August 24, 2022 • 23 mins
One of the remarkable myths of the American Revolution is that it was an all male affair. Really? An eight year home front war and American women didn't notice it? In fact, women played vital roles throughout the war — from enforcing the boycotts of British imports to writing and publishing propaganda, from nursing the soldiers at Valley Forge to scavenging active battle fields for usable clothing and weapons.
Carol Berkin dispels the myth that the success of the war rested solely on the shoulders of "great men" and explores the valuable contributions that women made to the effort — and beyond. Carol Berkin is Presidential Professor of History at Baruch College and a member of the history faculty of the Graduate Center of CUNY. She has worked as a consultant on several PBS and History Channel documentaries, including, The Scottsboro Boys, which was nominated for an Academy Award.
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Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Was the American Revolution a stag affair? Only men were involved?
A group of women of my generation who historians began
to think about this after we got tenure, very important
after we got tenure. Before we got tenure, we wrote
dissertations about white men, The science of Happiness, Appreciating modern painting,
(00:23):
Dilemmas of modern medicae, Abraham Lincoln at the Civil War,
history of jazz, the artistic genius of Michel Angeli, When
intuition face turning points that changed American history, psychology of
religious There One Day University. The most acclaimed and popular
(00:44):
professors from top colleges. They're best lectures, fascinating conversations. Hi,
I'm Richard Davies. Let's learn, and we said, this is
an eight year home front war. Carolder in and my
lectures Women of the American Revolution. It was fought and vileges.
(01:06):
Did women not notice? Here's the question? Where is half
the population? Almost every painting and nearly all of the
history books about the American Revolution talk a lot about men.
(01:26):
Women seem to be missing from the American Revolution. So
why is that? Well that history is written by men,
it's also written by people who largely believe that formal
politics and military life, both of which produce great heroic figures,
(01:48):
are the stuff of history. It took until the nineties,
sixties and seventies to even begin to talk about what
Jesse Lemish called history from the bottom up. As long
as historians thought of ordinary people women African Americans as
(02:08):
being passive figures, there was no reason to write about them.
But you say they were not passive, Absolutely, they weren't.
No one is a passive figure. One way to understand
that is that people, many people don't have many choices,
but they always have a choice. And when you make
(02:31):
a choice about how you're going to live, about what
you believe in, about how you're going to act, you
are an agent of history. And that is the message
of social history. So that instead of writing, for instance,
Lincoln freed the slaves, you might want to consider that
(02:53):
many slaves pick themselves up and walked to freedom or
fought against their oppressors. So you begin to have a
completely different perspective when you recognize that all those people
that have been sort of passive observers of history are
(03:14):
really active agents of it. And we have those of
us who do African American history, those of us who
do women's history, those of us who do working class history.
The whole way I think that we look at history
has been transformed since the late twentieth century in what way? Well,
(03:36):
in that this rise of social history and this belief
in what we call agency or being an agent making
choices about your future, has changed where change in history
comes from. That now we see change and continuity, which
are the two essences of history. That those are driven.
(04:00):
The engine of that is not just the men at
the top, or even the women at the top, It's
the people who participate in sustaining it or changing it.
What is the mission of your one day university lecture?
What are you hoping people will take away from it?
(04:22):
I am hoping that they'll be entertained by the stories,
because some of the amazing tales of women who are spies,
and women who dresses men in the army, and women
who write plays and are interesting in their own right.
The heart of history is people, and a lot of
(04:43):
these women are simply interesting people. But I also want
them to see that they have been given a version
of the American Revolution that is wildly incomplete. We know
from home for on Wars in our modern times, that
the entire civilian population is wrapped up in these wars.
