 Research
proposal
 Due Friday Oct 24th
 2 page out-line of you project
 detail the structure that your paper
will take
 an indication of your purpose in
choosing the subject
 i.e. the impact they had on America.
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Research paper:
Students will select a topic, in consultation with the
professor, and prepare a research paper of 7-8 pages,
type-written and double spaced.
Paper be due on November 19th
Internet sources
No more than two internet sources can be used
All internet sources must be authorized by the
Professor – any internet sources not authorized result
in a loss of points
NO use of Wikipedia at all
All quotations must have equivalent amount of
explanatory text
An American Revolution
(for women?)
 For
European women in the colonies there
was an ideal that they were supposed to fit
into (the private submissive good-wife)
 Role didn’t always fit – many women
challenged it

Without much success
 American
Revolution provided a turning point
in women’s history
 The revolution did not destroy women’s
separate realm of life but,
 threw it into convulsions
 War
years, pushed women into the
turmoil and conflict of public events
 Men away fighting
 Women called on to provide public
services as well as domestic
responsibilities
 Women began to express
themselves politically

Individually and in groups
 Wives





and housekeepers suddenly became
boycotters
camp followers
petitioners
fund raisers
For both loyalists and patriots
 The
decades around the Revolution were rife
with passionate ideas about political liberty
 Political pamphlets, newspapers, and sermons
explored the history and meaning of political
rights and freedoms

Expressions of patriotism
were novel and varied
 For example:
 Deborah Sampson
Gannett

Enlisted in the fourth MA
regiment


received a pension for her
service
After her death, pension
was passed on to her
husband
 Women
played traditional role as camp
followers
 Washington saw their presence as a
liability
 “The multitudes of women,”
 he contended in 1777,
 “especially those who are pregnant or
have children, are a clog upon every
movement.”
 Yet army had no support staff and
women were an essentially auxiliary

Camp followers


marched with the army
Provided tasks like cooking and
laundry.

Washington did appreciate a
modern role women adopted during
the war
 Raising money for the cause
 Congratulating the Ladies
Association of Philadelphia


elite group led by Esther De Berdt
Reed
on their fund gathering, he awarded
its members “an equal place with
any who have proceeded them in
the walk of female patriotism.”
 PA
ladies “established” the American
female character

Washington asserted
“proving that the love of the country is
blended with those softer domestic
virtues, which have always been allowed
to be more peculiarly your own.”
 War threw a spotlight on “domestic virtue”
 Also imbued household work with a
political content
 By
 For
over a decade, gatherings of rebel
women received publicity in patriot press
 Sometimes, women in groups created mobs
scenes
 500 women, Abigail Adams reported,
harassed a MA merchant for hounding coffee
 Women’s associations also
 passed resolutions to patronize merchants
who supported the rebel cause
 and took oaths renounce marriage with
men who did not support the patriot cause
 Sewing
circles
 Groups as large as
60 or 70 women
convened to
 spin, weave, and
sew – a political act
 Most famous to sew
 Betsy Ross
 Who may have
sewed the first
American flag
 The

war also disrupted families.
had mixed effects.
 In
absence of men, women were sometimes
able to assume new authority and larger roles

taking over and managing farms and businesses
 Many
were unprepared for such a
responsibility but responsibility provided
opportunity
 Women’s competent management

made some men pay more attention to their
wives’ roles
 household
work was customarily regarded as
trivial and inconsequential
 When
women looked back to the years of
the Revolution what did they remember?
 Several themes repeated with great
frequency
 War had been a nightmare

A



frightened people and disrupted lives.
time when women had chosen
political identities
prided themselves on their loyalism or on their
patriotism
performed services for the government of their
choice
 But
were these only temporary gains?
Women
who had survived
strong and courageous
Republic offered only grudging
response to their sacrifices
Americans did not choose to
explore the socially radical
implications of their republican
ideology.
 Revolution
and the Republic that
followed were considered men’s work
 “To be an adept in the art of
Government,” Abigail Adams observed
to her husband, “is a prerogative to
which your Sex lay almost an exclusive
claim.”
 Women
were left to invent their own
political character.
Active
citizenship in the
republic

the explicit province of men
Women
had to invent a new
ideology of citizenship
Merge domestic with new
public ideology of individual
responsibility and civic virtue
 consensus
developed around the
idea that a mother

committed to the service of her family
and to the state
 Might
serve a political purpose
 Those who opposed new role had
to meet the proposal
 That women should play a political
role

Raising of a patriotic child
A
Mother was to encourage in her sons
civic interest and participation.
 She was to educate her children and
guide them in the paths of morality and
virtue.
 But not to tell her male relatives for
whom to vote.
 She was a citizen but not really a
constituent.

Women's
historian,
Linda Kerber,
coined this
experience
"Republican
Motherhood."

Abigail Adams, wife and
mother of United States
Presidents
 Example of a woman in
the role of Republican
Mother.
 In a letter to her son,
John Quincy Adams


while he was at Holland
College in 1780
gave advice to the
foundations of virtue
and obligations she is
hopeful he will achieve.
 “Justice,
humanity, and benevolence are the
duties you owe to society in general.
 To your country the same duties are incumbent
upon you, with the additional obligation of
sacrificing ease, pleasure, wealth, and life itself
for its defense and security.
 To your parents you owe love, reverence, and
obedience to all just and equitable commands.
 To yourself- here, indeed, is a wide field to
expatiate you. To become what you ought to
be, and what a fond mother wishes to see
you…”
 Republican
Motherhood was a very
important, even revolutionary, invention.
 Altered the female domain in which most
women had always lived out their lives
 Justified women's absorption and
participation in the civic culture.
 The role of Republican Motherhood
paved the way for the emergence of the
public woman.
 Influence on sons
 through teaching of civic duties and virtue
 Changed
American politics.
 Republican Motherhood
 A very important step for women
towards the public sphere.
 1780s Republican Motherhood
stimulated debate on women’s
education

Provoking the founding of female academies

Writer Judith Sargent
Murray argued that
women’s only
disability lay in their
lack of education
 In an article “On the
Equality of the Sexes”
published in 1790,
Murray pondered
whether men were, in
fact, mentally superior
to women
 Murray,




finding signs of
reason,
imagination,
memory,
and judgment among women
 Proposed
that women’s deficiencies were
due to their limited knowledge
 “We can only reason from what we know,
and if opportunity of acquiring knowledge
hath been denied us, the inferiority of our sex
cannot fairly be deduced from thence.”
 According
to Murray:
 If girls were educated like boys,
the difference in intellectual
capacities would disappear.
 Women needed education to
 Develop their intellect and
encouragement to use their
intellect and knowledge
 Advocates
 like
of women’s education
Murray
 argued strenuously that the
purpose was not to make women
like men
 but rather to enable them to
properly fulfill their role in the new
republic
 Republican motherhood