“TO SPEND…WHAT OTHERS GET”
Sixteen-year-old Hetty Shepard came from the country to visit a friend in Boston in 1676 and was thunderstruck by how much stuff was available in the stores. “Through all my life I have never seen such an array of fashion and splendor,” she wrote. “Silken hoods, scarlet petticoats, with silver lace, white…plaited gowns, bone lace and silken scarves. The men with periwigs, ruffles and ribbons.” America was undergoing the first of what would become a long line of consumer revolutions. Soon, even humble families began to acquire something more than the bare necessities—a teapot or a painted dish might brighten up a housewife’s dark cabin. Wealthier colonial families began importing books, pictures, and rich clothing from Europe and installing real glass in their windows. Most homes were still very simple, with no carpets or curtains and minimal lighting. But families were dining off individual plates, drinking from their own cups, and sitting in their own chairs. By 1700, most women were no longer confined to benches and stools—although the backs on the newly available chairs were, unfortunately, very hard and straight.
On the frontier, life was pretty much the same as it had been in the early 1600s. While he was traveling through the Shenandoah Valley in 1748, George Washington spent the night with a family that had not yet acquired the luxury of beds. He “lay down before the fire upon a little hay, straw, fodder or bearskin…with man, wife, and children, like a parcel of dogs and cats.” But the settled parts of the country were becoming more civilized, and in many ways, things were getting easier. Even farm families could acquire bolts of cloth from the nearest store, freeing housewives from the tyranny of the spinning wheel. Everyday necessities like candles and soap, which had to be manufactured at home in the seventeenth century, could be purchased in the eighteenth. American women would have regarded this as a definite improvement, but the change also seems to have contributed to a slippage in their status. The housewife’s contribution to the family started to be described in terms of emotional support, not the kind of economic partnership that had led Ensign Hewlitt to honor his wife’s right to do what she wanted with the profits from her turkeys and geese. Some newspapers started ridiculing housewives as spongers, lazy and trivial. Women, Cotton Mather told his female readers, “have little more Worldly Business, than to spend…what others Get.”
Most women actually performed as much labor as they had a generation earlier. Although they may have done less spinning, higher standards of cleanliness dictated that they do much more washing and sweeping and polishing. But their husbands hardly noticed their efforts and found it hard to connect them with the support of the family. On the farm, instead of planting flax that their wives turned into linen, men planted cash crops that they sold, and bought cloth with the profit. The women seemed to be out of the loop entirely. The era of barter economy, in which they had played such an important part, was closing. And in some places, their exclusion from the world of commerce was much starker. In New Amsterdam, the Dutch had followed the traditions of their mother country and encouraged female entrepreneurs, training both their young men and women to enter business careers. Dutch women could maintain a separate civil identity after marriage, buy and sell goods and property, contract debt, and determine who would inherit their property. But when the English took over in 1664, turning New Amsterdam into New York, the women’s rights began to erode. Dutch farmers in New York stopped leaving their estates equally to all their children and started giving their land to their sons while daughters got a cash bequest. By 1700 there was not a single woman trader left in Albany, and the number in New York City dropped from 134 in 1653 to 43 in 1774.
Just as women were losing their status as household producers, they were gaining respect as mothers. This was a new idea—to the degree that seventeenth-century opinion makers ever thought of child rearing at all, it was in terms of the father’s role. Women, who were supposed to be less intelligent, less self-controlled, and even a little silly, were hard for their sons to take seriously. (A well-known Puritan writer in England, who was also read in America, counseled boys that their duty to honor their mother was “the truest triall” of childhood.) But as fathers absented themselves from the home, mothers became the main nurturers of the next generation. Women were also beginning to get a much larger role in religion, particularly in New England. Church membership, which had been so central to the life of every community in the seventeenth century, began to decline, and women began to outnumber men in most congregations. The conflict between religious values and sharp business practices that had tormented the early Puritans was resolved tidily by putting the men in charge of business and the women, under the minister’s leadership, in charge of church.
