The American Revolution Didn’t Free Women—It Strengthened Slavery

 

Adel:
Dr. Brown: , it’s a pleasure to have you in our program’s special series. Thank you for taking the time for this conversation with me about the American Revolution. So in the years leading up to the American Revolution, the pre-revolutionary years, what were the roles and rights of women in the American colonies?

And as I ask that question, I appreciate that it’s kind of like a broad, almost like an impossible question. Do you agree with that?

Dr. Brown:
Yeah. So, I mean, women is a term that encompasses female people across a number of different groups, racially, religiously, regionally. It encompasses people of different ages and wealth categories.

So it’s very hard to just talk about women as any kind of unified group. And the more complicating factor is that, as in any society in colonial America, some women really enjoyed their privileges of wealth and some household authority at the expense of other women. So most notably, white women who were enslavers, who had the benefit of enslaved labor, had a very different kind of relationship to social hierarchy in the colonies than the women who would be serving as slaves in their households or in agricultural fields.

So it’s not a simple set of relationships. And of course, Native American women were among the Native groups who had borne the brunt of colonial settlement through being pushed out of ancestral homelands, being dispossessed of those homelands, and suffering from disease and war and other kinds of ruptures of culture that they had a lot of responsibility for maintaining. So I think it’s better to think and be very specific when we’re talking about women in the period leading up to American Revolution.

Which group of women are we actually talking about to try to be more specific and locating them in relationships to others?

Adel:
Okay, that’s very helpful. Still leaves a very complicated picture. In fact, you could even say it’s like a kaleidoscope because it also changes with time, as we’re going to talk about.

Anticipating that this would be sort of a tough topic, I created some subjects to ask you specific questions about so we can address it that way. So let’s start with white women. And they even had different categories, new immigrants, different religions, and what have you.

What were, generally speaking, before the revolution, their legal rights?

Dr. Brown:
So the white women who were part of the settler population in the British North American colonies were working under a set of rules that came from English common law. And that meant that if they were single or widowed, they had nearly as many rights to engage in business, make contracts, hire people, get paid, own property, engage in commercial transactions. Basically, they had almost as many rights as a white man who was in their general peer group with less political authority, less obviously acknowledged potential for political leadership than the white men of their peer group.

If a woman in this category, a white woman, were to marry, she then fell under the household jurisdiction of her husband. And so her legal rights that she would have enjoyed as a single woman or as a widow kind of became shelved. She could recover those if she became widowed.

But during the time of her marriage to her husband, the household ran under one authority, and that was the husband’s authority. And so, in part to keep the household authority single and unified, the husband was the legally recognized head of household. So she temporarily lost the right to engage in all of those activities she might have engaged in as a single woman during the time of her marriage.

However, it’s actually more complicated than that because that might be the formal law, and there were very specific legal terms that went with this to describe her when she was a single woman with a full range of possible action. A femme sole, that would be a woman visible, alone, unencumbered by marriage. A femme couvert would have been a woman who was married legally, literally legally covered by her husband’s authority.

The complications are that people had to function in daily life. And in fact, people often used these kind of legal fictions very strategically. Sometimes it could be a family’s decision to protect certain resources of the household, land, or other kind of property from creditors.

And then a wife’s technical right to hold on to some property that she had brought into marriage might be used to protect the family’s well-being. A husband could also designate a wife to conduct business in his name if he were going to be away or if he wanted her to be able to freely engage in business in the community, and everyone in the community would know that she could be trusted to be acting as his agent. So it was never as cut and dried as what the legal texts would say.

And as of the 1760s, the main legal text coming out of England about the common law and about women’s kind of legal constraints under marriage would have been William Blackstone’s law compendium, which really informed legal practice in the United States and really spoke a lot to what a woman’s relationship was to her husband, to family property, and the kind of possibilities for her own legal action.

Adel:
Wow. So in this case, what I’m saying is a truism. I suppose it’s not just about love if you’re marrying someone.

If you’re a wealthy woman, there’s a lot to consider here because you’re essentially given much of your signature rights to this future husband.

Dr. Brown:
So if you came from a wealthy family as a white woman, there were ways your family could protect you. And it’s sometimes shocking to people in the present day to know that during the colonial period and really throughout all of American history, there were prenuptial settlements. So a father would make an arrangement that certain property might be reserved for his daughter.

It would be a way of kind of preserving his family lineage and property. But she also was understood to sometimes bring dour property to the marriage, dour property meaning the property that she would then have access to upon the death of her husband. And so there were ways if you were wealthy, as in almost any society, you’re wealthy, you have a certain kind of access to ways to make the rules work to your advantage.

