Category Archives: Lydia Rees

Lydia Rees and the Role of Women

Posted on by
Reply

Lydia Rees is one of the primary, some would say the primary, protagonist in my Will Rees/Shaker mysteries. I thought I would return to this work and talk about the women in the later eighteenth century.

Lydia Rees, wife of my detective Will Rees, is an opinionated and outspoken woman and an equal partner with her husband as they investigate murders and other crimes. This is not so surprising for modern times but during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a woman had no legal status. She owned nothing and in fact she herself was chattel, belonging first to her father and then to her husband. The portion she brought to her marriage belonged to her husband and literally everything she had, including her children and the clothes on her back, belonged to him. In one of the primary sources I read a woman divorced one man for another and had to marry in her shift. The clothing she wore belonged to husband number one. Fortunately, husband number two had clothing waiting for her and as soon as they were married, she dressed.

A woman could not inherit the family home unless her husband specifically named her in the will. If he did not, she became the burden of her eldest son. If they had a bad relationship he could, and did, at least according to some of the histories I’ve seen, put her out to make her own way on the road. 

This did not mean that women did nothing. Oh no. This was an agrarian world and a man could not run his farm without his wife’s labor. Farm wives kept a garden, made butter and cheese, cooked, sewed clothing, cleaned – and all of this at the same time they dealt with pregnancy and minded their children. Wives of printers and other professional men frequently helped in the shop. It is no wonder that many men from this time are buried with two, three or sometimes more wives.

Lydia is a former Shaker (or The United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Coming to give them their proper name. Shakers was at first a derogatory nickname based on their physical services – it is a combination of ‘Shaking Quakers’.) The Shakers were a faith begun by a woman, Mother Ann Lee, and the Shaker Sisters have equal authority with their male counterparts. There are two Elders and two Eldresses, two Deacons and two Deaconesses for every Family. Although the work was assigned along traditional gender roles, women and their labor were considered of equal importance. And in a time when illiteracy among woman was high (even among men it was almost 50%), the Shakers educated the girls equally with the boys. (Girls went to school during the summer, boys during the winter.) So Lydia expects to have a say.

The reasons a woman joined the Shakers were many and varied. In A Simple Murder and Cradle to Grave, Sister Hannah (Mouse) joins the Shakers be cause she has a cleft palate and knows she will never marry. In Simply Dead, one of my women characters flees to the Shakers to escape a life of servitude to her family. Another woman, who is an ongoing character throughout, is a fugitive who has escaped servitude in the south.

The Shakers were abolitionists and accepted escaped slaves as members in their community.

Obedience to the rules and celibacy, however, both come with membership in this faith. When Lydia secretly marries her first husband, Charles Ellis, and bears a baby she is immediately expelled from the Shakers. Ellis’s unexpected death causes further legal complications. 

When a person joined the Shakers, he or she signed a document called the Covenant. In it, they agreed to surrender all their worldly goods to the community. Charles Ellis is almost a member of Zion; he has not yet signed the Covenant but everyone is expecting him to. Then he dies. Because Ellis leaves his farm to Lydia in his will, the farm the Shakers were expecting to own, she inherits.  When she marries Will Rees, the farm immediately becomes his because of the laws governing a woman’s lack of rights to own property.

Although Lydia wishes to abide by Ellis’s wishes and surrender the farm to the Shakers, Rees hesitates. Fortunately for the family. When they are forced to flee their home in Dugard, they take refuge in the farm near Zion. (The Devil’s Cold Dish).

Lydia is a very determined individual. When Rees would leave her behind in Death in the Great Dismal, when he goes south to rescue a woman from the Great Dismal Swamp, Lydia insists on accompanying him. Fortunately. Ruth will not agree to go north without Lydia’s persuasion.

Lydia is instrumental (always!) in assisting her husband solve the mystery and, in many cases, connecting with the other women characters.

Families

Posted on by

As I looked around the table at Christmas dinner, and saw people who had not spoken to one another for years, I thought of how complicated families could be.

In Murder, Sweet Murder, I set the mystery against Lydia’s family, but Will Rees’s is no less difficult.

Lydia, estranged from her father and step-mother, left her family years ago. Her father is a wealthy Boston merchant engaged in the Triangle Trade. He owns a distillery that distills molasses into rum as well a fleet of ships that run slaves from Africa.

Lydia cannot accept her father’s profession and after some problems in her personal live, runs away. She lands at Zion, a Shaker community in Maine. In Murder, Sweet Murder I bring her back to Boston, and her family. She is no more tolerant of her father’s profession now than she was then.

Rees’s father was an abusive alcoholic who died by falling off a wagon in a drunken stupor. Rees is not an alcoholic but he makes other mistakes with his children. Before the action begins in A Simple Murder, David, Rees’s oldest son runs away from home, and takes refuge in Zion with the Shakers. Rees had left David (he would say his father abandoned him) with Caroline and her husband. When Rees returns home and recovers the farm, sending Caroline’s family packing, she never forgives him.

In A Devil’s Cold Dish, Caroline does her very best to destroy her brother and his family.

As the stories go on, and Rees’s history unfolds, his family expands. But it also changes. By the time of Murder, Sweet Murder, Jerusha, Rees’s oldest daughter, wants to leave home for school. David and Simon have already left for a farm in a distant town.

Families are complicated, even in fiction.

Gender in Will Rees’s America

Posted on by

Several readers have expressed the opinion that Lydia should be the detective, not her husband. I can see their point. I think she is more intelligent than he is as well. But I chose Will Rees for some practical reasons.

Although women were not so circumscribed as they became later, in the Victorian times, they had little freedom. Everything they had, and I mean everything right up to their children and the clothes on their back, belonged to their husbands. The farm on which Rees and Lydia are living went to Lydia on the death of her first husband. She promised it to the Shaker community nearby. But when she married Rees, that farm became his property, leading to no end of issues with the Shaker community that expected to take possession.

And while we are on the subject of inheritance, it is important to realize that widows did not inherit from their husbands unless SPECIFICALLY MENTIONED BY NAME IN THE WILL. If they were not included, they became the responsibility of the eldest son and could be tossed in the street if he so desired.

Even their clothing was owned by their husband. I read one contemporary account of a woman who sought and obtained a divorce. She had to marry again in her petticoats.

Although there are accounts of women printers, silversmiths and more, most of them were the widows or daughters of the craftsmen who had taught them the skills. Only then could they actually work in these fields. No one would accept them as apprentices. (This has changed very slowly. I wanted to be a carpenter as a girl. The local trade school would not accept me because of my gender and told me to become a secretary.)

The other issue is travel. Rees is a traveling weaver; he goes from house to house and farm to farm to weave the yard spun during the previous winter. Even if Lydia owned a loom, she would be expected to weave at home. She would not have the freedom to leave that home, to investigate or for any other purpose, that her husband had.

Unfortunately, these were the challenges women faced. ( In many ways, they have not changed so greatly.) So Lydia has become a detective, but part of a team.