“LEFT TO PONDER ON A STRIP OF CARPET”
Women’s economic power was narrowing even faster in the pre-Revolutionary South, but the region still continued to produce some remarkable women, worthy successors to the pioneers who dared malaria and shipwreck to seek their fortunes. Eliza Lucas was fifteen years old when her father moved the family to South Carolina in 1738, settling on a plantation seventeen miles from Charleston. George Lucas was called back to military duty the next year, and he left Eliza in charge of the plantation, as well as her invalid mother and younger sister. He knew what he was doing—Eliza not only kept her father’s properties running in his absence, she began experimenting with ways to diversify the area’s rice-based farm economy. She focused on indigo, a plant that was valued for the blue dye it produced, even though it was difficult to cultivate. By 1744—despite attempts at sabotage by the indigo expert her father had dispatched to help her—Eliza had successfully raised a crop of good commercial-grade dye and given away parcels of the seed to her neighbors. That was imaginative generosity, for it created enough supply to make it worthwhile for merchants to include South Carolina in their indigo trade. When she wasn’t busy revolutionizing the colony’s agriculture, Eliza found time to instruct her younger sister in French, set up a plantation school for the slave children, see to her father’s other business affairs, carry on an extensive correspondence, practice handicrafts, and teach herself shorthand. She eventually married the attorney Charles Pinckney, a widower much her senior. After his sudden death, she ran several plantations he had left in her care and reared her three formidable children. Her daughter managed her own husband’s plantations and both of her sons served as governor.
But most southern women weren’t given that kind of independence. Slavery was gradually dominating the culture of the South and there was little about the role of southern women that was not defined by the “peculiar institution.” By the time of the Revolutionary War, prosperous white women shunned almost every kind of physical labor, and they were dependent on slaves to do their housework—nearly a fifth of the workforce on some Virginia plantations was involved in household duties, and even a middle-class farmer might have two or three female slaves dedicated to chores like clothmaking or cooking. The self-sufficient Eliza Pinckney, living alone in old age in Charleston, still required six servants to run her household.
Wealthy southern families were beginning their experiment with the sort of cultivated lifestyle that we associate with the Gone with the Wind era. But the real life on the plantations, at least during the colonial era, was a peculiar combination of gentility and disorder. Just as the theoretically tidy Yankee farm families lived in yards full of garbage, the plantation hospitality had a wild edge that unnerved outsiders. The slaves were often the children of African parents, given neither the training nor the incentive to turn themselves into efficient butlers or maids. So meals were served several hours after the appointed time and the process of carrying the dishes from the cookhouse—always located away from the mansion—left much of the food overcooked and underheated. The plantations didn’t invest much in clothing for the slaves, either. “I have frequently seen in Virginia, on visits to gentlemen’s houses…young negroes from sixteen to twenty years old, with not an article of clothing, but a loose shirt, descending half way down their thighs, waiting at table where were ladies,” wrote one Revolutionary-era visitor.
Once southern agriculture had become dependent on slave labor, it became necessary to raise upper-class southern men to dominate, to control large numbers of potentially rebellious slaves, and impose their will upon them. The wives inevitably got the spillover. Southern white womanhood was supposed to be submissive, as well as frail and chaste, the better to contrast with black women who were thought of as sturdy and sexually promiscuous. Caroline Gilman, a lively southern matron who wrote a memoir of her life in South Carolina, described her internal battle to mold herself into a proper wife: “To repress a harsh answer, to confess a fault, and to stop (right or wrong) in the midst of self-defense, in gentle submission, sometimes requires a struggle like life and death; but these three efforts are the golden threads with which domestic happiness is woven.” She praised her husband as one of the rare men in South Carolina who included women in his conversation. None of the other men in the neighborhood, however, were interested in hearing anything she had to say and when male guests came to call, “after the ordinary questions were answered, I was usually left to ponder on the strip of carpet before the hearth, and wonder why it did not come up to the chairs” while the men talked over her, as if she was not in the room.
“THEY LACED HER UP, THEY STARVED HER DOWN”
In both the North and South, the daughters of the wealthy urban gentry were becoming the nation’s first leisure class. The girls learned fancy stitching, dancing, and music and spent a great deal of time worrying about their figures, which were supposed to be very slender and straight-backed. Elegant bearing was regarded as a critical accomplishment, and many young women spent their adolescence wearing harnesses or strapped to backboards in order to improve their posture. One Revolutionary physician recalled in verse:
They braced my aunt against a board,
To make her straight and tall
They laced her up, they starved her down
To make her light and small.
