Women in the American Revolution

Carol Berkin, Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America’s Independence. NY: Knopf, 2005, xviii, 194 pp. ISBN 1-4000-463-5. $24.

Carol Berkin resists the temptation to make claims unsupported by historical evidence. Consequently, when she “retells the story of women’s role in creating the new nation,” she does not transform eighteenth century women into modern feminists. For example, she states unambiguously, “Abigail Adams was not an early suffragist, demanding that John and Congress grant women the right to vote.” She thereby keeps Abigail in the Revolutionary era at the expense of the ideological demands of many modern historians, who would impose their values and beliefs on historical figures without evidence. Occasionally she stretches the evidence to enhance the role of women and, at times, her personal ideas on what historical figures should have thought or done stand out, but never in clear contradiction to the historical record. Those interested in emotion, familial conflict and personality will find grist for their mill.

In Berkin’s final chapter on the legacy of the Revolution, she suggests a greater female impact than I would, but she has company in that regard among some very distinguished historians. Some readers of this review may denigrate both the claim and the desire for the kind of objectivity Berkin provides and this reviewer admires, arguing that all thought is dependent on the social context and consequently ideological. If that were true, then there would be no reason to read or write history, since it would be no more valuable than fiction. I believe that Berkin has written an excellent book, which provides an antidote to the “gendered amnesia” which she asserts has befallen the story of the Revolution.

Berkin aims to tell “that story through the words and actions of individual women.” She follows in the footsteps of Elizabeth Ellet’s three volume work, Women of the American Revolution and subsequent studies to provide direct access to the words of the participating women. She makes clear that these women joined men in seeing themselves created by God “to be a helpmate to man…with a natural inclination to obedience, fidelity, industriousness and frugality,” and propelled by nature toward the bearing and raising children. When the war arrived, women and girls “developed concerns outside the private world of the family,” but those concerns and the new roles they engendered did not ultimately lead to a transformation of gender definitions as the horrors and deprivations of war ultimately inculcated a desire to return to the familiar.

The Revolutionary crisis began after the British sought to recoup a miniscule portion of the vast expense of the French and Indian War (1754-63) by imposing very modest taxes on Americans. The colonists, however, exaggerated the cost of the levies and developed dark fears of a plot to destroy their liberty and reduce them to slavery.

The first piece of British legislation aimed at raising Colonial taxes was the Stamp Act. The Americans responded with the hastily assembled Stamp Act Congress, which called for a boycott on the importation of British goods until the offending law was repealed. Colonial women responded with alacrity, which was vital because America had undergone what historian T.H. Breen called a “consumer revolution,” with women as the chief purchasers of a plethora of goods. The vast majority now refused to buy, organized, marched, published and even cajoled men to do more, moving out of the household and taking on public leadership roles. After this proved successful with the repeal of the Stamp Act, the crisis continued with the Townshend Duties which also engendered a boycott and women’s participation included the spinning of cloth for the creation of “homespun” clothing, which became a badge of pride and a symbol of defiance. The repeal of the Townshend Duties left a tax on tea which women again refused to drink even though the legislation would

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have made the beverage cheaper. Berkin asserts that all this activity “was equally or more important to the colonial future than the actions of male congresses and assemblies.” Such a conclusion seems excessive to me and needs a more detailed and comparative argument, but she has clearly made the case for an important role for women as the American colonists and the British stumbled toward “the shot heard round the world.”

When shots were fired on Lexington Green, the Declaration of Independence and full scale war quickly followed. The real and emotional impact on women then became quite onerous. They saw husbands, sons and lovers depart to face mortal danger, suffered loneliness and worry and worked assiduously to hold the home front in some semblance of order, but found plundering by occupying armies of both sides common and devastating. To render the emotional impact Berkin quotes Eliza Wilkenson, “The whole world appeared to me as a theater, where nothing was acted but cruelty, bloodshed and oppression; where neither age nor sex escaped the horrors of injustice and violence; where lives and property of the innocent and inoffensive were in continual danger and lawless power raged at large.” Wilkenson might have added rape to her comment, for the soldiers of both sides committed this heinous crime though the British and their commanders saw it as part of the accepted spoils of war. Such were the horrors that would ultimately lead to a desire to return to the familiar after the conflict, thus thwarting any immediate transformation of gender definition and roles.

Berkin also describes the women who followed the armies, serving as “cooks, washerwomen, seamstresses, nurses, scavengers for supplies, sexual partners and occasionally as soldiers and spies.” She notes that the Americans were less used to having women in their rear ranks than were the British. General Washington tried to end it but to no avail, since many of the women were needed, and some even heroic. The modern understanding of “camp followers” as simply prostitutes is wrong, though many followed both armies to the frustration of commanders who tried to eradicate them and the venereal disease they brought. Many of the women, however, especially the American women, won praise for their often heroic service. Berkin gives examples and ends by quoting a British army officer, “if we destroyed all the men in North America, we should have enough to do to conquer the women.” While this ambiguous quotation can be read in various ways, including gender superiority for women, the authors choice to place it as the final summary sentence of a chapter certainly indicates her pride in the performance of Revolutionary women.

