Women of the American Revolution

after we got tenure. Before we got tenure, we wrote dissertations about white men, The science of Happiness, Appreciating modern painting, Dilemmas of modern medicae, Abraham Lincoln at the Civil War, history of jazz, the artistic genius of Michel Angeli, When intuition face turning points that changed American history, psychology of religious There One Day University. The most acclaimed and popular professors from top colleges. They're best lectures, fascinating conversations. Hi,

I'm Richard Davies. Let's learn, and we said, this is an eight year home front war. Carolder in and my lectures Women of the American Revolution. It was fought and vileges. Did women not notice? Here's the question? Where is half the population? Almost every painting and nearly all of the history books about the American Revolution talk a lot about men. Women seem to be missing from the American Revolution. So

why is that? Well that history is written by men, it's also written by people who largely believe that formal politics and military life, both of which produce great heroic figures, are the stuff of history. It took until the nineties, sixties and seventies to even begin to talk about what Jesse Lemish called history from the bottom up. As long as historians thought of ordinary people women African Americans as being passive figures, there was no reason to write about them.

But you say they were not passive, Absolutely, they weren't. No one is a passive figure. One way to understand that is that people, many people don't have many choices, but they always have a choice. And when you make a choice about how you're going to live, about what you believe in, about how you're going to act, you are an agent of history. And that is the message

of social history. So that instead of writing, for instance, Lincoln freed the slaves, you might want to consider that many slaves pick themselves up and walked to freedom or fought against their oppressors. So you begin to have a completely different perspective when you recognize that all those people that have been sort of passive observers of history are

really active agents of it. And we have those of us who do African American history, those of us who do women's history, those of us who do working class history. The whole way I think that we look at history has been transformed since the late twentieth century in what way? Well, in that this rise of social history and this belief in what we call agency or being an agent making choices about your future, has changed where change in history

comes from. That now we see change and continuity, which are the two essences of history. That those are driven. The engine of that is not just the men at the top, or even the women at the top, It's the people who participate in sustaining it or changing it. What is the mission of your one day university lecture? What are you hoping people will take away from it?

I am hoping that they'll be entertained by the stories, because some of the amazing tales of women who are spies, and women who dresses men in the army, and women who write plays and are interesting in their own right. The heart of history is people, and a lot of these women are simply interesting people. But I also want them to see that they have been given a version

of the American Revolution that is wildly incomplete. We know from home for on Wars in our modern times, that the entire civilian population is wrapped up in these wars. Women were going out to hang up their laundry and the battles going on in their wheat fields, and they don't notice, they don't participate. It's an absurd version. What do you try to do, then, given that we've been fed this wildly inaccurate version of the history of the America,

I try to deconstruct that version. I try to insert women here all along the way, Valley Forge. Insert women here, the boycotts that preceded the war, Insert women here, military life insert there's no part with the exception of formal political decision making. But everything else, everything else. You are only seeing a sliver of the complexity. So let's look at the everything else. Valley Forge. Valley Forge, like many areas, for instance, in Vietnam during the war, anywhere the army went,

cities arose immediately because women, children, their pet dogs. They all flocked to the winter quarters of the army, because otherwise they might starve, they might be attacked by enemy soldiers, their farms might be burned down. Washington hated it. He hated it. He had this image of this professional army professional as the British Army was, and having you know, children running around was not his idea. So he wanted

to be agile. He wanted the army to move, and every time he would try to move he as hilarious records in his quartermaster books. He says, I was trying to move the army quickly, but eight women were in labor and I had to wait until the babies were delivered. I mean, for Washington, this was a horrible thing. He didn't drive the women out. Anybody guess why because if the women left, the men would have left. And what did they do there? They gathered the fuel for fires.

They nursed the soldiers who were largely sick from communicable diseases, not injuries. They did the laundry, and that was terribly important because these young boys who were soldiers were covered in lice. They prepared the food. They served in many ways as a sort of informal quartermaster corps, providing services and supplies that the men needed. And that's a perfect example of the small things that make a big difference.

