In the late eighteenth century women in the Western world were acquiring more legal rights, although the change was barely perceptible at the time. This movement was strengthened in America by the events leading up to the break with Great Britain and still more by the Declaration of Independence. When Americans began to think and talk about the rights of the individual and the evils of arbitrary rule, subtle effects on relations between the sexes followed. For example, it became somewhat easier for women to obtain divorces. In colonial times divorces were relatively rare, but easier for men to obtain than for women. After the Revolution the difference did not disappear, but it became considerably smaller. In Massachusetts, before the 1770s no woman is known to have obtained a divorce on the grounds of her husband’s adultery. Thereafter, successful suits by wives against errant husbands were not unusual. In 1791 a South Carolina judge went so far as to say that the law protecting “the absolute dominion” of husbands was “the offspring of a rude and barbarous age.” The “progress of civilization,” he continued, “has tended to ameliorate the condition of women, and to allow even to wives, something like personal identity.”
As the tone of this “liberal” opinion indicates, the change in male attitudes that took place in America because of the Revolution was small. Courts in New York and Massachusetts refused to take action against Tory women whose husbands were Tories on the grounds that it was the duty of women to obey their husbands; and when John Adams’s wife Abigail warned him in 1776 that if he and his fellow rebels did not “remember the ladies” when reforming society, the women would “foment a Rebellion” of their own, he treated her remarks as a joke. Adams believed that voting (and as he wrote on another occasion, writing history) was “not the Province of the Ladies.”8
However, the war effort increased the influence of women in several ways. With so many men in uniform, women took over the management of countless farms, shops, and businesses, and they became involved in the handling of other day-to-day matters that men had normally conducted. Their experiences made both them, and in many cases their fathers and husbands, more aware of their ability to take on all sorts of work previously considered exclusively masculine in character. At the same time, women wanted to contribute to the winning of independence, and their efforts to do so made them conscious of their importance. Furthermore, the rhetoric of the Revolution, with its stress on liberty and equality, affected women in the same way that it caused many whites of both sexes to question the morality of slavery.
Attitudes toward the education of women also changed because of the Revolution. According to the best estimates, at least half the white women in America could not read or write as late as the 1780s. In a land of opportunity like the United States, women seemed particularly important, not only
This 1797 engraving depicts Deborah Sampson, the first woman to serve as a soldier in the Revolution. In 1782 she put on men's clothes and enlisted in the Massachusetts militia. Her identity was discovered and she was expelled. She then enlisted as Robert Shurtlieff in the Continental army. Wounded during a battle at Tarrytown, New York, she extracted the musket ball herself, rather than let a doctor treat her and discover her gender.
In 2009, historian Woody Holton described how Abigail Adams shrewdly invested in the Continental Congress's war debts; when the new government decided to pay those debts in full, those who had invested in the debt made a killing. Because John Adams himself supported this policy, Holton suggests that she had engaged in unsavory (but not uncommon) investment practices.
Because they themselves were citizens, but because of their role in training the next generation. “You distribute ‘mental nourishment’ along with physical,” one orator told the women of America in 1795. “The reformation of the world is in your power. . . . The solidity and stability of your country rest with you.” The idea of female education began to catch on. Schools for girls were founded, and the level of female literacy gradually rose.
World History
