The American Nation A History of the United States, Combined Volume (14th Edition)

Women and the Revolution 133

Women and the Revolution

In the late eighteenth century women in the
Western world were acquiring more legal rights,
although the change was barely perceptible at the
time. This movement was strengthened in America
by the events leading up to the break with Great
Britain and still more by the Declaration of
Independence. When Americans began to think and
talk about the rights of the individual and the evils
of arbitrary rule, subtle effects on relations between
the sexes followed. For example, it became some-
what easier for women to obtain divorces. In colo-
nial times divorces were relatively rare, but easier for
men to obtain than for women. After the Revolution
the difference did not disappear, but it became con-
siderably smaller. In Massachusetts, before the
1770s no woman is known to have obtained a
divorce on the grounds of her husband’s adultery.
Thereafter, successful suits by wives against errant
husbands were not unusual. In 1791 a South
Carolina judge went so far as to say that the law pro-
tecting “the absolute dominion” of husbands was
“the offspring of a rude and barbarous age.” The
“progress of civilization,” he continued, “has tended
to ameliorate the condition of women, and to allow
even to wives, something like personal identity.”
As the tone of this “liberal” opinion indicates,
the change in male attitudes that took place in
America because of the Revolution was small.
Courts in New York and Massachusetts refused to
take action against Tory women whose husbands
were Tories on the grounds that it was the duty of
women to obey their husbands; and when John
Adams’s wife Abigail warned him in 1776 that if he
and his fellow rebels did not “remember the ladies”
when reforming society, the women would “foment
a Rebellion” of their own, he treated her remarks as
a joke. Adams believed that voting (and as he wrote
on another occasion, writing history) was “not the
Province of the Ladies.”^3
However, the war effort increased the influence
of women in several ways. With so many men in uni-
form, women took over the management of count-
less farms, shops, and businesses, and they became
involved in the handling of other day-to-day matters
that men had normally conducted. Their experi-
ences made both them, and in many cases their

fathers and husbands, more aware of their ability to

take on all sorts of work previously considered

exclusively masculine in character. At the same time,

women wanted to contribute to the winning of

independence, and their efforts to do so made them

conscious of their importance. Furthermore, the

rhetoric of the Revolution, with its stress on liberty

and equality, affected women in the same way that it

caused many whites of both sexes to question the

morality of slavery.

Attitudes toward the education of women also

changed because of the Revolution. According to the

best estimates, at least half the white women in

America could not read or write as late as the 1780s.

In a land of opportunity like the United States,

women seemed particularly important, not only

This 1797 engraving depicts Deborah Sampson, the first woman to

serve as a soldier in the Revolution. In 1782 she put on men’s clothes

and enlisted in the Massachusetts militia. Her identity was

discovered and she was expelled. She then enlisted as Robert

Shurtlieff in the Continental army. Wounded during a battle at

Tarrytown, New York, she extracted the musket ball herself, rather

than let a doctor treat her and discover her gender.

(^3) Adams’s distaste for women historians may have been based on
the fact that in his friend Mercy Otis Warren’s History of the Rise,
Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution(1805)
Warren claimed that Adams sometimes allowed his “prejudices” to
distort his judgment.