The “pretty gentlewoman” replaced the fecund workhorse as the colonial female ideal. When upper-class family matrons began sitting for their portraits, historian Laurel Ulrich has noted, the artists were encouraged to depict them not as the middle-aged mothers they were in real life but as “tiny-waisted, full-bosomed, raven-haired creatures.” Nicholas Culpepper, that best-selling author of medical advice books, offered a remedy to make matronly figures look more youthful: “Take hemlocks, shred them and boyl them in white-wine, then make plaster of them and apply them to the breasts.”
Visiting was the main occupation of many young women, and sometimes even their mothers. They traveled from one friend’s home to another, for stays of a few days or a few months, amusing themselves and exposing marriageable daughters to the widest possible array of suitors. Lucinda Lee, a wealthy Virginian, kept a diary of her two-month round of visits in the Revolutionary War era, and it depicts a life that would be regarded today as either extremely carefree or extremely useless. Lucinda and her friends read novels, entertained young men, played cards, fixed each other’s hair, went dancing and riding, and drove around in a carriage. She did note that she spent one morning “putting my clothes to rights—a dreadful task.”
As so often happened in American history, society was sending young women two completely opposite signals. They were expected to become wives who could perform an enormous number of tasks so skillfully that their husbands never noticed that they were busy. But they prepared for married life by spending their youth in leisure that was supposed to be so refined as to leave them almost immobile. (Dr. William Buchan, a popular writer on medical issues, advised that the only proper activities for young women were “playing on some musical instrument, singing and reading aloud delightful pieces of poetry or eloquence.”) Well-bred American girls were also getting a raft of advice about how to conceal their intelligence. A young woman’s literary magazine featured in its first issue the sad tale of one Amelia, a clergyman’s daughter who was taught Latin and Greek, and as a result became “negligent in her dress” and filled with “pride and pedantry.” In his popular A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters, John Gregory urgently advised young women to refrain from displaying their good sense in public: “If you happen to have any learning, keep it a profound secret, especially from the men, who generally look with a jealous and malignant eye on a woman of great parts, and a cultivated understanding.” Dr. Gregory, who had a habit of giving with one hand and then taking away with another, admitted that “a man of real genius and candor” would rise above such meanness. But he added that it was unlikely such a paragon would appear.
Fashion began to get very complicated in the eighteenth century. Most women continued to wear the loose skirts and smocks that farm wives had worn for generations. But upper-class wives and daughters tried to outdo one another in the most uncomfortable getups imaginable. Skirts acquired hoop petticoats so huge that ladies had trouble getting into carriages or walking two abreast on the streets. At one point the hoops were six feet in diameter, and wags reported that ministers of well-to-do congregations despaired of finding adequate seats for all those billowing churchgoers. Women also wore extremely tight corsets that covered much of the body, and shoes with very high heels, usually made of wood. When they were outdoors, they balanced their shoes on pattens—leather or iron or wooden clogs mounted on rings of iron. The pattens kept the thin-soled shoes out of the mud, but they made a stroll down the street as challenging as stilt-walking. When women went outside in daylight, they also wore masks to protect their complexion, as well as gloves to keep their hands smooth. (It’s hard to imagine how someone encumbered with a body-length corset and huge hoop skirt would be able to get involved in any activity conducive to nail breakage, let alone chapping.) Well-born little girls wore the same clothes as their mothers. Their stiffness in colonial portraits may reflect the fact that they had already been bound up in corsets.
The most spectacular eighteenth-century fashion was the tower hairdo, in which the hair was piled on top of the head in stiff poufs and topped by a wire frame covered with ribbons, beads, jewels, and feathers. The women must have looked like floats in a parade, but the towers went in and out of style several times over the 1700s. “Some of the ladies appear sensible and dress neat,” wrote John May after a visit to Philadelphia in 1788, “and some appear by their garb to be fools. I have seen a headdress in this city at least three feet across.” In 1782, a minister described Mrs. Henry Knox, the wife of the secretary of war, as “very gross…her hair in front is craped at least a foot high much in the form of a churn bottom upward and topped off with a wire skeleton in the same form covered with black gauze which hangs in streamers down her back. Her hair behind is in a large braid, turned up and confined with a monstrous crooked comb.”