(05:07):
Women were going out to hang up their laundry and
the battles going on in their wheat fields, and they
don't notice, they don't participate. It's an absurd version. What
do you try to do, then, given that we've been
fed this wildly inaccurate version of the history of the America,
(05:27):
I try to deconstruct that version. I try to insert
women here all along the way, Valley Forge. Insert women here,
the boycotts that preceded the war, Insert women here, military
life insert there's no part with the exception of formal
(05:50):
political decision making. But everything else, everything else. You are
only seeing a sliver of the complexity. So let's look
at the everything else. Valley Forge. Valley Forge, like many areas,
for instance, in Vietnam during the war, anywhere the army went,
(06:14):
cities arose immediately because women, children, their pet dogs. They
all flocked to the winter quarters of the army, because
otherwise they might starve, they might be attacked by enemy soldiers,
their farms might be burned down. Washington hated it. He
(06:42):
hated it. He had this image of this professional army
professional as the British Army was, and having you know,
children running around was not his idea. So he wanted
to be agile. He wanted the army to move, and
every time he would try to move he as hilarious
records in his quartermaster books. He says, I was trying
(07:05):
to move the army quickly, but eight women were in
labor and I had to wait until the babies were delivered.
I mean, for Washington, this was a horrible thing. He
didn't drive the women out. Anybody guess why because if
the women left, the men would have left. And what
did they do there? They gathered the fuel for fires.
(07:27):
They nursed the soldiers who were largely sick from communicable diseases,
not injuries. They did the laundry, and that was terribly
important because these young boys who were soldiers were covered
in lice. They prepared the food. They served in many
ways as a sort of informal quartermaster corps, providing services
(07:53):
and supplies that the men needed. And that's a perfect
example of the small things that make a big difference.
Those are the camps. What happened when the army traveled,
many women went with them, and they were sent out
onto the battlefield to scavenge boots, coats, any clothing that
(08:18):
would be valuable, and weapons, and many of them were
killed or wounded because they were in the midst of
the battle. So they were not luxury items in this
tale of the American Revolution. They were actually veterans of
the battles. And one of the best examples of this,
of course, the famous Molly Pitcher. You know, there was
(08:42):
no such person. Molly was a very common nickname, and
they were called Molly pitcher because in the forts where
they fired cannons. And I had to learn this because
I thought these women were bringing water to the men
to drink. When you fire a cannon, it gets very hot,
(09:03):
and in order to reload it, you have to reach
inside it and tamp down the material that you're going
to fire off. And if there are any sparks left
in there and you push in the paper, that precedes
the cannon ball boom. So they had to cool down
the cannon after every firing. So the women would be
(09:23):
in the barracks and then the men were at the
cannons and they would fire the cannon and then they
would shout Molly Pitcher, and a woman would come running
out with a pitcher of water and it would be
poured on the cannon. We have two hundred and fifty
applications by women who were injured in a battle in
(09:47):
the forts and who were asking for veterans pay, and
there were probably a lot more, yes, many more, that
we simply don't have records of. None of them, by
the way, got anything you say women were political, that
they became political in the seventeen sixties before the revolution exactly.
(10:09):
I think one of the most radical consequences of the
protests and the war was the instant politicization of women.
For a century and a half, women had been told
be silent, don't participate in public discourse, don't bother your
(10:32):
heads with politics. You're not smart enough to do this.
That's men's world. In seventeen sixty five, the stamp ac
comes along, and the policy that got it repealed and
the acts that followed repealed, was the boycott of British
manufactured goods. Patrick Henry, a rated Legislature's Assembly, sent letters
(10:57):
to Parliament. People wrote treatises about how unfair what the
British were doing. In the response of Parliament was these Americans,
the descendants of horse traders and thieves. That people in
Parliament didn't even know that Virginia wasn't right next to Massachusetts,
I mean America was. America was the boomdocks. They didn't care.
(11:20):
But when the Americans decided to boycott British tea and
British cloth, Parliament perked up because the British Industrial Revolution
that was beginning was based on cloth and America was
the primary market. And the British East India Tea Company
guess who all the stockholders were. Men in Parliament. And
(11:43):
when Americans said, we're gonna boycott everything you planned to
sell us until you repeal the Stamp Act and then
later the Townsend Acts and the Tea Act, we're not
going to buy anything from you. Well, who was responsible
for making that boycott work? Who bought the cloth, who
(12:06):
needed the cloth? Who had the tea parties? Women? It
was all about women participating. And when they started to participate,
they became politically conscious that what they were doing was
defending the liberty of American colonists. And they said it
(12:31):
by referring to the cloth they spun as liberty cloth.
