her judgment call, not his: without Mistress Brent, they averred, “All would have gone to ruin.”
English-speaking colonial women, of course, benefited from the examples of seventeenth-century Queen Mary and especially the highly successful Elizabeth I, followed in the next century by Mary II and Anne. The English idea that a woman was capable of being the supreme monarch was rarely replicated on the European continent, Spain’s Isabella notwithstanding, and the status of women in French and Spanish colonies reflected this lesser place. Nor did the Catholic Church of France and Spain offer women roles analogous to those of Protestant women, especially Quakers. Although Spain’s Catholic colonies were North America’s first and priests held significant roles in them, more than two centuries would pass before the first Spanish sisterhoods arrived.
Spanish colonial women did enjoy some social freedoms that Anglo women lacked—dancing, drinking, smoking, gambling, wearing more comfortable clothing—but any aspirations to educational and political equality were more difficult. As late as the nineteenth century, for example, Catholic women in California were actively discouraged from even reading.
In contrast, reading was fundamental to Protestantism. Especially in the Puritan colonies of New England, girls were taught to read so that they could properly inculcate religious principles in their children. It is therefore wholly appropriate that the nation’s first written feminist theory came from its original Puritan settlement, Salem. It was the work of a intellectual giant whose name should be well known, but again, few Americans are familiar with Judith Sargent Stevens Murray.
A childless sea captain’s wife, Murray had time to think. In 1784—almost a decade before English Mary Wollstonecraft published the much more famous Vindication of the Rights of Women—she wrote on the need for improved female self-esteem, “Encouraging a Degree of Self-Complacency, Especially in Female Bosoms.” The thoughts she expressed are still being rediscovered by women today:
Will it be said that the judgment of a male of two years old is more sage than that of a female of the same age? I believe the reverse is generally observed to be true. But from that period what partiality! How is the one exalted and the other depressed…. The one is taught to aspire, and the other is early confined and limited.
Murray eventually collected her essays into three books, the sales of which were promoted by George Washington, and at least one critic has compared her work with that of Noah Webster. Yet after her 1820 death in the wilderness of Mississippi, where she had gone to live with a daughter she bore by her second husband, Judith Sargent Murray’s brilliant mind was soon forgotten.
A better-known writer of the same era is Mercy Otis Warren. Perhaps her work is remembered both because it was less feminist and because she was well-connected to male leadership. The wife and the sister of governmental officials, Warren had a political insider’s view of the tumultuous days of the American Revolution; indeed, she played her own significant role in bringing on the rebellion by anonymously publishing satires of the British. While her chief purpose in writing was political in the usual sense of the word, Warren also included asides that made feminist points. “Hateall,” for example, a character in one of her plays, not only represented British brutality toward colonists, but also was a blatant misogynist. In a tavern scene, he boasted that he married only to win his wife’s dowry and then “broke her skirts.” His recommendation for a “rebellious dame” was “the green Hick’ry or the willow twig.”
Although both Warren and Murray called for greater respect for women, they nevertheless published much of their work under pseudonyms, and neither ever suggested the vote for women or even demanded clearly defined rights to property, custody, or other legal empowerments. Abigail Adams, who never published, was more assertive about political inclusion of women in her voluminous correspondence with the era’s important men.
Future president John Adams acknowledged that it was his wife’s property management ability that allowed him to spend his life in politics, and their records make it evident that she was the business executive of the family. And yet, although John had great respect for Abigail and their marriage was ideally companionate, he laughed off her most famous call for female freedom. When he met with the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, she wrote from their farm near Boston in March 1776—well before July’s Declaration of Independence. “I long to hear you have declared an independency,” she said, “and, by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make,”
Abigail Adams (Library of Congress)
I desire you would remember the ladies and be more favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of husbands. Remember all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention are not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion and will not hold ourselves bound to obey any laws in which we have no voice or representation. 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.
Her husband’s reply was amused; rolling eyes and a quizzical grin seem to suffuse his words. Not only did he treat her demand for respect as cute, he could not even grant that these creative thoughts were her own:
As to your extraordinary code of laws, I cannot but laugh. We have been told that our struggle has loosened the bands of government everywhere—that children and apprentices were disobedient, that schools and colleges were grown turbulent…. But your letter was the first intimation that another tribe, more numerous and powerful than all the rest, were grown discontented…. Depend on it, we know better than to repeal our masculine systems…. I begin to think the British as deep as they are wicked at stirring up Tories, Canadians, Indians, Negroes, Irish, Roman Catholics, and, at last, they have stimulated the women to demand new privileges and threaten to rebel.
Abigail Adams’s and Mercy Otis Warren’s feminist arguments were clearly subordinate to their mainstream political ideas, for it was the success of the new nation that motivated the majority of the words they wrote. Yet the rhetoric of freedom—as John Adams reluctantly acknowledged—inevitably encouraged rebellion among the less privileged. It was simply impossible to proclaim a Declaration of Independence that spoke of “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness” and of “the consent of the governed” without inspiring hopes that those words might mean what they say.
Perhaps these women of the Revolutionary Age influenced the political climate more than is easily traced, for the same era did produce the first actual voting rights for women. In 1776, the first official year of the Revolution, New Jersey implicitly granted the vote to its women when it adopted a constitution that enfranchised “all free inhabitants.” English-speaking women, however, had long experience with gender-neutral language that did not actually mean to include them. In Virginia, too, similar gender-neutral language implied an enfranchisement of which women remained unaware. When Hannah Lee Corbin wrote her brother, General Richard Henry Lee, in 1778 to protest the taxation of women without representation, he replied that Virginia “women were already possessed of that right”—something that seems to have been news to her.
Not surprisingly, such ambiguous and unpublicized enfranchisement meant that few women actually cast ballots. Surprisingly, almost a decade after the Revolution’s end, its spirit still prevailed: in 1790, the New Jersey legislature confirmed that it indeed had meant what it said by adding the words “he or she” to its election codes. The amendment’s sponsor was Joseph Cooper, a Quaker accustomed to voting women. More remarkable is the fact that only three of his male colleagues voted against this precedent-setting legislation.
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