When Europeans began arriving in large numbers in the Americas, they brought not only their animals, plants, and diseases with them, they also brought their assumptions and beliefs about how society ought to operate. That included ideas about the roles and status of women, ideas that had been slowly changing for centuries. The process of colonization accelerated those changes. By the early seventeenth century, when English colonies began to spread across the coast of what is now the United States, European-born men and women were experimenting with new ways of running their society and new understandings of how social roles ought to operate.