And they referred in their letters to one another to
being perfect statesmen talking about politics. And all those men
who had told them to be quiet for hundred and
fifty years, all those ministers who had told them to
(12:53):
be quiet, are now suddenly singing their praises, now suddenly
saying you are the defenders of American liberty. Horsaf for you.
So if those women had merely been meek and silent
fall exactly, there wouldn't have been the energy behind Exactly.
(13:14):
Women signed petitions, uh declarations that they put in newspapers,
and they signed it with their names, and they expressly said,
we are doing this ourselves, not because our husbands suggested it.
I mean, this is political action, and it happened literally overnight.
(13:38):
It's the most extraordinary politicization of a group of people
that I know of, and they are responsible for the
repeal of every one of those laws. You sound fired
up by this stuff always. I once had a student
who said to me, you know, miss Birkin, I don't
I don't care that much about history, but it seems
(13:59):
to there's so much to you that I'm going to
do the work in this class. And I never understand
why people don't realize how interesting the past is and
how important it is to get it right. Why well,
because myths are dangerous. Myths reinforced the idea that the
(14:24):
American Revolution was a stag event, you know, only men,
only men did it plays a role in assumptions that
generation after generation will have about what women can do
and what women can't do, And so it's really important
to understand what roles they played to shape attitudes later on.
(14:51):
The consequences of that are really relevant right up until today,
right up until modern times. One of the many unreported
acts of women in the American Revolution was how they
took over farms and shops and businesses. Why was that
(15:15):
so difficult to do housework in the eighteenth century was
household production? Men were the unskilled laborers. Women were the
skilled laborers. Men did the grunt work in the field,
but women processed raw materials into usable items. Everybody acknowledged
(15:42):
that there was not a farmer in the world who
didn't want to have a wife because she knew what
was called the mysteries of house swiffery. Any medieval scholars
out there, okay, who had mysteries raftsmen, the mysteries of goldsmithing,
(16:04):
the mystery of barrel making, these were the secrets of
the profession, and that meant that you were an artisan.
They talked about the mysteries of how swiffery, meaning they
knew that women had production skills that men did not have,
and that was the primary activity besides bearing children that
(16:28):
women had. Their houses were filthy. They didn't bother with
washing and cleaning. My students think housewife. They decorate the table,
they make the napkins matched the place matt, they put
flowers on the table. That's not what how swiffery was.
How swiffery was turning flax into cloth, slaughtering pigs and chickens,
(16:52):
and preserving and cooking the meat, taking the apples from
the orchard, and making cider, making butter, all of the
things that families needed. As my son once said to me,
I would have just ordered in pizza. Not a historian,
my son. So here's what you're gonna see. A man
goes off to war. A woman is left not only
(17:15):
with all the maintenance and the production chores, but with
maybe she's pregnant, maybe she has a baby in her arms.
She hasn't wean, she has toddlers, and there are no
safety latches on anything. So you're watching your children. You
are holding your children, and now you have to also
go out and manage the field. But it depended a
(17:39):
lot on whether you were wealthy enough, because for the
average American farm woman, this was a tremendous heroic action.
For many years, we have letters from from farm wives
saying to their husband's in the army, we interest coming.
(18:01):
Your children will freeze, we have no firewood, Your children
will starve. The British Army has taken all our food.
Come home, Come home. Married women were men's property. Yes, yes,
legally you were the ward of your father, and when
(18:22):
you got married you became fem covert woman covered taken
care of by a man, and you lost your legal identity.
You couldn't sewer, be suits, you couldn't own property everything
you brought into the marriage, and your body belonged to
your husband. When a slave ran away, the poster put
(18:46):
up said runaway. If a wife ran away from her husband,
the poster said, she has abducted her body from me.
