The early life of Margaret Philipse is, sadly, still undiscovered and likely to remain so. All that is known of her life in Holland is that she was born in the Rhine Valley, the daughter of Adolph Hardenbrook and Maritje Caterberg. The next record of her is as an immigrant in New Netherlands in 1659. Her brother, Abel, became an indentured servant to a family moving to New Amsterdam, and it is suspected that she traveled with him. A marriage license between Margaret and Peter Rudolphus, a merchant trader in New Amsterdam, was published on October 19, 1659, and they had one daughter baptized Maria the following year. As most Dutch women did, Margaret kept her maiden name, and by 1660 was active in mercantile business under the name of Hardenbrook. She began her career as a business agent representing Dutch Merchants trading with New Netherlands. When her husband died in the summer of 1661, she assumed his trading activities, which was predominantly shipping furs to Holland in exchange for Dutch merchandise. Within the next two years she became a shipowner, calling her new fleet ship Margaret. In 1662 she remarried, to a Frederick Philipsen, who with her late husband's money expanded his own merchant trade. Meanwhile, Margaret traveled frequently between New Netherlands, and New Amsterdam at this time for her own trading business. She is repeatedly found in Dutch depositions of financial arrangements. New Netherlands was taken over by the English in 1664, and though it did not hurt her business, it took away many of her previously enjoyed legal rights. She could no longer own property (like her boat) in her own name. By English law she was forced to take on her husband's last name. It was now necessary for legal documents to say that her spouse was a merchant. She was not representing him, she had her own agency, yet his name backed her's up. Dutch law had not forced women to choose between marriage and a marketplace profession, but English law did. In her second marriage, Margaret had several more children, who later became merchants or otherwise engaged in shipping. When she died in 1690, Mr. Philipse (he had Anglicized the name after the English take-over) remarried a rich widow and bought the famous Manor of Philipsburg.

Biographical info from: Edward T. James, ed. , Notable American women, 1607-1950, Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971.

Also in First Generations: Women in Colonial America, by Carol Berkin, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996