Mothers of the Revolution
Carol Berkin on Women and America's War for Independence
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| A New Touch on the Times by a "Daughter of Liberty," Woodcut, Broadside, 1779, Neg. #48257. Collection of the New-York Historical Society |
Too often, she observes, the American Revolution is cast as an all-male drama, with such familiar figures at George Washington, "Swamp Fox" Francis Marion, Patrick Henry, and Paul Revere playing the lead roles. Only three women typically get mentioned, and then as minor characters: Abigail Adams (who asked her husband to "remember the ladies" at the Second Continental Congress), Betsy Ross (who may or may not have sewn the first flag), and Molly Pitcher (who never actually existed, says Berkin, but was a name given to the many women who carried water to cool cannons on the battlefields). Women are conspicuously absent from the historical literature, but, as Revolutionary Mothers shows, they were active in a variety of vital roles--from boycotting British goods, to raising funds for the army, to even acting as spies and fighting on the battlefront.
"Women were deeply involved in making the boycotts work, and, actually, that's what got the tax laws repealed," says Berkin, a professor of history at The Graduate Center and Baruch College who has spend much of her career studying women in the Colonial and Revolutionary periods. "It wasn't the great oratory of Patrick Henry or the petitions from the assemblies that did it. It was the boycott of British goods....and it was women who enforced these boycotts as consumers."
Berkin's book seeks not only to fill a void in the traditionally male-dominated histories, but also to re-animate the period with the stories of individual women--including Martha Washington, the Quaker spy Lydia Darragh, the wealthy fundraiser Esther DeBerdt Reed, the Native American diplomat Molly Brant, the Boston slave and poet Phillis Wheatley, and Margaret Corbin (who was crippled for life when she took her husband's place manning a cannon at Fort Monmouth)--by focusing as much as possible on women's actual words and deeds.
Revolutionary Mothers includes chapters on gender ideology before the Revolution, the role of women in the protest period from 1763 to the Declaration of Independence, the roles of African American and Native American women during the war, the women who followed the troops, the effect of the war on the home front (with many women taking on the jobs of running farms, plantations, and businesses), the lives of generals' wives, and of loyalist women in exile. It reaches across societal divisions to paint a broad and complex portrait of women intimately engaged in the violent conflict in a variety of ways--many of them surprising, even to Berkin.
"I have a chapter on women who were spies and saboteurs, who dressed as men and fought in the military and carried messages," she says. She writes, in this chapter: "These stories of Revolutionary war heroines reveal surprising humor and resourcefulness. In them, young girls chew and swallow documents rather than have them discovered by the enemy; middle-aged women listen at keyholes to spy on military planning sessions; and old women serve liquor to soldiers and rob them of their guns."
"They're just wonderful, wonderful stories...and they don't appear in scholarly history books," she says. As a result, Berkin had to rely on some unconventional, non-scholarly sources to do research on these women, such as the Daughters of the American Revolution. DAR chapters are often named after local heroines, and they pay tribute to these women's lives through a combination of folklore and material documentation, which proves that the heroines really existed. It's an oral tradition, not without embellishments, says Berkin, but the information is invaluable to historians--even if the details are in dispute, the roles that these women played are not.
"There was this whole underground that kept these stories alive, and it was wonderful to find them," she says.
The book tells other often-overlooked stories, such as those of women loyal to the British crown. "Thousands and thousands of American colonists were opposed to the Revolution, and these women thought that they were just as patriotic when they worked for the British army as Abigail Adams thought she was when she worked for the Revolutionary army. And sometimes they were neighbors," says Berkin.
In Revolutionary Mothers, Berkin writes for a general audience, in a lucid, engaging style, as she has done in previous works such as A Brilliant Solution: Inventing the American Constitution (Harcourt, 2002). With that highly readable, down-to-earth account of the Constitutional Convention, she sought to dispel the myth of the founding fathers as demigods, instead portraying them as a fascinating cast of human characters, with their many foibles, who came together in order to solve problems for the good of the country. The book won a popular readership, and is assigned in high school and college courses. She is also involved with several programs to help educate public high school teachers, and she frequently appears as a commentator in television documentaries such as The History Channel's "Founding Fathers" and "Founding Brothers," Ric Burns's "New York" series, "Benjamin Franklin" on PBS, and a program with Richard Dreyfus on the Hamilton-Burr duel.
"I see myself much more now as a public historian," she says, noting that her focus has changed somewhat in recent years. "I really want to write for the layperson."
If she has a mission to reach the general public and get readers excited about history in new ways, she also strives to write history that looks forward from the point of view of the people living it, not from hindsight, and treats historical figures as real people. "If you look at it going forward, the bewildering choices that people faced are like those we face in our lives," she says, and the outcome is always uncertain. Think, for example, of Abigail Adams, Deborah Franklin, and Martha Washington, who lived with the knowledge that their husbands would be hanged as traitors should the Revolution fail.
Berkin not only tells the story looking forward, but often does so from the points of view of people whose stories have not been told before. "Even today," she says, "many of the histories of the Revolution are written as if women were in some catatonic state and didn't notice that armies were marching in front of their doorsteps....What I was trying to do in this book was to make the point that in a home-front war, these women were actively engaged in an enormous number of ways."