Very few women in the colonies had either the money to buy these getups or the leisure to be immobilized by them. Nevertheless, the obsession with shopping and display must have seemed like the end of the world to ministers who believed that the colonies were supposed to represent the kingdom of God on Earth. They were shocked by women’s revealing fashions—a Boston journal in 1755 suggested that if current trends continued, women would soon be completely nude. And the ministers were horrified when people started dancing with the opposite sex. Previously, those who dared to dance at all generally performed the contradance, in which men and women faced each other from opposing lines. The new style, in which couples danced in pairs, was called “gynecandrical” or “promiscuous” by the scandalized arbiters of morality. Cotton Mather, naturally, had something to say about it:
Because the daughters of Zion are haughty,
and walk with outstretched necks.
Glancing wantonly with their eyes,
Mincing along as they go,
tinkling with their feet;
The Lord will smite with a scab
the heads of the daughters of Zion
and the Lord will lay bare their private parts.
Prenuptial pregnancy went through the roof during the eighteenth century, and the authorities gave up trying to mete out punishments, concentrating instead on identifying the fathers of illegitimate children and forcing them to support their offspring. But while young women seemed to become more sexually active, particularly with men they expected to marry, American society was developing ideals of courtship in which the woman was supposed to play a passive, virtually hostile role. A truly ladylike female rejected a suitor on first proposal, even if she intended to accept him eventually. And she never felt the surges of something as tawdry as sexual attraction, or even romantic love. “A man of taste and delicacy marries a woman because he loves her more than any other,” wrote Dr. Gregory. “A woman of equal taste and delicacy marries him because she esteems him and because he gives her that preference.”
“MISERABLE OLD AGE AND HELPLESS INFANCY”
The number of really poor people grew in eighteenth-century America, and as now, the most distressed segment of the population was single women with children. In the colonists’ case, they were mainly widows, whose numbers had exploded as a result of the British wars against the French in North America. In 1742 there were 1,200 widows in Boston alone—nearly a third of all the women in the town who had ever been married. Those with young children tried to stay afloat by taking in piecework, wet-nursing other women’s babies, or doing laundry in their homes. Those with older children often bound them out, or placed their daughters in domestic service.
Widows who inherited establishments from their husbands sometimes did very well. They ran taverns and stores and printing shops, a business that for some reason seemed particularly well suited to colonial women’s talents. But any female who worked for wages was poor. The maximum weekly rate paid for women in domestic service in New England around the time of the Revolution was the same as the maximum daily rate for male farm laborers. Even women who worked as tailors, one of the few crafts open to them, made only about a third of what men made.
Some colonies had a rough welfare system, but it was very unpleasant. In parts of Pennsylvania, a woman on the dole had to wear a red P, for pauper, on her upper sleeve, along with the first letter of the county providing the support. Massachusetts established almshouses for the indigent, but only the most pathetic and infirm were willing to be institutionalized in return for bread-and-water diets and employment at the looms. Judith Stevens, who visited an almshouse in 1775, was shocked by what she saw. The inmates, she said, were “occupied by unsuccessful industry, destitute vice, miserable Old Age and helpless infancy…. I passed through many divisions of this abode of wretchedness.” If an impoverished mother died, many communities accepted responsibility for her children. But they showed little appetite for the job and bound their young wards out as indentured servants as soon as possible. There are records of girls being bound out as early as two years of age.
In 1748, Boston came up with a new plan—a factory, sponsored by public subscription, which employed widows and orphaned children in the manufacture of linen cloth. But despite the urgings of the minister of the Brattle Street Church that factory employment would add to “the innocent Gaiety and Sprightliness of Childhood,” mothers were reluctant to enlist their offspring in an army of infant textile workers. Nor were the women themselves much more eager for work that took them out of their homes and separated them from their children. The factory closed without ever making a profit, and meanwhile the French and Indian War was creating yet a new generation of widows and fatherless children.