Those are the camps. What happened when the army traveled, many women went with them, and they were sent out onto the battlefield to scavenge boots, coats, any clothing that would be valuable, and weapons, and many of them were killed or wounded because they were in the midst of the battle. So they were not luxury items in this tale of the American Revolution. They were actually veterans of the battles. And one of the best examples of this,

of course, the famous Molly Pitcher. You know, there was no such person. Molly was a very common nickname, and they were called Molly pitcher because in the forts where they fired cannons. And I had to learn this because I thought these women were bringing water to the men to drink. When you fire a cannon, it gets very hot, and in order to reload it, you have to reach inside it and tamp down the material that you're going

to fire off. And if there are any sparks left in there and you push in the paper, that precedes the cannon ball boom. So they had to cool down the cannon after every firing. So the women would be in the barracks and then the men were at the cannons and they would fire the cannon and then they would shout Molly Pitcher, and a woman would come running out with a pitcher of water and it would be

poured on the cannon. We have two hundred and fifty applications by women who were injured in a battle in the forts and who were asking for veterans pay, and there were probably a lot more, yes, many more, that we simply don't have records of. None of them, by the way, got anything you say women were political, that they became political in the seventeen sixties before the revolution exactly.

I think one of the most radical consequences of the protests and the war was the instant politicization of women. For a century and a half, women had been told be silent, don't participate in public discourse, don't bother your heads with politics. You're not smart enough to do this. That's men's world. In seventeen sixty five, the stamp ac comes along, and the policy that got it repealed and the acts that followed repealed, was the boycott of British

manufactured goods. Patrick Henry, a rated Legislature's Assembly, sent letters to Parliament. People wrote treatises about how unfair what the British were doing. In the response of Parliament was these Americans, the descendants of horse traders and thieves. That people in Parliament didn't even know that Virginia wasn't right next to Massachusetts, I mean America was. America was the boomdocks. They didn't care.

But when the Americans decided to boycott British tea and British cloth, Parliament perked up because the British Industrial Revolution that was beginning was based on cloth and America was the primary market. And the British East India Tea Company guess who all the stockholders were. Men in Parliament. And when Americans said, we're gonna boycott everything you planned to sell us until you repeal the Stamp Act and then later the Townsend Acts and the Tea Act, we're not

going to buy anything from you. Well, who was responsible for making that boycott work? Who bought the cloth, who needed the cloth? Who had the tea parties? Women? It was all about women participating. And when they started to participate, they became politically conscious that what they were doing was defending the liberty of American colonists. And they said it by referring to the cloth they spun as liberty cloth. And they referred in their letters to one another to

being perfect statesmen talking about politics. And all those men who had told them to be quiet for hundred and fifty years, all those ministers who had told them to be quiet, are now suddenly singing their praises, now suddenly saying you are the defenders of American liberty. Horsaf for you. So if those women had merely been meek and silent fall exactly, there wouldn't have been the energy behind Exactly.

Women signed petitions, uh declarations that they put in newspapers, and they signed it with their names, and they expressly said, we are doing this ourselves, not because our husbands suggested it. I mean, this is political action, and it happened literally overnight. It's the most extraordinary politicization of a group of people that I know of, and they are responsible for the repeal of every one of those laws. You sound fired

up by this stuff always. I once had a student who said to me, you know, miss Birkin, I don't I don't care that much about history, but it seems to there's so much to you that I'm going to do the work in this class. And I never understand why people don't realize how interesting the past is and how important it is to get it right. Why well,

because myths are dangerous. Myths reinforced the idea that the American Revolution was a stag event, you know, only men, only men did it plays a role in assumptions that generation after generation will have about what women can do and what women can't do, And so it's really important to understand what roles they played to shape attitudes later on. The consequences of that are really relevant right up until today,

right up until modern times. One of the many unreported acts of women in the American Revolution was how they took over farms and shops and businesses. Why was that so difficult to do housework in the eighteenth century was household production? Men were the unskilled laborers. Women were the skilled laborers. Men did the grunt work in the field,

but women processed raw materials into usable items. Everybody acknowledged that there was not a farmer in the world who didn't want to have a wife because she knew what was called the mysteries of house swiffery. Any medieval scholars out there, okay, who had mysteries raftsmen, the mysteries of goldsmithing, the mystery of barrel making, these were the secrets of the profession, and that meant that you were an artisan.