And so for wealthy people, in fact, there were ways to protect daughters. A husband wasn’t supposed to squander the property that was understood to be his wife’s dour property. And she was supposed to be able to give consent to his sale or otherwise alienating that property in a private examination.

So let’s say he was thinking, I’m in trouble with my creditors. I’m going to liquidate a bunch of this property. If some of it had been property that was designated as her dour property that she brought to the marriage, she could then be subject to a private examination with an official in the community who could then say to her, are you freely consenting to have this sale go forward?

Adel:
You used the word suppose. She was supposed to be able to do that. Did that actually happen in practice?

Dr. Brown:
It happened in some places more regularly than in other places. And of course, you can imagine if you’ve got a contentious marital relationship and you’re being coerced or pressured, that just having five minutes with a neutral party in another room might not alleviate all your concerns.

Adel:
And to just go back to make sure that we’re following the source of these laws, these are British common laws. They’re not statute passed by the parliament necessarily.

Dr. Brown:
No, this is a British common law, which gets put together in a number of ways. It becomes customary law and it is judge-made law. Now, it is often supplemented by statute law, but these are not statutes that have to be passed in the colonies in order for them to take effect.

This is actually through the inherited common law that would then inform judges in courts in cases of some kind of litigation or even in very basic things like passing property, title to property, wills, deeds, and that kind of thing.

Adel:
Yeah. And our whole legal system is based on common law here in the United States as well as in Britain now. So was there a wide discrepancy from, let’s say, New Hampshire North to Georgia and the South in observing or enforcing these laws?

Did at any like customs overwhelm the practice of these laws?

Dr. Brown:
So I think one of the biggest differences has to do with the degree to which a particular colony’s economy relied on slavery, the way that property passed from generation to generation through land that was made profitable through slave labor. And that seems to be one of the main factors in explaining differences in approaches to how to maintain household order and function. So let me explain what I mean by that.

In Massachusetts and Connecticut, even before the revolution, it was easier to get a failing marriage dissolved either through a separation or an actual divorce. It was common. I don’t want to be misunderstood to say it was common, but it was not impossible to do in either Massachusetts.

They had the most liberal culture for those kinds of separations. In places like Virginia and South Carolina, although there were other remedies, including basic separations, and sometimes it went along with something called a separate maintenance, a couple that clearly was not able to live together might through special action be allowed to live separately, but then the husband would be required to provide a separate maintenance. What didn’t happen in Virginia and South Carolina, among other places that relied on slavery, were divorces.

Those kinds of divorces just were not possible.

Adel:
And that was because of slavery?

Dr. Brown:
It seems to be related to different strategies for maintaining household order and the transmission of property across generations. And it also seems to be related in part to the fact that Massachusetts and Connecticut never had the equity courts, and this gets a little bit more technical than probably we need to get. But in Virginia and South Carolina and New York, there were these separate courts to which parties could appeal for remedies in equity that were kind of outside the common law.

And they happened to exist in these colonies that had this heavy reliance on slavery, South Carolina, Virginia, eventually North Carolina. And that does change what remedies are available to couples, but also to women who feel like they might be the injured party. It also changes what kinds of ways you could concoct special property settlements to protect a wife going into a marriage.

So it just expanded some of the range of opportunities. In place of that, what you do get in Massachusetts and Connecticut are some other possible remedies when a marriage is falling apart. They were more liberal.

And part of the thinking was that if you kept a really bitterly contesting couple together, not only would the household be subject to disorder and all the members of the household, but it actually would have a very bad impact on the community. And in many of the communities in New England, they had actually gotten their start with this notion of a kind of communal bond through shared religion, because so many of the migrants to those early New England colonies were religious migrants. And they were dissenting religious migrants, right?

They were not Church of England migrants, at least initially. They were dissenters from the Church of England. That they had a kind of vision of a kind of unified religious community as part of the social order.

And so within that context, and with that aim of preserving household order, they actually allowed for more liberal provisions by the 18th century for couples that were not getting along to be able to separate and in some cases actually divorce.

Adel:
I see. We talked about the differences between colonies. I’m just interested, do we know if there was a market difference, let’s say between an urban setting, let’s say you mentioned South Carolina, so let’s say Charleston versus the back countries of Carolinas or like Massachusetts, Boston, or let’s say small town like Lexington or something where things are more practical and there are more dire needs to just survive.

It’s different.

Dr. Brown:
So here’s what the picture generally looks like from the work of many historians who’ve looked at urban populations and rural populations. Cities are places of opportunity for women who want to be able to earn wages, that there’s a market for many of their skills, whether it’s providing food that people will purchase or running shops where people will purchase imported goods or actually manufacturing garments, hats that people might purchase, whether it’s actually doing sewing for people. There’s all kinds of ways that women come to cities finding opportunity to basically market their labor.