In the twentieth century, there was still states that said
that a woman's body belonged to her husband. Did the
status of women change as a result of the war,
(19:11):
that's a very complicated question. They didn't get married women's
property rights, They certainly didn't get political rights. Very little
changed in terms of the context in which they would
make their choices, but some things did change that would
have long term consequences. Even before the Revolution, Enlightenment ideas
(19:36):
had come to the elites of the colonies, and the
Enlightenment ideas, among other things, made this remarkable observation that
all human beings are capable of rational thought. This was
a new idea. Throughout the whole colonial period. It was
assumed that women, because they had small and weak brains
(20:00):
that science in the eighteenth century smile and weak brains,
couldn't think rationally, and what that meant was they couldn't
judge right from wrong. Children we're not raised by women.
Women could teach girls household production, but the educating of
(20:21):
their children to be citizens in the community, only the
rational partner could do that. As manufacturing and trade further
developed in the Northeast, more men were separated their business
from their home, so they weren't really around to educate
(20:43):
their sareness about how important it was to be patriots
and to sacrifice. The out of the Dada, But the
Enlightenment and the Revolution had taught them that women, contrary
to earlier thought, were actually capable of ration sational thought.
They were actually capable of deciding right from wrong, and
(21:04):
they had proved it day after day in the American Revolution.
And a lot of the women they were talking about
when they talked about American women were middle and upper
class white women, right, That's who they envisioned. And these
women didn't have to engage in how swiffery anymore. In
towns and cities, you could buy cloth, you could buy
(21:25):
chickens already killed, you could buy produce, you could go
to a green grocer, and you had servants, and you
had slaves who could do the actual housework. So these
women didn't have how swiffery chores anymore. So the idea
developed that you would let women socialize the children. Not
(21:50):
only would you let them, but you would persuade women
that this was the most important civic duty in the existence.
On your shoulders rests the survival of the republic. And
women took up the challenge. And what happens after the
(22:11):
American Revolution in every colony from Massachusetts to Georgia is
the rise of young ladies academies. It is very dangerous
to educate people, very dangerous, and it's very dangerous for
a group of women to be all together for several
(22:34):
years talking about their condition. What you mean, It isn't
just me, it's the whole society. Seventy years later, which
in historical terms is just a little blip, women gather
at Seneca Falls, they write the Declaration of Sentiments, and
(22:56):
they demand equality. That's the consequences of the revolution. Thank
you very much, Thank you. I'm Richard Davies. Thanks for listening.
(23:17):
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Was the American Revolution a stag affair? Only men were involved?
A group of women of my generation who historians began
to think about this after we got tenure, very important
after we got tenure. Before we got tenure, we wrote
dissertations about white men, The science of Happiness, Appreciating modern painting,
(00:23):
Dilemmas of modern medicae, Abraham Lincoln at the Civil War,
history of jazz, the artistic genius of Michel Angeli, When
intuition face turning points that changed American history, psychology of
religious There One Day University. The most acclaimed and popular
(00:44):
professors from top colleges. They're best lectures, fascinating conversations. Hi,
I'm Richard Davies. Let's learn, and we said, this is
an eight year home front war. Carolder in and my
lectures Women of the American Revolution. It was fought and vileges.
(01:06):
Did women not notice? Here's the question? Where is half
the population? Almost every painting and nearly all of the
history books about the American Revolution talk a lot about men.
(01:26):
Women seem to be missing from the American Revolution. So
why is that? Well that history is written by men,
it's also written by people who largely believe that formal
politics and military life, both of which produce great heroic figures,
(01:48):
are the stuff of history. It took until the nineties,
sixties and seventies to even begin to talk about what
Jesse Lemish called history from the bottom up. As long
as historians thought of ordinary people women African Americans as
(02:08):
being passive figures, there was no reason to write about them.
But you say they were not passive, Absolutely, they weren't.