“A VERY EXTRAORDINARY FEMALE SLAVE”
Phillis Wheatley was born in Senegal and arrived in America on a slave ship around 1761, when she was seven or eight years old, and was purchased in Boston by John Wheatley, who wanted a personal servant for his wife, Susanna. When the Wheatleys’ daughter saw Phillis trying to make letters with chalk on the wall, she taught her to read. Within a year and a half, Phillis was fluent in English and had also begun to study Latin. By the time she was thirteen she was writing poetry. Her work began appearing in New England newspapers, and she became a regional celebrity. Like Anne Bradstreet, she had found a way out of the normal restrictions of her assigned role in life through verse.
Treated more as a daughter than a servant by the Wheatley family, Phillis became known for her poise and conversation as well as her writing. In Britain, the Countess of Huntingdon admired one of her poems, and arranged the publication of a book by “a very Extraordinary female Slave.” The high point of Phillis Wheatley’s life came in 1773, when she traveled to England, where she was taken up by the literary celebrities of the day and invited to be presented at court. But the illness of Susanna Wheatley cut short her visit, and Phillis returned to Boston, where her mistress died and John Wheatley officially freed her.
Her renown far outstripped Anne Bradstreet’s, and she was the first American writer to achieve international fame. Benjamin Franklin read her work, which sometimes compared the experience of a slave to that of an American colonist under the yoke of British tyranny. George Washington invited her to visit him at his camp during the Revolutionary War. Some admirers credit her with Washington’s decision to allow black men to serve in the Continental Army. “I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate,” she wrote, “Was snatch’d from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat…Such, such my case. And can I then but pray /Others may never feel tyrannic sway?”
Phillis Wheatley found no happiness in her own liberty. She continued living with her old master until his death, but the intelligentsia of Boston had much less interest in her as a free black woman than they did when she was the beloved slave of a prominent white family. She married John Peters, a free black man who turned out to be a poor provider and who eventually abandoned her. None of her three children lived past infancy, and she was working as a servant in a cheap tavern when she died at the age of thirty-one.
“WHAT HAVE I TO DO WITH POLITICKS?”
The struggle for independence was going to be one of the many, many moments in American history when the country found it necessary to do a sudden about-face on the conventional wisdom of what women were really like. The late-eighteenth-century feminine ideal was fragile, fair, not particularly bright, and certainly not interested in public affairs. But if the colonies were going to succeed in their fight for self-determination, women needed to become political, very fast. In the years leading up to the Declaration of Independence, resistance to the British was expressed mainly in boycotts of imported products. For the boycotts to work, women would have to step into the breach and provide the cloth and foodstuffs that could no longer be brought in from overseas. The housewives were also the family shoppers, and they were asked to shun all the “taxables”—items that the British imposed levies on without the colonials’ consent. Getting the cooperation of the women was the critical challenge “without which ’tis impossible to succeed,” said the South Carolina patriot Christopher Gadsden in 1769. Tea was, of course, a very important battleground. It was an extremely popular drink in colonial America—half of all homes had tea sets. Women patriots joined enthusiastically in the boycott, and those who found some particularly splashy way to express their determination became national heroines. Nine-year-old Susan Boudinot was invited to a tea party hosted by the governor of New Jersey, a Tory. She took her cup of tea, raised it to her lips, then threw it out the window. Only moments earlier, in the historical sense of time, Americans had been subscribing to the theory that women were supposed to be demure and deferential. Now they celebrated the defiance of a little girl who insulted a governor in a manner that would normally have earned her a spanking.
In 1774, fifty-one women in Edenton, North Carolina, issued a public statement endorsing the boycott, much to the amusement of British journalists and cartoonists, who depicted them as bad mothers, harlots, and heavy drinkers. But they were praised as patriots back home. Southern ladies wore dresses made of homespun cloth to their fancy balls, and they joined their husbands and fathers in making political toasts and singing patriotic songs. The northern women organized spinning bees and were honored for their production of homemade material, which they proudly presented to local officials. A much-quoted poem addressed to the “Daughters of Liberty” in 1768 derided men for allowing themselves to be stripped of their rights and urged:
Let the Daughters of Liberty, nobly arise,
And tho’ we’ve no Voice, but a negative here,
The use of the Taxables, let us forbear,
Stand firmly resolved and bid Grenville to see
That rather than Freedom, we’ll part with our Tea.
