It wasn't easy for women to be enterprising in St. Augustine several centuries ago. As a military post, this town was very much a man's world. However, midwives in colonial St. Augustine could be enterprising, bringing cash or payment in goods into the household.
Mary Evans Fenwick Peavett Hudson is probably St. Augustine's best known midwife. Eugenia Price fictionalized Mary's life here in the 1700s in "Maria," published in 1977. Anthropologist Patricia Griffin and translator Eugenia Arana provided Ms. Price with the facts about Mary from old documents.
Midwives were probably the closest thing to a professional woman at the time. Most midwives were older, either with grown children or childless (like Mary), and thus available to attend women in labor whenever needed at all hours of the day and for however long it took. Historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich notes that midwives also served as "physicians" because of their knowledge of the body and experience with persons in discomfort. A midwife was out in the streets at all times of the day and often accompanied by a man who was not her husband, possibly the father of the new baby or a neighbor who came with the alert. We can only wonder if midwives saw this as a freedom of movement not experienced by other women.
Mary Evans Fenwick arrived in St. Augustine as the British were taking over from the Spanish in 1763. Soon widowed, she married Joseph Peavett, the paymaster for the British troops. Today we might refer to Mary as a "cougar" for her husband was seven years younger than she. Information from the census at the time indicates that the marriage of an older woman and a younger man was pretty common in St. Augustine.
Mary and Joseph purchased a home today known as The Oldest House on St. Francis Street, right across the street from the soldiers' barracks. The British had converted the Franciscan monastery into housing for troops (today's headquarters for the Florida National Guard). The Peavetts opened a tavern within easy reach of the soldiers, and Joseph Peavett oversaw the soldiers' pay. What a case of location, location, location.
With her midwife activities, Mary brought in cash or in-kind payment into the household. Thatcher notes that midwives were paid with food, all sorts of household items -- mirrors, knives, thimbles, furniture, cloth.
Mary stayed on in St. Augustine when Spain took Florida back from Great Britain in 1784. Spanish soldiers again walked the streets of the old town.
While Mary may have been enterprising, she was also foolish. After Joseph died, she married John Hudson, a man more than 20 years younger than she and who knew how to spend her money.
Mary endured severe financial problems with her third husband, who ran up debts to the point that they lost their home in the Oldest House, and she had to pay off many creditors. When Mary died in her early 50s, she still owned a substantial number of nice household possessions in spite of her losses. The inventory of her possessions is a testament to her earning power and enterprise as she engaged in midwifery -- a very female activity -- in the man's world of the military town of St. Augustine.