The Burden of Proof: Sex, Power, and Patriarchy in the Eighteenth-Century Connecticut River Valley

Abstract In the late 1740s, in Northampton, Massachusetts, Martha Root named Elisha Hawley, a scion of the Connecticut Valley's “River Gods,” as the father of her twins born out of wedlock. This scandal, which unfolded in an understudied region of western Massachusetts, illuminates the intersection of gender, race, and class at the center of patriarchal power in colonial New England.