As much as the male rebels wanted to encourage their wives and daughters in defiance, they still liked to picture patriotic women engaged in safe, feminine forms of protest. The Virginia Gazette announced approvingly that the young women of Amelia County had “entered into a resolution not to permit the addresses of any person…unless he has served in the American armies to prove, by his valour, that he is deserving of their love.” But the women were actually required to do far more than boycott tea and vet their boyfriends for political correctness. If men were going to have to fight, women were going to have to take over their farms and businesses, and in some parts of the country, endure life under an army of occupation. Eliza Pinckney, who was not generally given to complaint, described her situation in South Carolina to a friend: “my property pulled to pieces, burnt and destroyed; my money of no value, my Children sick and prisoners.” Some women were raped by Tory soldiers, but many victims kept it secret rather than bear the stigma. “Against both Justice and Reason we Despise these Poor Innocent Sufferers,” admitted a New Jersey man. A North Carolina man recalled his widowed mother being “tied up and whipped by the Tories, her house burned and property all destroyed” while he was away with the militia.
“We are in no ways dispiritted here,” wrote Abigail Adams, who was holding down the fort at the family farm in Massachusetts. “We possess a Spirit that will not be conquerd. If our Men are all drawn off and we should be attacked, you would find a Race of Amazons in America.” Abigail spent much of her married life as a veritable widow to the Revolution—her husband John was always off serving his country as a statesman or diplomat. Now, she was sheltering soldiers and refugees from the conflict, and as the war approached Boston, she made contingency plans for grabbing her children and fleeing into the woods. When dysentery struck the area, her home became a hospital. “And such is the distress of the neighbourhood that I can scarcely find a well person to assist me in looking after the sick,” she wrote. She raised their five children, managed their finances, ran their farm, and kept the house throughout the war. The Revolution not only deprived her of her helpmate, but of a companion she dearly loved. Still, in her letters, she urged him on. In November 1775, she reported to John that when their minister had prayed for a reconciliation between the colonies and the mother country, “I could not join.” England, she wrote, was “no longer parent State but tyrant State…. Let us separate…. Let us renounce them.”
In the summer of 1777, more than 100 Boston housewives gathered in front of the store of one Thomas Boylston. They were, one observer reported, “reputable Clean drest Women Some of them with Silk gownes on,” and they were angry about Boylston’s extortionate wartime prices. They were prepared to boycott tea, but not to let a merchant gouge them for coffee. Abigail Adams wrote to her husband that the women “assembled with a cart and trucks, marched down to the Ware House and demanded the keys, which he refused to deliver, upon which one of them seazd him by his Neck and tossd him into the cart.” Boylston gave up his keys, and the women opened the warehouse, took out the coffee they required, and drove away. “A large concourse of Men stood amazd silent Spectators of the whole transaction,” Abigail reported gleefully.
The women sometimes took a more aggressive part in the war—one South Carolina man claimed the women in his state “talk as familiarly of shedding blood and destroying the Tories as the men do.” In Massachusetts, a group of women disguised in their husbands’ clothes intercepted a Tory captain en route to Boston, took the important papers he was carrying, and escorted him to the Groton jail. In 1776, when the British troops took control of New York, the city was suddenly engulfed in fire, which protected the retreating Americans. Edmund Burke told the British House of Commons that the blaze had been started by “one miserable woman, who…arrested your progress in the moment of your success.” The female rebel, he said, had been found in a cellar “with her visage besmeared and smutted over, with every mark of rage, despair, resolution and the most exalted heroism, buried in the ashes—she was brought forth, and knowing that she would be condemned to die, upon being asked her purpose said ‘to fire the city!’ and was determined to omit no opportunity for doing what her country called for.”
A few women donned male clothing and fought with the Revolutionary Army. Deborah Sampson Gannett fought for more than two years before being discovered, and her husband was later granted a pension as the widower of a Revolutionary soldier. Far more women traveled with their soldier husbands, cooking, washing, mending, and sometimes replacing them in the lines. The legendary “Molly Pitcher” who took her wounded husband’s place loading a cannon at a critical moment during the battle of Monmouth may have actually been a camp follower named Mary Ludwig Hays, but whoever she was, she was representative of dozens of women who shared their mates’ lives in the field and sometimes the dangers of battle as well. Margaret Corbin stepped in for her slain husband at the Battle of Fort Washington and was severely wounded, losing the use of one arm. The Continental Congress awarded her a pension and she was eventually buried at the West Point cemetery.
