How the Revolution carved out space for women’s liberty

Abigail did not appreciate this banter. In a letter to another Massachusetts woman, she noted that John was “very saucy” about her “list of female grievances.” And she was right about the law: Before and after the Revolution, men controlled their wives’ property, their income, even their legal identities.

But many historians have uncovered evidence that in an unjust world, American women found small but real ways to shape their own lives. The Revolutionary War, with its emphasis on individual liberty, played a key role in encouraging and accelerating this process.

One researcher, Lee Virginia Chambers-Schiller, has shown that the number of women choosing not to marry — only a couple of percentage points at the start of the conflict — increased rapidly in the years after. Another, Susan E. Klepp, has shown that the women who did marry chose to have fewer children. After a postwar baby boom, birth rates began to fall, with women marrying later and using techniques like herbal abortifacients to space their pregnancies further apart.

Both Klepp and Chambers-Schiller are making inferences from demographic data. But exciting new research has uncovered examples of regular women speaking and acting for themselves. These women — war widows, working-class mothers, elderly Black women — drew inspiration from the Revolution itself, which gave them new ideas, new circumstances, even new language to argue for lasting changes of their own.

The Revolution was a violent and tumultuous time for many Americans. On remote farms and in occupied cities, women worried about being robbed or murdered or raped. In a forthcoming book, Lauren Duval, a professor at the University of Oklahoma, details the terrible ways in which the war hit the home front. A Long Island woman named Elizabeth Johnstone was raped by two British soldiers while her 4-year-old daughter watched and wept. A Philadelphia woman named Elizabeth Drinker wrote that she was “afraid to go to bed.” Drinker continued: “Every noise now seems alarming that happens in the night.”

These years of chaos — husbands and sons dying in battle, homes and belongings being seized or destroyed — had enormous impacts on American women. They responded with a canny mix of strategy and survival. Their actions did not always generate public records. (Drinker described her fears in a private diary.) But historians have discovered some surprising and revealing archives.

One such archive is the legal petitions representing and often written by 18th-century women. While researching the 2023 book “In Dependence: Women and the Patriarchal State in Revolutionary America,” Jacqueline Beatty read thousands of these petitions — pleas to charities, courts, and legislatures; divorce cases; and deeds for manumission, among other examples. These petitions allowed women to do something rare in this era: make demands for themselves.

The war gave them plenty of opportunities. Beatty, a professor at York College, writes that during the Revolution the number of petitions “increased exponentially.” A woman named Margret Clendening asked the South Carolina legislature for help. “The ravages of the war and the loss of her husband,” she said, had devastated her family. A woman named Mary Dunton begged a Pennsylvania council for a pass to travel to New York, where the British had imprisoned her husband. Although the Colonies’ new army and government had failed to free him, Dunton argued that she could “effect his exchange or liberty.”

Another petition came from “Daphne, an African,” who submitted her request for aid to the Massachusetts General Court. Daphne’s owner was a British loyalist who’d fled Boston during the war. After the state seized his property, it had not taken adequate care of Daphne, who, in the words of her petition, was “unfirm and wholly unable to support herself in a very advanced age.”

In petition after petition, women added their signature or their mark — they engaged with the legal system and advocated for themselves.

As Beatty points out, this advocacy often required them to play to gendered stereotypes, to flatter the men who remained in charge. In her famous letter, Abigail told John that “if particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion.” But most women in this period chose a less radical tone.

Dunton emphasized that she had “no support but what arose from the labor of her husband”; Clendening stressed that she was caring for a “number of small children, whose support and education depends wholly upon the industry of your petitioner”; Daphne dwelled not on the evils of slavery but on “the short time which probably she has to live.”

This approach was calculated: Women understood that they lived in an unfair system, and they told that system what it wanted to hear.

The Revolution did change that system in subtle ways. Debates about the British king, and the American government that would replace him, popularized ideas like independence and individual liberty — what the Declaration of Independence famously called “unalienable rights.” Women borrowed those ideas to advance their own causes. Hannah Ellis, who lost her husband at the Battle of Monmouth, asked for the “relief which is due her.” Her husband, she wrote, had “bled and died … in defense of the rights of mankind.”

Once the Revolution ended, women began applying the language of “rights” not only to their men but to themselves. Beatty traces this transformation by analyzing divorces requested by women. These surged after the Revolution. According to Beatty’s analysis, women in Boston filed for five divorces in the 1770s. In the 1780s, they filed for 15 — and by the 19th century, that number had climbed to 30 or more per decade, easily outpacing the city’s population growth.

The terms in these cases also shifted. Elizabeth Finney filed for divorce because her husband beat her and threatened her. Her petition said that he had “wholly subverted … all that comfort and happiness which she had a right to expect.”

Mary Lobb also invoked her legal rights when describing her husband’s abuse. So did Catherine France when she explained that her husband took the money she made as a laundress and spent it on alcohol. So did Nancy Robinson when she claimed that her husband had slept with other women and “destroyed” her “peace and felicity.”

In their petitions, these women emphasized that they had played the role of faithful and submissive wife. But they also leveraged that role to get what they needed: safety, alimony, freedom. Sally Jones Wilson accused her husband of adultery. Her petition made the next step clear: “a right accrues to the said Sally, to be loosed from the bonds of matrimony.”

Historians have argued for a long time that the Revolution inspired women in various ways, but they’ve often focused on domestic topics. There were the women who decided not to marry. (A Massachusetts woman wrote a poem championing this option: “Round freedom’s fair standard I’ve rallied and paid, / A vow of allegiance to die an old maid.”) Or there were the women who decided to have fewer children. Elizabeth Drinker, the Philadelphia woman who was “afraid to go to bed,” had eight children. In the years after the war, Drinker’s daughters averaged just over four children each.

If the Revolution empowered women in these domestic realms, though, it seemed to make less of a difference in politics and law. There were small steps, most notably when New Jersey allowed some women to vote, but the state reversed that right in 1807. America remembered the ladies, briefly, only to forget them.

And yet new scholarship like Beatty’s suggests this was only part of the picture. The women who filed their own legal petitions engaged directly with the legal system. They understood that change was messy and slow — that it sometimes moved backward, as in New Jersey, and that it often required one to operate within an unfair set of laws. But just as the Revolution inspired women to take control of their bodies and their domestic duties, it also inspired them to view themselves as American citizens with American rights. Women in this period, writes Beatty, “developed a new consciousness of and confidence in their ability to demand these rights from the state.”

That mindset eventually led to more activism, which led to more rights: the right to own property, the right to vote, the right to equal pay. It started with the Revolution, and it continued through 19th-century figures like Louisa May Alcott, one of the post-Revolutionary women who decided not to marry.

The reason, to Alcott, was obvious: “To many of us,” she wrote, “liberty is a better husband than love.”