No one is a passive figure. One way to understand
that is that people, many people don't have many choices,
but they always have a choice. And when you make
(02:31):
a choice about how you're going to live, about what
you believe in, about how you're going to act, you
are an agent of history. And that is the message
of social history. So that instead of writing, for instance,
Lincoln freed the slaves, you might want to consider that
(02:53):
many slaves pick themselves up and walked to freedom or
fought against their oppressors. So you begin to have a
completely different perspective when you recognize that all those people
that have been sort of passive observers of history are
(03:14):
really active agents of it. And we have those of
us who do African American history, those of us who
do women's history, those of us who do working class history.
The whole way I think that we look at history
has been transformed since the late twentieth century in what way? Well,
(03:36):
in that this rise of social history and this belief
in what we call agency or being an agent making
choices about your future, has changed where change in history
comes from. That now we see change and continuity, which
are the two essences of history. That those are driven.
(04:00):
The engine of that is not just the men at
the top, or even the women at the top, It's
the people who participate in sustaining it or changing it.
What is the mission of your one day university lecture?
What are you hoping people will take away from it?
(04:22):
I am hoping that they'll be entertained by the stories,
because some of the amazing tales of women who are spies,
and women who dresses men in the army, and women
who write plays and are interesting in their own right.
The heart of history is people, and a lot of
(04:43):
these women are simply interesting people. But I also want
them to see that they have been given a version
of the American Revolution that is wildly incomplete. We know
from home for on Wars in our modern times, that
the entire civilian population is wrapped up in these wars.
(05:07):
Women were going out to hang up their laundry and
the battles going on in their wheat fields, and they
don't notice, they don't participate. It's an absurd version. What
do you try to do, then, given that we've been
fed this wildly inaccurate version of the history of the America,
(05:27):
I try to deconstruct that version. I try to insert
women here all along the way, Valley Forge. Insert women here,
the boycotts that preceded the war, Insert women here, military
life insert there's no part with the exception of formal
(05:50):
political decision making. But everything else, everything else. You are
only seeing a sliver of the complexity. So let's look
at the everything else. Valley Forge. Valley Forge, like many areas,
for instance, in Vietnam during the war, anywhere the army went,
(06:14):
cities arose immediately because women, children, their pet dogs. They
all flocked to the winter quarters of the army, because
otherwise they might starve, they might be attacked by enemy soldiers,
their farms might be burned down. Washington hated it. He
(06:42):
hated it. He had this image of this professional army
professional as the British Army was, and having you know,
children running around was not his idea. So he wanted
to be agile. He wanted the army to move, and
every time he would try to move he as hilarious
records in his quartermaster books. He says, I was trying
(07:05):
to move the army quickly, but eight women were in
labor and I had to wait until the babies were delivered.
I mean, for Washington, this was a horrible thing. He
didn't drive the women out. Anybody guess why because if
the women left, the men would have left. And what
did they do there? They gathered the fuel for fires.
(07:27):
They nursed the soldiers who were largely sick from communicable diseases,
not injuries. They did the laundry, and that was terribly
important because these young boys who were soldiers were covered
in lice. They prepared the food. They served in many
ways as a sort of informal quartermaster corps, providing services
(07:53):
and supplies that the men needed. And that's a perfect
example of the small things that make a big difference.
Those are the camps. What happened when the army traveled,
many women went with them, and they were sent out
onto the battlefield to scavenge boots, coats, any clothing that
(08:18):
would be valuable, and weapons, and many of them were
killed or wounded because they were in the midst of
the battle. So they were not luxury items in this
tale of the American Revolution. They were actually veterans of
the battles. And one of the best examples of this,
of course, the famous Molly Pitcher. You know, there was
(08:42):
no such person. Molly was a very common nickname, and
they were called Molly pitcher because in the forts where
they fired cannons. And I had to learn this because
I thought these women were bringing water to the men
to drink. When you fire a cannon, it gets very hot,
(09:03):
and in order to reload it, you have to reach
inside it and tamp down the material that you're going
to fire off. And if there are any sparks left
in there and you push in the paper, that precedes
the cannon ball boom. So they had to cool down
the cannon after every firing. So the women would be
(09:23):
in the barracks and then the men were at the
cannons and they would fire the cannon and then they
would shout Molly Pitcher, and a woman would come running
out with a pitcher of water and it would be
poured on the cannon. We have two hundred and fifty
applications by women who were injured in a battle in
(09:47):
the forts and who were asking for veterans pay, and
there were probably a lot more, yes, many more, that
we simply don't have records of. None of them, by
the way, got anything you say women were political, that
they became political in the seventeen sixties before the revolution exactly.