Berkin next discusses the role of the wives of generals. The American women in this category “would spend their time at the winter encampments in the most comfortable housing the army could provide,” hosting dinner parties for officers and, thereby, making a statement that even the wealthy could make sacrifices for the Revolution. This also served to remind officers and soldiers that they could still “remember and function in a world far removed from the brutality and violence of warfare.” Some of the wives, like Martha Washington, would have preferred to remain home, while others like Catherine Greene, wife of General Nathaniel Greene, would rush to shop for fashions whenever she could convince her husband to cease his worrying about her “delicate sensibilities.” A bit of familial conflict overlaid with some gender stereotyping can be seen here. One also has to wonder about the problems caused by the fact that British generals “preferred camp wives to real wives, often taking as their mistresses the wives of junior officers.”

The Revolution proved particularly trying for the wives of Loyalist men who suffered emotionally and in various other ways including abandonment by their husbands, confiscation and destruction of property, physical violence, and exile in England or Canada. Berkin provides valuable examples.

In exploring the role of Indian women in the Revolution, Berkin frequently makes the point that in the Native American matrilineal society, women often had a deciding voice in political and military decisions. Foreseeing that an American victory would inevitably lead to land grabbing and cultural assimilation they wisely sided with the British. Molly Brant led the Mohawks to this stance and other tribes motivated by women did the same. When the Americans won, Indian women quickly found that their “power was fading after the war,” and the cultural and gender norms of white society were soon pressed upon them

Carol Berkin describes how African-American women also fared poorly in the Revolution, espe-

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cially in the South, where their owners had no intention to free them. When the Earl of Dunmore formed a regiment of blacks in Virginia, it was defeated and its members treated with draconian harshness, to the sorrow of wives and daughters. When the fighting shifted to the lower south, runaway slaves followed the British army in the hope of ultimate emancipation. Some were freed and sent to Canada. A total of 914 women were thus emancipated, only to find that “prejudice and poverty replaced their earlier bondage.” Others were sold back into slavery and the loyalty of those who had not left their masters was “rewarded” with a hardening of attitudes and harsher laws regulating African-American life. In the North some progress occurred. In Massachusetts a slave woman sued for her freedom won a ruling that outlawed slavery in the state. Overall, however, the Revolution brought African-American women little to celebrate.

Professor Berkin moves to a discussion of women as spies, couriers and saboteurs, a rarely mentioned and mostly unknown role. This is a story which comes down to us from family websites and essays created by proud descendants, from genealogists, town historians, amateur historians and finally from some scholarly books and articles. “In every case,” she declares, “these stories survive because that kernel of truth found within them captures a wartime reality out of which myths are made.” Did you ever hear of Deborah Champion or Sybil Ludington or Lydia Darragh? Though I am a colonial historian, I never did and so I invite the readers of this review to remember Berkin’s point that the history of the American Revolution has usually been written with “gendered amnesia.” You should enjoy this quite interesting and informative chapter.

With the end of the war, most Americans returned to their ordinary pre-war lives. For women, that meant hearth and home, children and a submissive gender role. For a small group of “elite American women and men,” however, there came to be a short but intense moment of lively debate over “the women question.” Berkin notes that the debate included a rejection of the idea that women were mentally inferior to men. She quotes the Quaker poet Susanna Wright, “Reason rules in everyone the same,” she wrote, “No Right, has man, his Equal to control / Since all agree, There is no Sex in soul.” This belief led to educational reform for women.

That reform, however, did not “envision female intellect free from the helpmate role.” The new ideology saw women as homemakers who should rear the children, impart civic and patriotic virtue and personal morality to them, provide a safe haven for their husbands from the wicked world and nurse all when sickness developed. This is almost identical to the belief pattern described by historian Barbara Welters for women of the mid-nineteenth century, “The Cult of True Womanhood.” In short, the Revolution did not bring quick reform. The publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, in 1963, finally ushered in the modern women’s movement, which enabled women to make “revolutionary” strides in all aspects of life. While Berkin can see this as “only a moment in the long flow of history,” and historian Bernard Bailyn can refer to the “contagion of liberty” emanating from the Revolution, I believe that the long time frame suggests that the American Revolution did not lead to “revolution” in other aspects of life, in this case the role of women. This minor caveat, which some might even see as nit-picking, should not obscure my admiration for Revolutionary Mothers, an informative, enjoyable, prodigiously researched, carefully written and well-reasoned book.

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