And it’s not impossible to do that in rural areas. I would say that the market is a little bit more limited. There’s always ways that women in rural spaces are, especially when they’re younger, before they’re married, they’re exchanging labor in some form or another.

They may be working in the household of another person in order to put together goods for a marriage trousseau, garments, linens, things that they’ll need when they get married. And sometimes they’re actually earning money. But the rural areas, it’s a bit more of a labor exchange.

Although you also find in rural areas around Pennsylvania, people who are raising chickens and dairy cows and then able to sell eggs and butter in the city. So there’s all kinds of ways that things are a bit more interconnected than that would sound. But the other issue, though, is in cities we see, especially in the 18th century before the revolution, cities like Boston, most especially, growing percentages of poor women.

Now, these might be women whose husbands had gone to sea, mariners, and they were gone for long periods of time and never came back. These might be women who, for other reasons, end up trying to support young children on their own. Maybe a husband has died.

Maybe he’s engaged in a process of self-divorce, where you just take off, you don’t bother with the courts. So this is a kind of a notable shift that we see in a lot of these seaboard cities, is there are increasing proportions of poor women. Many of these women are poor white women.

Some of them might be immigrant women. There also are poor free Black women. And this becomes truer in the late 18th century in Philadelphia, which is one of the nearest locations for people who have managed either to get free from slavery or have otherwise escaped slavery, coming north to try to find a city where they can find a market for their labor.

So I guess what I would say is then, these are places of opportunity for women, but they’re also places of risk. And they can be places of difficult living, poverty. Cities are also generally less healthy than rural spaces.

So there’s all kinds of risk factors that go with that too.

Adel:
You mentioned religious migrants to the colonies when we’re talking about Massachusetts, sort of New England in general. So how about religion? How does religion impact or impacted the role and rights of women in pre-revolutionary colonies?

And I had wanted to ask you about different types of religions, but I realized there were so many different denominations that it would just take too long.

Dr. Brown:
So this is one of the interesting things about the British North American mainland colonies, which are on the eve of the American Revolution, they are increasing in diversity. This is also something I think people don’t fully grasp. There are religious migrants and usually religious migrants different than migrants around the world to other spaces.

And I can say more about that in thinking about other places in the Americas. Usually when migration opens up, a global path for migration opens up, the people who go first are the young men. When you have religious migrations, they are characteristically family migrations.

If you’re going to try to go either for reasons of religious liberty or to escape religious persecution, you kind of grab your people and you cross the ocean. And so they tend to be slightly more balanced by sex, men and women, there are more children involved. And usually these are groups, again, sometimes, not always, but these are groups that are presenting alternatives to established religions in Europe.

And so sometimes they have alternative ways of organizing church, religious participation, spiritual life hierarchies. Let me just give you a couple examples. Certainly, we’d have to think about the Quakers as a group where the possibilities for women to actively participate in Quaker life, in Quaker daily spiritual practices, and even in kind of religious leadership in the sense not of running the meeting, or being in the Quaker hierarchy.

That word is a little bit of a misnomer with Quakers. But people who might actually be fervent evangelical Quakers who are going and spreading the word about the inner light, we find women in all of those roles.

Adel:
Oh, they’re involved in all of those?

Dr. Brown:
They are. They are. So Quakers are an example of a dissenting religious group that comes to North America.

They come in family migrations. And they initially at least create religious communities where women have access to learning. They’re understood to be vessels of spiritual wisdom in ways that are a little bit different from what you see in some of the other more established religions.

So all this is to say that we find these little pockets of religious communities that offer women different kinds of abilities to participate more fully in a religious and spiritual life. The early Baptists are another example. They eventually become a bit more conservative around race, around whether they think slavery is a moral evil.

They develop a more conservative message about that by the beginning of the 19th century, partly in response to not wanting to lose wealthy white converts to the Baptist faith. But in most cases, these are groups that at least in their kind of founding fervor or their establishment in North America, have some space for women to be the bearers of spiritual wisdom and to be able to be nearly full participants in religious life.

Adel:
You didn’t mention the Anglican Church, which, if I’m correct, was also very big in the South, where women involved in the so-called hierarchy or administration, and you’re shaking your head no.

Dr. Brown:
Yeah, no, I mean, the Anglican Church is the state religion of Britain, was and is. And it has a formal society for propagating the gospel. It has formal liturgy.

