1624

The Dutch West Indies Company began settlement of Dutch women and men in New Amsterdam and in 1629 the Dutch began to settle Pavonia in what is now Jersey City.

The New Sweden Company began the settlement of Swedish men and women along the Delaware River.

1643

During a dispute with the Hackensack Indians, Dutch soldiers under New Netherlands Governor Willem Kieft massacred 80 Lenape men, women, children and infants at Pavonia.

By 1660

There were scattered Dutch settlements in New Jersey.   Smallpox and other imported diseases ravaged the Lenape population.

1664/65

Lenni Lenape chief Oratam granted to Sarah Kiersted (17th century), a Dutch settler of New Amsterdam, 2260 acres in what is now Ridgefield Park, Bogota, and Teaneck for her assistance to him as a negotiator and arbitrator when the Dutch were in control of the colony.

1667

The British colony of New Jersey was divided into East Jersey and West Jersey.

Elizabeth Carteret (1615-1696) became proprietor of East Jersey after the death of her husband George Carteret.  As executor of the colony, she sold the land of East Jersey in 1682 to Quakers.

The Lenape population of East and West Jersey is estimated to have been anywhere between 3,000 and 24,000 people.  Colonial encroachment on hunting grounds and purchases of Lenape land, European diseases to which the Lenape had no resistance, and westward migration as far as the Ohio River drastically reduced the Lenape population.

Elizabeth Haddon Estaugh (ca. 1680-1762) a British-born American Quaker, founded a home for traveling ministers on land her father owned in New Jersey. She managed the plantation and served as clerk of the Quaker women's meeting for over 50 years. She is considered by some to be the founder of Haddonfield, New Jersey.

1703

New Jersey became a royal province with a British and European population of about 10,000 men and women: Dutch, Swedish, English, Scots. They were Puritan, Baptist, Quaker, Presbyterian and Anglican. There were also numbers of African slaves, especially in the former East Jersey, where in some areas most white families owned slaves.

1715

Sybilla Righton Masters (unknown -1720) of Burlington Township, received in London what was probably the first patent granted to an American colonist, a patent for a machine to prepare Indian corn by stamping rather than grinding. 

1726

It is estimated that 32,000 Europeans and Africans lived in the royal province of New Jersey. 47% of these people were female, 8% were Africans.

1739-1755

The Great Awakening, a period of religious zeal sparked by preacher George Whitefield, stirred religious enthusiasm in New Jersey.

1745

It is estimated that 61,000 people lived in the royal province of New Jersey. Slightly less than 45 % were female, 7.5% were African.

An estimated 200 remaining Lenape men and women of New Jersey moved to the Brotherton Reservation in the Burlington County pine barrens.  Others had intermarried with colonial settlers.

1760

Women in the colonies brought with them the types of clothing they had worn in England and the Continent. Wealthy women tried to emulate in their clothing their wealthy counterparts in Britain and France. Other women made practical clothing from available materials to suit their hard working lives.

Rutgers College was founded by the Dutch Reformed Church.  It did not educate women.

  Many infants and children did not survive the harsh conditions of colonial times.
 

Jemima Condict (1754-1779) wrote in her diary about events leading to the Revolutionary war.