Daughters of Liberty
To the editor:
Our 250th Anniversary encourages us to gauge how well the civic principles championed by the Revolution endure in the effort to create a constitutional republic dedicated to self-determination. The Declaration was asserted to agree with “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” What were these selfevident truths? “That all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” These are lofty, inspiring ideals.
Between 1765 and 1776, such ideals inspired insurrection, even mob violence. Agitation was stoked by writers in several colonies, perhaps none more important than Sam Adams, of Boston, John Adams’ cousin. Sam used several pseudonyms to write countless letters that circulated throughout the colonies to incite resistance to King and Parliament. Focus on the heroes of the Revolution emphasizes the roles played by men, but Sam Adams realized that without women’s enduring support freedom and liberty could not be achieved. As the colonies banned tea, women made do. As the colonies proclaimed non-importation, women made do. As men engaged in various acts of resistance, women had to make do by tending animals, gardening, and supplying garments. They spun cotton and wool, wove cloth, and knitted caps and socks. Women and girls were exposed, without brothers, husbands and sons to defend them, to depredations unique to females (as occurs in today’s sex-trafficking).
British soldiers were quartered in colonists’ houses. Women were expected to care for them. Women were accosted in their homes and on streets, even for laundry and clothing that British Red Coats wanted. Women’s closed doors did not protect them. Their movements were monitored and controlled. The British wanted to know what mischief women and girls were up to.
About 1766 as Daughters of Liberty, women formed spinning parties and boycotted products, especially tea. Adams was openly pleased to see women—grandmothers, mothers and girls—sitting spinning, making clothes and knitting by candlelight. As products, such as paints, were listed as not to be purchased to resist British tyranny, women improvised. They foraged for red and yellow pigments in the soil and rocks near their homes. The strict Christian members of New England, Puritan stock, endured noisy parades that interrupted church services, as well as theft, prostitution, and profanity, especially on the Sabbath. Violations targeted women’s virtue, probity, and sobriety.
In the face of such challenges, women in the same proportion of the population as men supported the call to liberty. Women were committed to liberty because they recognized the self-determination rights they did not enjoy, the right to an education, to own property, and to vote, among others.
We often stress how the Revolution was fought for liberty, but it really opposed tyranny. We dramatize all that was achieved by the Revolution following the Declaration, but we fail to acknowledge how much the pursuit of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” was denied to women. Ideals expressed in 1776 and in the Constitution were not for “we the people,” but almost entirely for “We” white male propertyowning citizens.
Patriot women such as Abigail Adams, Anne Willing Bingham, Mercy Otis Warren, Eliza Harriot, and Mary Wollstonecroft argued that the ideals of the Revolution must be guaranteed to women. Deborah Sampson disguised herself as a man, fought in battle, was wounded, and earned full military pension for her service. Such women argued that in the opinion of the new American government, women enjoyed no more status than “pigs and sheep, insects and beasts.” George Washington’s wife, Martha Dandridge Custis, perhaps the wealthiest widow of the day, needed a strapping young, “second son” of a prominent family, to be her husband and help her protect her inheritance. She married George in 1759 and endured his years away from home in service of the nation. Even with her position, title, and wealth, she could not vote for her husband as the first president of the United States.