It has a church hierarchy that means that a minister is placed in a church coming from the church hierarchy, as opposed to, for example, congregationalists in New England would call a minister and then through congregational approval of that minister, a bottom-up process, they would receive the minister. So it’s a really different kind of church governance. And generally speaking, the Anglican Church would not be among the religious institutions in North America that would be the most receptive to women’s leadership and spiritual wisdom.

Adel:
Got it. I’m glad I asked. That’s because the Anglican Church obviously was very important in the colonies before the revolution.

One of the things that interested me is the education level of middle to upper-class women. And I think in one of our communications, I told you how my family and I, especially my daughter and I, were so taken by Abigail Adams’ sort of skills in writing letters. I had to explain to her that back then people wrote more letters and probably spent less time on social media.

They read more. So that’s probably that. But aside from that, yeah, please share that with us.

What was it like? What level did women sort of rise to in the school system, if at all?

Dr. Brown:
Right. Well, so here’s where we can make another differentiation between the New England colonies and the Southern colonies. And again, I would say the basis of social order and household order really coming out of New England in tandem with a belief that education, especially the way education in New England was focused on Bible learning, that that was a key to social order.

And so you get a very early provision in New England to set up schools in part to keep Satan at bay. That was part of the religious mission as well as the kind of larger social good. And you don’t get that same kind of provision in Virginia and in South Carolina.

So Abigail Adams, let’s start with her. She was a very privileged white woman. She did not have formal schooling, but she was the daughter of a really prominent minister who had a vast library.

And so in a way that’s not unusual, I would say for pretty privileged white girls, even into the 19th century. She learned a lot of what she learned just by reading in her father’s library, being exposed to lots of different kinds of literature and writing, and then carried that with her certainly in her letter writing skills. I think historians who’ve looked at women’s letter writing skills in the 18th century would say that Abigail Adams wasn’t even the most proficient letter writer.

Adel:
Really?

Dr. Brown:
She had some irregularities of spelling and grammar that revealed that she was not formally taught, that she was self-taught. In other instances, we might see a very privileged white girl actually having a tutor or having some other kind of instruction. Some of the ornamental skills, by that I mean really fancy embroidery, painting, being able to play music, singing, those kinds of things would be in the wealthiest of households.

And the idea was that those skills might make a young woman more marriageable, more charming. Those were really solid investments in her future and in the family lineage, in the future of the family lineage. Most ordinary white girls would probably have had basic training in literacy and numeracy, and especially around Bible reading.

But they might also read primers, small books that were designed to teach children. Sometimes it was moral lessons. Sometimes it was just even primers usually referred to kind of alphabet and learning reading and very basic literacy skills.

Numeracy, just basic math skills, being able to do some, being able to keep track of what people owed you and what you owed them. Those would also be very basic skills.

Adel:
Would that be in a local schoolhouse or just mom and dad teaching it?

Dr. Brown:
Could be either. Because remember, in many households, and again, it depends where you’re talking about. If we’re talking about a white household of kind of, you know, in a rural space, maybe a child, male or female, might go to school for only part of the year when they weren’t actually needed for labor in the household.

Because the commitment to children’s education, a formal commitment to children’s education, as a means of producing a certain kind of class position, that doesn’t really come until the 19th century. Children are little laborers. White children and black children, free and enslaved, and many children were also bound themselves as apprentices if they weren’t enslaved.

And so they had work responsibilities from very young ages in some of these rural households, and even in some of the urban households. And so the learning would be partly through doing some of the work, but it would also be seasonal attendance of school. And so you wouldn’t be in school if you were most needed at the time of a harvest or some other agricultural demand on the household, where even a child as young as six or seven, their labor might be needed.

Adel:
I see. I’m going to go on a limb and say something, and I think I may be going too far. So please correct me, Dr. Brown: . When we started talking about education, you said, you sort of drew a line between New England and the South, for example, South Carolina, Virginia. Would it be going too far to say that, generally speaking, upper-class, middle-class women in New England had more education than in the South? Is that a right conclusion, or was it just different?

It’s not that it was more of it.

Dr. Brown:
So female literacy, and again, I think we want to be careful to be thinking about who we’re talking about here. If we’re talking about white women across the colonies, there was definitely higher rates of white female literacy in the New England colonies, for sure. But I guess I would maybe not it’s but, maybe it’s and.

In places like Virginia, where there are large populations of enslaved people, and there are no provisions made for enslaved people to learn to read and write. It doesn’t mean that all enslaved people cannot read and write, but it means there are no provisions made for them. So when a white child becomes bound out as an apprentice or an indentured laborer, as a young person who’s going to work for a period of years until they reach adulthood, very often the apprenticeship agreement with that child’s master would specify that they had to be taught certain skills.

