the warehouse, hoisted out the coffee themselves, put it into the trunks and drove off…. A large concourse of men stood amazed, silent spectators of the whole transaction.
It has been pointed out by women historians recently that the contributions of working-class women in the American Revolution have been mostly ignored, unlike the genteel wives of the leaders (Dolley Madison, Martha Washington, and Abigail Adams, for example). Margaret Corbin, called “Dirty Kate,” Deborah Sampson Garnet, and “Molly Pitcher” were rough, lower-class women, prettified into ladies by historians. While poor women, in the last years of the fighting, went to army encampments, helped, and fought, they were represented later as prostitutes, whereas Martha Washington was given a special place in history books for visiting her husband at Valley Forge.
When feminist impulses are recorded, they are, almost always, the writings of privileged women who had some status from which to speak freely, more opportunity to write and have their writings recorded. Abigail Adams, even before the Declaration of Independence, in March of 1776, wrote to her husband:
…in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make… [d]o not put such unlimited power in 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 the laws in which we have no voice of representation.
Nevertheless, Jefferson underscored his phrase “all men are created equal” by his statement that American women would be “too wise to wrinkle their foreheads with politics.” And after the Revolution, none of the new state constitutions granted women the right to vote, except for New Jersey, and that state rescinded the right in 1807. New York’s constitution specifically disfranchised women by using the word “male.”
Working-class women had no means of recording whatever sentiments of rebelliousness they may have felt at their subordination. Not only were they bearing children in great numbers, under great hardships, but they were working in the home. Around the time of the Declaration of Independence, four thousand women and children in Philadelphia were spinning at home for local plants under the “putting out” system. Women also were shopkeepers and innkeepers and engaged in many trades.
Ideas of female equality were in the air during and after the Revolution. Tom Paine spoke out for the equal rights of women. And the pioneering book of Mary Wollstonecraft in England, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, was reprinted in the United States shortly after the Revolutionary War. She wrote: “I wish to persuade women to endeavor to acquire strength, both of mind and body….”
Between the American Revolution and the Civil War, so many elements of American society were being transformed that changes were bound to take place in the situation of women. In preindustrial America, the practical need for women in a frontier society had produced some measure of equality; women worked at important jobs—publishing newspapers, managing tanneries, keeping taverns, engaging in skilled work. A grandmother, Martha Moore Ballard, on a farm in Maine in 1795, in twenty-five years as a midwife delivered more than a thousand babies.
Now, women were being pulled out of the house and into industrial life, while at the same time there was pressure for women to stay home where they were more easily controlled. The idea of “the woman’s place,” promulgated by men, was accepted by many women. It became important to develop a set of ideas, taught in church, in school, and in the family, to keep women in their place even as that place became more and more unsettled. The woman was expected to be pious. One female writer said: “Religion is just what woman needs. Without it she is ever restless or unhappy.”
Sexual purity was to be the special virtue of a woman. The role began early, with adolescence. Obedience prepared the girl for submission to the first proper mate. Barbara Welter describes this:
The assumption is twofold: the American female was supposed to be so infinitely lovable and provocative that a healthy male could barely control himself when in the same room with her, and the same girl, as she “comes out” of the cocoon of her family’s protectiveness, is so palpitating with undirected affection [that]…she is required to exert the inner control of obedience. The combination forms a kind of societal chastity belt which is not unlocked until the marriage partner has arrived, and adolescence is formally over.
When Amelia Bloomer in 1851 suggested in her feminist publication that women wear a kind of short skirt and pants, to free themselves from the encumbrances of traditional dress, this was attacked in the popular women’s literature. One story has a girl admiring the “bloomer” costume, but her professor admonishes her that they are “only one of the many manifestations of that wild spirit of socialism and agrarian radicalism which is at present so rife in our land.”
The woman’s job was to keep the home cheerful, maintain religion, be nurse, cook, cleaner, seamstress, flower arranger. A woman shouldn’t read too much, and certain books should be avoided.
A sermon preached in 1808 in New York: “How interesting and important are the duties devolved on females as wives…the counsellor and friend of the husband; who makes it her daily study to lighten his cares, to soothe his sorrows, and to augment his joys.…”
Women were also urged, especially since they had the job of educating children, to be patriotic. One women’s magazine offered a prize to the woman who wrote the best essay on “How May an American Woman Best Show Her Patriotism.”
The cult of domesticity for the woman was a way of pacifying her with a doctrine of “separate but equal”—giving her work equally as important as the man’s, but separate and different. Inside that “equality” there was the fact that the woman did not choose her mate, and once her marriage took place, her life was determined. Marriage enchained, and children doubled the chains.
The “cult of true womanhood” could not completely erase what was visible as evidence of woman’s subordinate status: she could not vote, could not own property; when she did work, her wages were one-fourth to one-half what men earned in the same job. Women were excluded from the professions of law and medicine, from colleges, from the ministry.
Putting all women into the same category—giving them all the same domestic sphere to cultivate—created a classification (by sex) that blurred the lines of class. However, forces were at work to keep raising the issue of class. Samuel Slater had introduced industrial spinning machinery in New England in 1789, and now there was a demand for young girls literally, “spinsters”—to work the spinning machinery in factories. In 1814, the power loom was introduced in Waltham, Massachusetts, and now all the operations needed to turn cotton fiber into cloth were under one roof. The new textile factories swiftly multiplied, with women 80 to 90 percent of their operatives—most of these women between fifteen and thirty.
Some of the earliest industrial strikes took place in these textile mills in the 1830s. Women’s daily average earnings in 1836 were less than thirty-seven cents, and thousands earned twenty-five cents a day, working twelve to sixteen hours a day. In Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in 1824, came the first known strike of women factory workers; 202 women joined men in protesting a wage cut and longer hours, but they met separately. Four years later, women in Dover, New Hampshire, struck alone.
In Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1834, when a young woman was fired from her job, other girls left their looms, one of them then climbing the town pump and making, according to a newspaper report, “a flaming Mary Wollstonecraft speech on the rights of women and the iniquities of the ‘moneyed aristocracy’ which produced a powerful effect on her auditors and they determined to have their own way, if they died for it.”
Several times in those strikes, women armed with sticks and stones broke through the wooden gates of a textile mill and stopped the looms.
Catharine
