Ordinary Women, Extraordinary Times

March is Women’s History Month, a time to remember not only exceptional women, but also everyday women who coped courageously with life’s challenges. Joanna White Winslow, daughter and wife of gentlemen, was caught on the wrong side of the Revolutionary War, and falling on hard times, opened a shop to support her family.

Joanna was born c1745 to Gideon and Joanna White, who lived in a house on Main Street (currently the location of Sam Diego’s restaurant). Around 1770 the young Joanna married Pelham Winslow. As one of the town’s only two barristers, her husband was well-off. They had two girls—Mary, born in 1771, and Joanna, born two years later. 

In the early 1770s, the family was caught up in the turmoil that led to the Revolution. While most townspeople felt their rights were being trampled upon, Pelham outspokenly supported the King, and was known as “an obnoxious Tory.” 

Not long after the Boston Tea Party, a few Plymouth Tories, including Pelham, left for British-occupied Boston to escape their irate neighbors. Joanna and the children stayed in Plymouth. Pelham left with the British army when they evacuated Boston for Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1776, and ended up as a major with the British army in New York City.

Meanwhile, Plymouth leaders banished him from returning to town, and in 1779, the town confiscated his property. After reserving one third of the estate for Joanna, the town seized the family’s belongings—including the dining room table, the bed and bolsters, and even Pelham’s law books.

Joanna and her family most likely moved in with her parents. With the end of the Revolution in 1783, many Loyalists left for Nova Scotia, where they could apply for land grants to compensate for their losses in America. Joanna was planning to join Pelham there when she was notified that he had died suddenly in New York from a fever. Left destitute, she wrote to Benjamin Marston, a Loyalist surveyor and distant cousin in Nova Scotia, to request his aid in obtaining a land grant.

“I am told… that there can be no difficulty in obtaining a grant of land and rations for myself and two little girls if applied for by [a] gentleman of influence. You are well sensible the sacrifices Mr. Winslow made to his loyalty…I think, could I be indulged with rations and a grant of land, I might with industry support my children there. Here I have no prospect but beggary, — every article of furniture taken.”

There is no listing of any land grants in Canada to Joanna Winslow. So how did she manage to support herself and her two daughters?

She solved her problem by opening a shop in her family home. According to Joanna’s great nephew, Plymouth historian William T. Davis, “wishing to do what she could to maintain herself and family, her father… who owned the house in question, built an addition… and fitted up the lower story for her store.”

Davis related another story, in which he approached a Boston millionaire for a loan. In his youth, the millionaire had owned a shop on Washington Street, “where she [Joanna] bought…pins and needles and ribbon, buttons and laces for her stock in trade. ‘She was very much of a lady,’” the millionaire noted.

In an era when women seldom worked outside the home, Joanna opened a small business. Like countless women before and after her, Joanna, finding herself on hard times, had to find a creative solution in order to feed her children. Women’s History Month is a great opportunity to remember how ordinary women in Plymouth and all over dealt with the blows life dealt them.

The White family house with Joanna’s shop was occupied by relatives until the middle of the 19th century. The town of Plymouth acquired the property in the 1870s, tore down the house and built a fire station. Decades later, the town relocated the fire station, and the Main Street building became a restaurant, which is now occupied by Sam Diego’s Mexican eatery.