(10:09):
I think one of the most radical consequences of the
protests and the war was the instant politicization of women.
For a century and a half, women had been told
be silent, don't participate in public discourse, don't bother your
(10:32):
heads with politics. You're not smart enough to do this.
That's men's world. In seventeen sixty five, the stamp ac
comes along, and the policy that got it repealed and
the acts that followed repealed, was the boycott of British
manufactured goods. Patrick Henry, a rated Legislature's Assembly, sent letters
(10:57):
to Parliament. People wrote treatises about how unfair what the
British were doing. In the response of Parliament was these Americans,
the descendants of horse traders and thieves. That people in
Parliament didn't even know that Virginia wasn't right next to Massachusetts,
I mean America was. America was the boomdocks. They didn't care.
(11:20):
But when the Americans decided to boycott British tea and
British cloth, Parliament perked up because the British Industrial Revolution
that was beginning was based on cloth and America was
the primary market. And the British East India Tea Company
guess who all the stockholders were. Men in Parliament. And
(11:43):
when Americans said, we're gonna boycott everything you planned to
sell us until you repeal the Stamp Act and then
later the Townsend Acts and the Tea Act, we're not
going to buy anything from you. Well, who was responsible
for making that boycott work? Who bought the cloth, who
(12:06):
needed the cloth? Who had the tea parties? Women? It
was all about women participating. And when they started to participate,
they became politically conscious that what they were doing was
defending the liberty of American colonists. And they said it
(12:31):
by referring to the cloth they spun as liberty cloth.
And they referred in their letters to one another to
being perfect statesmen talking about politics. And all those men
who had told them to be quiet for hundred and
fifty years, all those ministers who had told them to
(12:53):
be quiet, are now suddenly singing their praises, now suddenly
saying you are the defenders of American liberty. Horsaf for you.
So if those women had merely been meek and silent
fall exactly, there wouldn't have been the energy behind Exactly.
(13:14):
Women signed petitions, uh declarations that they put in newspapers,
and they signed it with their names, and they expressly said,
we are doing this ourselves, not because our husbands suggested it.
I mean, this is political action, and it happened literally overnight.
(13:38):
It's the most extraordinary politicization of a group of people
that I know of, and they are responsible for the
repeal of every one of those laws. You sound fired
up by this stuff always. I once had a student
who said to me, you know, miss Birkin, I don't
I don't care that much about history, but it seems
(13:59):
to there's so much to you that I'm going to
do the work in this class. And I never understand
why people don't realize how interesting the past is and
how important it is to get it right. Why well,
because myths are dangerous. Myths reinforced the idea that the
(14:24):
American Revolution was a stag event, you know, only men,
only men did it plays a role in assumptions that
generation after generation will have about what women can do
and what women can't do, And so it's really important
to understand what roles they played to shape attitudes later on.
(14:51):
The consequences of that are really relevant right up until today,
right up until modern times. One of the many unreported
acts of women in the American Revolution was how they
took over farms and shops and businesses. Why was that
(15:15):
so difficult to do housework in the eighteenth century was
household production? Men were the unskilled laborers. Women were the
skilled laborers. Men did the grunt work in the field,
but women processed raw materials into usable items. Everybody acknowledged
(15:42):
that there was not a farmer in the world who
didn't want to have a wife because she knew what
was called the mysteries of house swiffery. Any medieval scholars
out there, okay, who had mysteries raftsmen, the mysteries of goldsmithing,
(16:04):
the mystery of barrel making, these were the secrets of
the profession, and that meant that you were an artisan.