For girls, that would usually be skills that were called housewifery, the basic skills of running a household.

Adel:
Housewifery?

Dr. Brown:
Yep. Being a housewife, right? Now, housewifery.

So cooking, cleaning, managing a household, being able to turn produce of a garden or raw fibers of textiles into something, right? Into cloth, into food. All of those might be what a young white girl would be taught if she was indentured.

Enslaved children, there’s no contract, right? They’re born into slavery. There’s no way to say to the enslaver, hey, you reneged on the contract.

So there’s generally no investment, no provision for their education other than what a particular enslaver might decide is worth his or her while. And then eventually it actually becomes illegal in many Southern states, this would be in the early United States, to actually teach enslaved people to read.

Adel:
I see. Wow. Wow.

We’ve talked about race and slavery so much, and obviously it’s a determinative factor on women’s roles and rights. So I want to go to your book, talk about that. And the title of it is Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs.

The first question I have is this, Dr. Brown: , why did you write this book? Did you set out to answer a certain question? Were you looking for something?

Dr. Brown:
Yeah, I was interested generally in how a social order and a set of power relationships could go from England, where the natural hierarchy that people at least ascribe to was about the difference between men and women and the superiority of men to women, how that kind of society could transform in the space of about 100 years to one where people on the ground in colonial Virginia were trying to explain to officials back in England why people of African descent, and especially people who had African and English parentage, basically could not be trusted and were automatically presumed to be part of a lower criminal element. How did the basic kind of matrix of social order and power shift to accommodate race in such a profound way over the period of about 100 years?

So my question was, how did race and gender work together as intersectional power relationships? But also, what was the history of that intersection? How did they come to intersect?

What exactly happened to get us from… There were a lot of pamphlets at the beginning of the 17th century, so around the early 1600s in England, for example, really criticizing and making fun of women who were dressing in such a way that they actually looked like they were wearing male clothes. I want to be clear on this.

This is not people who are actually putting on men’s clothing, but that the fashion that women were indulging in seemed to be wild and wacky and crossing some important gender boundaries. And there was a lot of kind of contest about women being in their proper place, a lot of aphorisms about the natural tendencies of men and women. I mean, I think we can look back at some of this and say, aha, you only start talking that way if people are getting out of place, right?

You only start getting more and more shrill on that. But that was the supposedly God-given natural order, right? As God had created society, that there was, through the Bible and through the natural world, this understood dominance of men and superiority of men over women.

And so how did that play out in a place like Virginia, where by about certainly 1750 into the late 18th century, people are espousing a set of views about the natural order that is about race. And so I was also trying to understand just how these two processes were linked together, how they had worked together. And basically, I spent a lot of time reading a lot of county court records, just trying to get a sense of what’s actually happening.

And when a white person has people of African descent whom they’re claiming as slaves, what’s the basis for making that claim really stick? I mean, we know there are laws that are passed, and these would have been passed by the Virginia Assembly, the General Assembly. So these are statute laws that make it stick.

But how did they get to that point? And how did they develop their thinking around why people of African descent were not male and female the same way English people were? They could be subject to different duties.

They could be subject to different expectations. They could be exploited in different ways. They could be subordinated in different ways.

How did that actually happen? So that was the sort of bigger question I had. I knew what things looked like at the beginning of the process, and I kind of knew where it ended up in the 18th century.

And I wanted to try to see if I could follow the trail. And I followed it partly through the county court records, partly through looking at statute laws, partly whatever other little shreds of evidence I could find. There weren’t a lot of women in Virginia in the 17th century leaving diaries.

So that limited me a bit. But there was a lot of information about white men, especially, and what prompted them to take up arms and fight for something, what prompted them to petition the colonial government. So I tended to view it as a kind of historic moment of conversation and debate, where even if I couldn’t hear all the conversations, I might be able to hear some of them.

Just like when you’re listening to one side of a cell phone conversation, you don’t want to listen necessarily on public transportation to get an idea of what the other part is. So I really was just working with what I had to try to understand what the relationships of power were and how they were transforming.

Adel:
I guess, in one level, I’m afraid to ask follow-up questions, because we’ll be here for several hours, Dr. Brown: . This is fascinating. Let me just go back and ask this.

This is a very specific question. You’ve already touched on this. I just want to ask it again.

So did gender impact the institution of slavery?

Dr. Brown:
I mean, I would say, yes, it did. It provided some of the kind of template for how power became ascribed to individuals within a household, within a society, cohorts of those individuals in government. That actually had some impact on how a population forced to migrate to North America could then be subordinated and exploited in a different way than previous subordinated populations.