Some women appeared to get a new sense of purpose from their responsibilities as patriots and stand-ins for their husbands at home. Letters to husbands away at war gradually took on a more confident tone, and farms and crops that had been referred to as “your” when the war began, became “our” as time went on. Nevertheless, they were still tentative about expressing political opinions. Ann Gwinnett, widow of the president of Georgia, wrote to the Continental Congress to warn that the officer corps in her colony was full of Tory sympathizers. “These things (tho from a Woman, & it is not our sphere, yet I cannot help it) are all true,” she penned. Another wrote, “Tho a female, I was born a patriot and cant help it if I would.” The deeply political Sarah Jay stopped in a letter on the events of the day to protest wryly: “But whither, my pen, are you hurrying me? What have I to do with politicks? Am I not a woman, and writing to Ladies? Come then, the fashions to my assistance.” When the federal Constitution was being debated in Philadelphia, Thomas Jefferson wrote to Angelica Church, who had apparently solicited his opinions about political developments, that “the tender breasts of ladies were not formed for political convulsion.” (Admirers of Jefferson might best be advised to skip everything he ever wrote about women and restrict their attention to the Declaration of Independence.)
No matter what the ladies’ contribution, the Revolution was not fought to prove that all women were created equal. One of the era’s most quoted letters was written by Abigail Adams to her husband when the Continental Congress was meeting to draw up the Declaration of Independence: “In the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands…. That your Sex are Naturally Tyrannical is a Truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute, but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of Master for the more tender and endearing one of Friend. Why then, not put it out of the power of the vicious and the Lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity and impunity. Men of Sense in all Ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the vassals of your Sex.”
Adams’s response, which is less well known, wounded his wife deeply: “As to your extraordinary code of laws,” he wrote, “I cannot but laugh.”
“WE MAY SHORTLY EXPECT TO SEE THEM TAKE
THE HELM—OF GOVERNMENT”
The only colony that permitted women to vote after the Revolutionary War was New Jersey. Possibly due to pressure from Quakers who lived in the southern part of the state, it awarded the franchise to “all free inhabitants” who owned a certain amount of property. That seemed to apply to at least a limited number of widows and single women, as well as a few free black residents.
In 1797, during a hard-fought election for the state legislature in Essex County, about seventy-five women turned out to vote—most of them in favor of William Crane, the Federalist candidate who lost to John Condict of Newark. In 1800, a larger number of women showed up at the polls, including some who probably didn’t qualify under a strict interpretation of the property requirements. (Well into the twentieth century, New Jersey had a reputation both for vigorous political campaigns and a lack of regard for the finer points of election law.) People began to complain and predict dire consequences if the women weren’t curbed. Before you knew it, critics argued, “we may shortly expect to see them take the helm—of government.”
The fatal blow was struck in 1806, when the state decided to build a new courthouse in Essex County and left it up to the voters to decide whether to place it in Elizabeth or Newark. Local sentiment was so aroused that it became dangerous for residents of Elizabeth to be seen on the streets of Newark, and vice versa. On election day, men and boys skipped from one polling place to another, voting repeatedly. Outsiders were carted in to increase the local turnout. Women and girls, black and white, joined in the excitement, and when the balloting was over, nearly 14,000 votes had been cast in an area where the previous record turnout had been about 4,500. Unsurprisingly, the vote in Elizabeth was almost unanimously for building the courthouse in Elizabeth. But Newark was even more successful in marshalling people for the Newark site.
“A more wicked and corrupt scene was never exhibited,” one Elizabethtown writer described it. The people of Newark were too busy celebrating to be shocked. But eventually, the whole episode was sent to the state legislature for consideration. The legislature decided to reform the election law, and the head of the committee charged with proposing changes was none other than John Condict. His suggested reforms included the end to female suffrage. When a motion was made to strike out that clause, Mr. Condict rose to his feet and eloquently defended the limitation of the franchise to “free, white, male citizens.”
The legislature voted to stop women from voting in the one state where their rights as citizens had been acknowledged. Mr. Condict had his revenge, and women lost their official voice in American politics for the next century.