They talked about the mysteries of how swiffery, meaning they
knew that women had production skills that men did not have,
and that was the primary activity besides bearing children that
(16:28):
women had. Their houses were filthy. They didn't bother with
washing and cleaning. My students think housewife. They decorate the table,
they make the napkins matched the place matt, they put
flowers on the table. That's not what how swiffery was.
How swiffery was turning flax into cloth, slaughtering pigs and chickens,
(16:52):
and preserving and cooking the meat, taking the apples from
the orchard, and making cider, making butter, all of the
things that families needed. As my son once said to me,
I would have just ordered in pizza. Not a historian,
my son. So here's what you're gonna see. A man
goes off to war. A woman is left not only
(17:15):
with all the maintenance and the production chores, but with
maybe she's pregnant, maybe she has a baby in her arms.
She hasn't wean, she has toddlers, and there are no
safety latches on anything. So you're watching your children. You
are holding your children, and now you have to also
go out and manage the field. But it depended a
(17:39):
lot on whether you were wealthy enough, because for the
average American farm woman, this was a tremendous heroic action.
For many years, we have letters from from farm wives
saying to their husband's in the army, we interest coming.
(18:01):
Your children will freeze, we have no firewood, Your children
will starve. The British Army has taken all our food.
Come home, Come home. Married women were men's property. Yes, yes,
legally you were the ward of your father, and when
(18:22):
you got married you became fem covert woman covered taken
care of by a man, and you lost your legal identity.
You couldn't sewer, be suits, you couldn't own property everything
you brought into the marriage, and your body belonged to
your husband. When a slave ran away, the poster put
(18:46):
up said runaway. If a wife ran away from her husband,
the poster said, she has abducted her body from me.
In the twentieth century, there was still states that said
that a woman's body belonged to her husband. Did the
status of women change as a result of the war,
(19:11):
that's a very complicated question. They didn't get married women's
property rights, They certainly didn't get political rights. Very little
changed in terms of the context in which they would
make their choices, but some things did change that would
have long term consequences. Even before the Revolution, Enlightenment ideas
(19:36):
had come to the elites of the colonies, and the
Enlightenment ideas, among other things, made this remarkable observation that
all human beings are capable of rational thought. This was
a new idea. Throughout the whole colonial period. It was
assumed that women, because they had small and weak brains
(20:00):
that science in the eighteenth century smile and weak brains,
couldn't think rationally, and what that meant was they couldn't
judge right from wrong. Children we're not raised by women.
Women could teach girls household production, but the educating of
(20:21):
their children to be citizens in the community, only the
rational partner could do that. As manufacturing and trade further
developed in the Northeast, more men were separated their business
from their home, so they weren't really around to educate
(20:43):
their sareness about how important it was to be patriots
and to sacrifice. The out of the Dada, But the
Enlightenment and the Revolution had taught them that women, contrary
to earlier thought, were actually capable of ration sational thought.
They were actually capable of deciding right from wrong, and
(21:04):
they had proved it day after day in the American Revolution.
And a lot of the women they were talking about
when they talked about American women were middle and upper
class white women, right, That's who they envisioned. And these
women didn't have to engage in how swiffery anymore. In
towns and cities, you could buy cloth, you could buy
(21:25):
chickens already killed, you could buy produce, you could go
to a green grocer, and you had servants, and you
had slaves who could do the actual housework. So these
women didn't have how swiffery chores anymore. So the idea
developed that you would let women socialize the children. Not
(21:50):
only would you let them, but you would persuade women
that this was the most important civic duty in the existence.
On your shoulders rests the survival of the republic. And
women took up the challenge. And what happens after the
(22:11):
American Revolution in every colony from Massachusetts to Georgia is
the rise of young ladies academies. It is very dangerous
to educate people, very dangerous, and it's very dangerous for
a group of women to be all together for several
(22:34):
years talking about their condition. What you mean, It isn't
just me, it's the whole society. Seventy years later, which
in historical terms is just a little blip, women gather
at Seneca Falls, they write the Declaration of Sentiments, and
(22:56):
they demand equality. That's the consequences of the revolution. Thank
you very much, Thank you. I'm Richard Davies. Thanks for listening.
(23:17):
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