So for example, indentured servants who tended to be white. So yes, I would say it certainly had an impact on how slavery became institutionalized, how it became codified in law, and how it became established in practice.

Adel:
Let me ask that question again with something more specific. So Virginia, South Carolina, whatever state in which slavery, the institution of slavery was well-established. Let’s say, I don’t know, 1768, 1770, and you are a lower class woman of English descent.

Is that work, whatever work that women of lower classes or lowest classes did, is that now given to women of African descent? Is that women of lower class now in a higher ladder in the hierarchy than enslaved women? Is that part of the story?

Dr. Brown:
I guess I would respond to that in a little bit more complicated way by saying that unless a white woman was actually part of a household where she and her husband enslaved people, or she grew up as a daughter in such a household, she would not actually see slavery as having a impact on the kind of work she did. But what she did benefit from was a certain kind of privilege of whiteness, what some scholars have described as almost a property in whiteness. For one thing, it’s actually something we often overlook, that one of the key pieces of legislation that really helped to codify slavery came in 1662 with a provision that directed that the status of children would follow the condition of their mothers.

Now, we often focus on that, rightly so, as being the main provision that made slavery inheritable by a child born to an enslaved mother. That’s absolutely correct. But it’s also true that it applied to white women as well.

And so it also meant that the property of their whiteness was to convey freedom to their children. And I use that term freedom carefully, and I just want to be sure we’re talking about the same thing here. When we’re talking about the 1760s, we’re also talking about colonies, not states.

What goes on in the states, it’s even more complicated in some ways. So in the 1760s, a white woman, now she might be in pretty dire economic circumstances herself and have to have a child become an apprentice or be bound out in indenture in some way, but there was at least a piece of paper that she could use to hold her child’s master accountable. She could take the master to court and say, you’re not feeding little Johnny enough.

You’re working him too hard. You said you were going to teach him to do sums. He can’t do any math yet.

You said you were going to teach him how to be a blacksmith, and I don’t think he’s learned any of that yet. She has at least some access as a white mother of a white child, not destined for slavery.

Adel:
That’s why earlier you were saying enslaved blacks didn’t have a contract. This is where that comes into play, right?

Dr. Brown:
Yep. Now, contracts aren’t everything. I don’t want to do that.

Contracts themselves are a slippery path to all kinds of other things, which are not so great sometimes. So I don’t want to act as if that’s just the salvation, but it gives a person some legal leverage, and she does have a right as the child’s mother to complain about revisions of a contract. Now, a free black mother in similar circumstances could also do something like that.

There aren’t so many free black mothers in Virginia in the 1750s and 1760s, but in theory, they might also do that. But what I was really saying about white women is that there is something about whiteness as a property that has a value for those women and for their children, for the generations of the future, that isn’t about exactly how much work they’re doing or how their work compares to black women’s work, enslaved black women’s work, but is more about what their own persons and their reproductive capacity means and how it’s valued and how their children are going to be valued and taken care of. And so that’s where I’d say that’s where one of the big differences is. There’s another huge difference that even as a poor white woman, if you end up working for someone else, nobody thinks you’re going to work for that person until you drop dead and then your children will be stuck working for that person and that you or your children could be sold.

Adel:
Yeah. That’s fascinating and tragic at the same time. Let’s take a break here.

In the next segment, I asked Dr. Brown: about roles and rights of women in revolutionary America. We’ll be right back. Dr. Brown: , in the last segment, I mentioned Abigail Adams, so I’ll cite her for this question. In one of her letters to her husband, John Adams, I think at the time he was in Philadelphia, she reminded him, and I’m paraphrasing here, don’t forget the women. So she had some expectations and I’m wondering, was the American Revolution, and I think that letter was sometime in 1776 as he was writing to her that it’s any time now, the declaration will come any time now. Was some sort of expectation brewing on the part of women because of the revolution?

Dr. Brown:
Okay. So as we’ve said, Abigail Adams was a very privileged woman. Even though she was self-taught, she wasn’t just self-taught in the way we might think of, well, for example, Benjamin Franklin.

She had access to a really big library. She, I think, is in a minority of elite white women who really hope that independence from Britain might bring transformations to the law that would diminish the authority, especially over household governance, of men, white men. It’s probably very obvious, but for the white men who are fervently participating in the independence movement, they have no such thought.

They’re in the independence movement, partly because they want to expand their liberties and their rights and their frame of action. They’re not in it because they’re thinking, no, we should actually be regulated so that we exercise less authority at home. They want more commercial authority.

They want more political authority. They’re looking for more mastery, not less. What Abigail Adams is basically saying is that she and a small group, I would say, they’re vocal.

