I am interested in the evolution of women’s colonial experience in New Netherland, and then New York over the 17^th century. The main point of historiography so far has been to assert that women had broader legal rights under the Dutch Roman Law than under the English common law, and therefore lost their autonomy after the English takeover of the colony. By working on Court, Church and private papers, I hope to confront the actual social practices and interactions between men and women to the evolution of law in the colonial society. In this manner, my aim is to take into account the diversity of the population of the colony, both ethnic and social and to focus on more common women – and not only on wealthy and somewhat exceptional women. Studying the whole colony will allow me to consider a variety of gender situations, depending on the location, the distribution of the population, the relations with Native populations, and so on. I intend to focus on 3 main locations: Manhattan and Long Island, the Upper Hudson Valley, around Beverwijck/Albany and the Delaware River. By acknowledging this diversity of situations, I hope to get rid of the rigid framework of Dutch exceptionality and to restore women’s colonial experience in its complexity. The choice of a broad chronology is a way to re-evaluate the change of allegiance over a long period. Disturbing the political chronology is a way to think of long-term processes and to emphasize the continuity of social and cultural patterns throughout the seventeenth century – i.e. the absence of a meaningful turning point with the English takeover.