Please join us for the talk “She is a truly worldly woman”: Trading Women of the Colonial Hudson River Valley" by Amy Ransford, PhD candidate at Indiana University, part of the 2019 Peter Gansevoort Ten Eyck Lecture Series, presented by the New Netherland Institute. See more on the series here: https://goo.gl/sN3rRe

Native, Dutch, French, and English women throughout the seventeenth- and eighteenth- century Hudson River Valley played an important role as traders and merchants. They served as supercargoes on their own ships, directed the building and production of sawmills, outfitted soldiers and sailors, brewed and sold beer, and traded in an astonishing array of goods—salmon, furs, rum, milled boards, sugar, French wine, grains, cloth, and porcelains—and purchased and sold enslaved people. These women created and maintained business and kinship networks that extended deep into the continent and across the Atlantic Ocean; in doing so they ensured their own economic stability while often using legal zones of empowerment to secure that of their children as well. This talk will animate the lives of a number of women such as Margaret Hardenbroeck Philipse, Sarah Cooper, Alida Schuyler Livingston, Isacheran Pachot, and Konwatsi'tsiaienni (Molly Brant) to discuss the ways in which women merchants were active participants in the economic, political, and cultural spheres of the colonial Hudson River Valley.