Some of them are writing in newspapers. Some of them have other ways to express their opinions. They are imagining that with this break from Britain would be an opportunity to engage in a kind of transformation of the law that could be beneficial to women like them, who technically under marriage are femme covere.

They’re restricted to acting as agents of their husband, of having their legal existence temporarily covered or displaced by their husbands. They’re also thinking of the ways that in some households, that really results in abuse for women, whether it’s domestic abuse, violence, cruelty, really a life of diminished capacity in an unhappy marriage where a woman might be subjected to those kinds of things.

Adel:
You said this minority, and you emphasized that, I get it, this is a very small percentage of women, but they were vocal and they may have some writings in newspapers. I haven’t come across any such in my limited research of this era in the last few years. What I’m wondering is, was there ever any response from the men?

Did they ever opine on this, or is this just something they ignored? I haven’t read anything about it.

Dr. Brown:
John Adams laughed it off. He didn’t really take it very seriously. What’s interesting, I think, again, it’s helpful at this moment to pull back a little from this close, tight focus on the American Revolution and North America and look more broadly at moments of great political transformation in other parts of the world.

If we take the French Revolution, which happened a couple decades later, there’s a big debate about the relative roles and rights of men and women as the French Revolution is producing a kind of political reckoning with having deposed a monarch. No such debate takes place in the constitutional debates, certainly not in the articles before the Articles of Confederacy. The big debating point really has to do with where slavery will fit in in the future of the United States.

That’s one of the more heated debate points. Nobody’s really debating seriously whether there needs to be a new law code to enable a man’s dependents, D-E-P-E-N-D-E-N-T-S, his dependents of his household to have more rights and more liberties. The rights and liberties that they’re really talking about are for white male head of households.

Adel:
I take it that the American Revolution, as it progressed, let’s say it starts out in April in Lexington and Concord. It actually started even before that in 1774, the organization of it. It culminates in the Paris Treaty in 1783.

In this span of time, based on what you just shared with us, I take it that the rights and roles of women didn’t really change throughout this period or because of it.

Dr. Brown:
I think generally that’s the consensus of most scholars. There are important ways that we have to look at what the transformation and the upheaval of war does to certain kinds of hierarchical relationships. Let me just give you a few examples.

It is true that official laws that prescribe what was called primogeniture or entail, which was when there’s no will, how does property get distributed, especially in a very well-to-do household? Those two policies, the premature geniture and entail, would favor the eldest son and would keep lands in the South, in Virginia and other places, keep enslaved people tied to the land through inheritance. Those policies get dismantled.

It’s not clear that the end effect of that is really that big on improving younger children’s inheritance of property. But in any case, that’s a legal move that is dismantling something that favored elder sons. There is a brief uptick in divorce in many of the new states, although this then diminishes.

It’s not clear, again, that this is about any kind of women’s liberation. This appears to be as often about men trying to evade creditors or getting themselves out of marriages. Again, you have to be careful how you interpret it.

There is a decline of indentured servitude that comes with the revolution, but that has more to do with the supply of indentured servants and, I would say, the renewed commitment to slavery and to forms of abolition in the northern states like Pennsylvania and New York, where the way the abolition of slavery takes place is through a process called gradual abolition, and that means the children end up serving long terms of service, if not for life, until their late 20s.

So there are other ways that labor gets repurposed and supplied, even though the sheer numbers of indentured servants is declining. There is this abolition of slavery in many of the northern states. It tends to be a kind of absolute and immediate abolition.

The smaller the percentage of enslaved people are in the particular state, it tends to be gradual in places where there are more enslaved people. And there is also a spike of manumissions in the southern colonies, particularly in Virginia. So Virginia had made it against the law for an enslaver to engage in private manumissions.

That is, it took away an enslaver’s right to alienate his own human property until 1782, right on the cusp of the end of the revolution. And so there is this brief uptick, while manumission is legal in Virginia, of enslavers manumitting enslaved people, but then Virginia shuts it down again by the beginning of the 19th century. So all this is to say is there is a little bit of evidence that the turmoil and turbulence of war and political transformation creates opportunities that people seize, but it is not clear, for example, when you look at the law codes generally and especially decisions made by judges and the general reception of the English common law after the revolution, it is not clear that any big transformation takes place that does anything except expand the rights and liberties of white male heads of household. They do what they gain, but their dependents do not.

Adel:
Their dependents do not. So to the extent that there is any impact, if the American Revolution has any impact, sort of ephemeral, it does not become a permanent transformation of any sort. And you said the divorce, brief uptick in divorce, similar to our last segment, are you mainly talking about New England?

