Alice Morse Earle's Colonial Dames and Good Wives offers a vivid, witty portrait of women as indispensable builders of early America. Opening with the contrast between Massachusetts Bay and Virginia, Earle shows that colonies did not merely need ministers, food, and labor—they urgently needed wives, families, and domestic order. She recounts the famous shipment of ninety young English women to Jamestown in 1620, the French effort to stock Louisiana with Parisian brides, and later schemes involving casket girls, correction-house girls, convicts, and redemptioners, revealing how marriage, class, and survival shaped colonial society. Across these episodes, Earle blends humor, anecdote, and moral seriousness to portray colonial women as industrious household managers, reluctant emigrants, resilient captives, and sometimes tragic figures caught in wife-selling, kidnapping, and frontier violence. She also follows Madam Sarah Knight's sharp-tongued travels through New England, where rude lodgings, strange food, rough customs, and perilous journeys become comic social commentary. From widows' social power to ministers' wives, from captivity narratives to plantation life, the book captures the hardships, contradictions, and enduring courage of colonial womanhood. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.