Beaver Pelt
Beaver Pelt, n.d. New-York Historical Society. Photo by Daniel De Santis.
Johanna de Laet was born into a life of privilege and opportunity on September 6, 1623, in the city of Leiden in the Netherlands. Her father, Johannes de Laet, was a famous historian and mapmaker as well as one of the founding directors of the Dutch West India Company. His investments in the company made him very rich. As a child Johanna received an excellent education. She was tutored in history, philosophy, and foreign languages, which was unusual for a girl.
When Johanna was about 21 years old, she married one of her father’s colleagues, Johannes de Hulter, another founding director of the Dutch West India Company. For the next six years, Johanna was a wealthy Leiden housewife. She was responsible for running her family’s home and raising their children. Her first opportunity to become a businessperson in her own right came in 1649, when her father passed away. Under Dutch inheritance law, all children, even girls and women, were entitled to inherit a piece of their parents’ estate. Johanna inherited property in the colony of New Netherland, near present-day Kingston, New York.
In 1653, Johanna and her husband moved their family to the New Netherland colony, where they could personally oversee their lands and investments. They brought servants and other settlers with them and in return they received land grants from the colony’s government. The family settled in Rensselaerswyck, the territory that surrounded Fort Orange.
When Johanna’s husband died in 1655, she inherited half of his property. She managed the other half for her children until they came of age. Her inheritance from her husband combined with her inheritance from her father made Johanna a very wealthy woman, and her status as a widow meant she could represent her own economic and legal interests.
Johanna embraced her new role as business manager for her family. Between 1656 and 1659, she appears in the court records for business disputes over ten times, and her court appearances reveal the diversity of her business interests. She owned a tile manufacturing business in Beverwyck, rented homes and farms, fought challenges to her land rights, and regularly held sales of land and businesses she no longer wanted to oversee. One sale earned her 8,821 guilders in a single day, at a time when the average servant girl made between 30 to 50 guilders a year. In 1657 she was cited as a witness in a contract dispute, indicating that the court and her colleagues recognized her as a trustworthy member of the community.
As a widow, Johanna was allowed to represent her own economic and legal interests in the community.
Johanna remarried in 1659. Her new husband, Jeronimus Ebbing, was a rising star in the colony’s business and political communities. Johanna had the right to demand a contract that would have allowed her to hold her property separate from her husband’s and continue to conduct business as an independent woman, but she decided not to. She took her new husband’s last name, and when they appear in the court records jointly, her husband is always referred to as her guardian and manager of her business interests.
Even so, Johanna continued to run her businesses. She appeared in the courts at least ten more times before the English took over the colony. Her appearances in this period are spread out between Fort Orange, Kingston, and New Amsterdam, which means she traveled frequently. In 1663, she sued a man for keeping beaver furs he never paid for. The man countersued. He claimed that Johanna promised to teach him a trade and failed to fulfill her promise, so he kept the beaver furs as compensation. The court ruled in Johanna’s favor. This episode reveals that Johanna appeared in court independently and continued to conduct business without the oversight of her husband. Johanna had more power than other women in the colony because of her wealth and status.
The last known reference to Johanna in the government records is a court appearance she made in 1676 at the age of 53 . By then, the colony had transitioned to English rule. The new governing laws in New York made it harder for women to act independently, but Johanna continued to fight for her economic interests.
Vocabulary
- Beverwyck: A Dutch trade settlement near Rensselaerswyck north of Fort Orange.
- Dutch Republic: The name of the country of the Dutch in Europe from 1581 to 1795.
- Dutch West India Company: The company that owned and ran New Netherland.
- Fort Orange: The Dutch fort and settlement located just to the south of present-day Albany, New York.
- guilder: A basic unit of Dutch money.
- Kingston: A Dutch trade settlement located between Fort Orange and New Amsterdam.
- New Amsterdam: The capital of the colony of New Netherland, where New York City is today.
- New Netherland: The Dutch colony in North America, which encompassed land between the Connecticut and Delaware Rivers, and up the Hudson River to present-day Albany, New York.
- Rensselaerswyck: A tract of land in New Netherland that surrounded present-day Albany, New York.
Discussion Questions
- What circumstances allowed Johanna de Laet to have power in New Netherland?
- What do Johanna de Laet’s business ventures reveal about life in the colony of New Netherland?
- How did Dutch inheritance practices differ from those of other European colonies? What does the story of Johanna de Laet reveal about Dutch inheritance practices? Why do inheritance traditions matter in women’s history?
Suggested Activities
- APUSH Connection: 2.7 Colonial Society and Culture
- Use Johanna de Laet instead of a male Dutch trader as an example for lessons on trade in New Netherland and the wider Dutch colonies.
- Teach Johanna de Laet’s life story along with the loopwagen in Childcare in Oneida and Dutch Communities to flesh out the many different responsibilities she juggled as a New Netherland housewife and businessperson.
- Compare and contrast Johanna’s life as a business woman with Life Story: Charlotte-Françoise Juchereau de Saint-Denis and Life Story: Margaret Brent.
- Explore the rights of married women in New Netherland by combining this life story with Life Story: Teuntje Straatmans and Dutch Interpreter.
- For a larger lesson on the experiences of Dutch women in the colonies, teach this resource alongside any of the following:
- Johanna was able to engage in a wide-ranging business network because her intimate network of family and friends gave her the authority to do so. This kind of unacknowledged power network allowed women in many different colonial societies to exert influence far beyond what was traditionally available to them. Use any of the following resources to explore this idea of intimate power networks further with your students:
- Johanna de Laet married men who could further her economic interests. For other examples of women who used marriage as a way to improve their life circumstances, use any of the following resources:
Themes
WORK, LABOR, AND ECONOMY