Dr. Brown:
New England.

Adel:
Yeah. Okay.

Dr. Brown:
Because it is still not okay to get divorced in Virginia and South Carolina.

Adel:
Then let me ask about the American Revolution this way, Dr. Brown: . In the decades after the revolution, we can even go into the, I don’t know, the 1800s, did women invoke the American Revolution in their quest, in their push for more rights? So they did not get it at the time of the American Revolution, but did they go back to it?

I know the Declaration of Independence talks about men, but did that become a springboard for them?

Dr. Brown:
Yeah. So again, let’s be clear about what groups of women we’re talking about here. One of the most obvious answers to your question would be the 1848 Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments, which is modeled on the Declaration of Independence, except that it changes the group to whom the self-evident truths apply to be all men and women.

Adel:
All men and women, yeah.

Dr. Brown:
And also, a kind of modeling of throwing off tyranny, of women throwing off tyrannical male dominance. But generally, so I guess what I would say is generally, if you look at the United States before the Civil War, two of the texts that most often frame people’s arguments about any topic would be the Bible and the Constitution. And so a lot of arguments on whatever side you took in the argument would turn to those texts to try to justify and support the argument.

And so you could find a lot of support for different positions on different issues from those two texts. There were ways to use those texts to argue lots of different things. So I guess what I would start by pointing out is that initially, the arguments in opposition to slavery are the ones that have more heat and light in terms of getting out there sooner, getting more people involved, getting more debate going.

And even then, abolitionists are a pretty small portion of the population. But they certainly eventually have a big political impact. And that’s part of how we end up in the United States with the Civil War, right?

That transformative, at least potentially, in ending slavery. I would say that the arguments about women’s rights kind of fall in the shadow of the abolitionist arguments. Some of the same people who were involved in abolition are involved in the women’s rights movement.

You see Black women as well as white women. In general, though, the white women tend not to frame women’s rights as if Black women are also in the same boat with them. They tend to really frame women’s rights distinct from abolition as something that they get to define based on the needs of white women in their lives.

And eventually, of course, this takes some pretty specific forms in the later iterations of women’s rights and the effort to get women’s suffrage. So the answer is yes. Of course, the founding moment of the United States produces texts and slogans and sentiments and ideas about patriotism and about individual rights that people pick up on and echo again and again for all different kinds of causes.

And women, Black, white, Indigenous, pick up on all of this too. The framing for Indigenous women is somewhat different. It’s not necessarily hearkening to those founding documents or to the Bible in the same way.

But that’s how people frame arguments that they hope will get some political traction.

Adel:
You said that before the Civil War, the two main sources for some of these debates, the two documents, document is the wrong word, source is a better term here, is the Bible and the Constitution. You didn’t say the Declaration of Independence.

Dr. Brown:
It, I think it plays a secondary role.

Adel:
It was, it played a primary role in Seneca Falls in 1848, right?

Dr. Brown:
That was what they modeled it after. It’s, in some ways, it’s a more radical kind of rights declaration of individual rights. And to the best of my knowledge, it’s not as often part of how people frame arguments about the United States, about policy, about law, about the future of the United States, that they’re often using the Bible and the Constitution to kind of frame those arguments.

And there are all kinds of reasons for this. But to the best of my knowledge, those are the most used documents. And Seneca Falls Declaration kind of stands out for using the Declaration of Independence as its model.

Adel:
I see. If you wanted our audience to remember just one point about women’s rights and roles in the American Revolution, or let’s just say in the revolutionary era, what would it be? Just one point after everything we talked about for the last hour.

Dr. Brown:
That, so I’ve got two points to leave you with. That women were not one legal or demographic group. White women themselves were enmeshed in power relations, even if they were not the ultimate beneficiaries of all those relationships, they did benefit from them.

So that would be kind of point one. And that the main beneficiaries of the American Revolution were white American men, especially men with property, household heads, who were looking to secure and expand their authority over their households and over their dependents. And that doesn’t mean that the American Revolution didn’t have potential through the principles and the mechanisms, especially around the Constitution for future transformations.

But it does mean that at the point of the American Revolution, many of the main conditions that constrained women, and I’m using the term undifferentiated, of all different groups, and also had promise for their future liberty, many of those remain the same. The biggest difference would be their kind of more active engagement and presence in civic life in the potential role, especially for white women to be virtuous mothers who helped to nurture virtuous male citizens.

Adel:
Dr. Brown: , thank you so much for educating me and our audience about the American Revolution. And to our audience, if you know of any history that could provide more perspective about the American Revolution, please share it with us and tell us what’s your perspective. Thank you so very much, Dr. Brown.