The Books of My Life: Revolutionary Mothers

Carol Berkin, in her Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for American Independence (New York: Knopf, 2005), argues that the American Revolution brought about a political revolution but not a social revolution for Colonial American women. The American Revolution was not, in other words, a radical revolution because it kept the culture genteel women were brought up in and lived in, the genteel world of deference and obedience, largely in place, after the war ended. 

During the war Colonial American women, Berkin notes, served as the unofficial quartermaster corps of the Continental Army supplying the army with much needed items, cooked for, nursed, and did the laundry of soldiers, spied for the Patriots, those who supported the American Revolution, and for the Loyalists, those who opposed the American Revolution, propagandised for the war effort, and even donned men’s clothes, on occasion and fought in the militaries of the Patriots, the Loyalists, and the British. Colonial American women raised funds for the troops, made gunpowder for the troops, and collected metal to make bullets for the troops. Colonial American women, like Paul Revere and Nathan Hale, called Americans to arms, and they spied behind enemy lines for both sides using a combination of surveillance, charm, and wiles to do it, and acted as couriers for both sides during the Revolutionary War. Colonial American African-American and First Peoples' women had different stories to tell than Colonial America's White women, notes Berkin, about their experiences during the American Revolution. They told tales of violence, oppression, exploitation, and violence.

After the war, notes Berkin, change for American women seemed to be in the republican air. A number of intellectuals, Susanna Wright, Judith Sargent Murray, and Benjamin Rush amongst them, debated the “woman question”. Changes in the perception of women, which were afoot before the war, continued to impact notions of gender and perceptions of the role the new American woman should play after the war fed into debates over the “woman question” in the new United States. In essays, poems, plays, and speeches, these reforming and cosmopolitan intellectuals, impacted by the Enlightenment of the Atlantic world, science, and liberal religion, debated the role women should play in the new United States and what new roles women should play, if any, in the new American republic.

America’s reforming intellectuals, following Enlightenment logic, denied that women were intellectually inferior to men and argued that women’s vanity, superficiality, and materialism was a product of society rather than something innate in the female of the species. As a result they campaigned for the creation of schools that would cultivate inherent female rationality by training women in history, rhetoric, geography, composition, science, empirical and logical thought, and mathematics, so they could fulfill their republican duties of teaching their children to be good republican citizens and keeping their husbands virtuous by their own republican example. Benjamin Rush argued that republican women should also be taught the genteel arts like music in order to sooth their husbands and their households. Academies, by the way, did arise in the new United States, as Berkin notes, to do just that including the Philadelphia Young Ladies Academy. By the end of the 18^th century elite American society frowned on poorly educated young women.

The result of the rise of the republican woman and the training of American women for their republican duties was a new cultural iron cage for women, claims Berkin, the cult or culture of domesticity. Despite the fact that women had managed farms and shops, defended their homes from the “enemy”, and coped with the various problems associated with the Revolutionary War, women were relegated to the private sphere of the home where their role and their duty was to take care of their husbands and train their children to be good republicans.

The new American gender culture meant that women had no role in the public economic and political spheres in the new America, which, in the cult of domesticity, were the domains of White elite and middle class males. Murray argued that women should also be trained for self-sufficiency and independence and that women should be fully engaged in the politics of the new nation, but few listened to her and even fewer followed her lead. Most Americans continued to believe that women were supposed to be patient, to endure, to be frugal, and to be strong in whatever circumstances arose. Only New Jersey, and this more as a result of oversight than of conviction, allowed its women to vote in local elections from 1776 to 1801. In 1801, however, as a result of concerns that women and daughters would follow the lead of their husbands and fathers when voting and concerns that female reserve and delicacy were incompatible with politics, New Jersey, ended female voting to, as a supplement to the law ending the right of women to vote in the state said, to restore good order to the state.

The cult of domesticity also meant that American women still could not own property, that women could not even claim the clothes on their back as their own, and that women still could not sue or be sued. Abigail Adams, wife of founding father John Adams, Berkin notes, tried to get her husband to change women’s legal status, comparing the fact that women could not own property and could not sue, a legal status they shared with children and the insane, to the tyranny of King George III from which America rebelled. In a paternalistic reply to his wife that would echo the paternalism of slaveholders in Antebellum America, however, John Adams maintained that such laws were actually benign.

The more things change...

I found Berkin's book an excellent read. It is very well written and quite informative. I recommend it to anyone interested in American history, American women's history, Women's history, culture history, and the history of the American Revolution. Highly recommended.