Colonial Virginia in the seventeenth century was a relatively wild and lawless place in comparison to the England that most of its colonists had emigrated from. Thousands of miles across the Atlantic from their old home, with fluid and often hostile relations with the local Powhatan peoples, plus a lack of institutional controls of any kind other than a weak social deference to the colony's leadership, English colonists in Virginia struggled to build a stable society, especially as the population expanded to more than 70,000 by 1671. Especially critical was the huge disparity in the ratio between men and women in Virginia. Back home in England, married women maintained a public role in society that demanded that they present themselves as demure, quiet, morally upright, family-oriented, and especially submissive to their husbands. In Virginia, men outnumbered women by a ratio of three to one, at best; many of the men were indentured or enslaved servants and transported criminals, meaning that social lines between colonists were easily blurred. Under these circumstances, women exercised a lot of social power—for example, in their choice of mates, in their attitudes toward social authority and sexual mores, and in their ability and willingness to speak out about their neighbors.