors were smoky and dark. And cold in the winter.
At the time of European-Indian contact, Native American tribes in southern New England lived in settled villages and practiced agriculture.
They also hunted. In the spring they burned the undergrowth in the woods, making travel easier and encouraging the growth of game-attracting plants. In some places the hunting lands were so carefully managed that deer could be spotted at a distance of more than a mile. About every ten years, when the soil was depleted, the villagers moved together to a new location.
They lived in extended family groups in domed longhouses in the winter and usually moved into single-family circular wetus also known as wigwams for the spring and summer. The men gathered saplings and stripped off the bark to form the wetu frames. The sapling bark was then split and used to tie the frame together. A small wetu required about forty saplings. The wetu frame was covered with sheets of bark in winter, or with double-sided mats woven of dried reeds in summer.
A smoke hole was built into the center of the roof, situated directly over the fire pit. Sheets of bark were arranged above the smoke hole to shelter it from rain or snow, sheets which could be adjusted as needed. Inside, multi-purpose platforms were built that were used for everything from storage to sitting and sleeping. At night they slept under animal skins that were used for sitting on or wearing during the day.
Woven mats made of bulrushes lined the wetu interiors. A pot of succotash almost always simmered over the central fire. In the early days of the colony, the dwellings of these two groups were remarkably similar in size and comfort.
There was at least one important difference, though. The round design of the wetus increased their energy-efficiency. When colonists chanced to sleep in wetus in cold weather, they remarked on how remarkably warm they were compared to their own English homes.
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