They talked about the mysteries of how swiffery, meaning they knew that women had production skills that men did not have, and that was the primary activity besides bearing children that women had. Their houses were filthy. They didn't bother with washing and cleaning. My students think housewife. They decorate the table, they make the napkins matched the place matt, they put flowers on the table. That's not what how swiffery was.

How swiffery was turning flax into cloth, slaughtering pigs and chickens, and preserving and cooking the meat, taking the apples from the orchard, and making cider, making butter, all of the things that families needed. As my son once said to me, I would have just ordered in pizza. Not a historian, my son. So here's what you're gonna see. A man

goes off to war. A woman is left not only with all the maintenance and the production chores, but with maybe she's pregnant, maybe she has a baby in her arms. She hasn't wean, she has toddlers, and there are no safety latches on anything. So you're watching your children. You are holding your children, and now you have to also go out and manage the field. But it depended a lot on whether you were wealthy enough, because for the average American farm woman, this was a tremendous heroic action.

For many years, we have letters from from farm wives saying to their husband's in the army, we interest coming. Your children will freeze, we have no firewood, Your children will starve. The British Army has taken all our food. Come home, Come home. Married women were men's property. Yes, yes, legally you were the ward of your father, and when you got married you became fem covert woman covered taken care of by a man, and you lost your legal identity.

You couldn't sewer, be suits, you couldn't own property everything you brought into the marriage, and your body belonged to your husband. When a slave ran away, the poster put up said runaway. If a wife ran away from her husband, the poster said, she has abducted her body from me. In the twentieth century, there was still states that said that a woman's body belonged to her husband. Did the status of women change as a result of the war,

that's a very complicated question. They didn't get married women's property rights, They certainly didn't get political rights. Very little changed in terms of the context in which they would make their choices, but some things did change that would have long term consequences. Even before the Revolution, Enlightenment ideas had come to the elites of the colonies, and the Enlightenment ideas, among other things, made this remarkable observation that

all human beings are capable of rational thought. This was a new idea. Throughout the whole colonial period. It was assumed that women, because they had small and weak brains that science in the eighteenth century smile and weak brains, couldn't think rationally, and what that meant was they couldn't judge right from wrong. Children we're not raised by women. Women could teach girls household production, but the educating of their children to be citizens in the community, only the

rational partner could do that. As manufacturing and trade further developed in the Northeast, more men were separated their business from their home, so they weren't really around to educate their sareness about how important it was to be patriots and to sacrifice. The out of the Dada, But the Enlightenment and the Revolution had taught them that women, contrary to earlier thought, were actually capable of ration sational thought.

They were actually capable of deciding right from wrong, and they had proved it day after day in the American Revolution. And a lot of the women they were talking about when they talked about American women were middle and upper class white women, right, That's who they envisioned. And these

women didn't have to engage in how swiffery anymore. In towns and cities, you could buy cloth, you could buy chickens already killed, you could buy produce, you could go to a green grocer, and you had servants, and you had slaves who could do the actual housework. So these women didn't have how swiffery chores anymore. So the idea

developed that you would let women socialize the children. Not only would you let them, but you would persuade women that this was the most important civic duty in the existence. On your shoulders rests the survival of the republic. And women took up the challenge. And what happens after the American Revolution in every colony from Massachusetts to Georgia is

the rise of young ladies academies. It is very dangerous to educate people, very dangerous, and it's very dangerous for a group of women to be all together for several years talking about their condition. What you mean, It isn't just me, it's the whole society. Seventy years later, which in historical terms is just a little blip, women gather at Seneca Falls, they write the Declaration of Sentiments, and they demand equality. That's the consequences of the revolution. Thank

you very much, Thank you. I'm Richard Davies. Thanks for listening. Sign up on our website one day you dot com to become a member and access over six hundred full length video lectures for the world's finest professors.