1 The Dawn of Republican Motherhood Lydia Chapin Taft no doubt wore black on October 30, 1756 when she attended a town meeting in Uxbridge, Massachusetts. Both her 18‐year‐old son Caleb and her husband Josiah had died the previous month. During their twenty‐five‐year marriage, Josiah had worked his way through the ranks of the esteemed – becoming a captain in the militia, serving on the local Board of Selectmen, often chosen to ­represent their town in the Massachusetts General Court. His astute purchases and sales of property made him a wealthy landowner, and left Lydia, with three minor children still at home, the town’s largest taxpayer. Property assured male patriarchy, and conferred status on landed families. So civic leaders in Uxbridge, not far from the Quaker stronghold of Worcester, where women were invited to speak at meet- ing, asked Lydia to cast a vote in her husband’s place. Her affirmative vote on funding the local militia was the first of three she would cast as a widow. Two years later, in 1758, she voted on tax issues. And in 1765, she again appeared at a town meeting, this time to weigh in on school districts. Before Massachusetts or the other original Thirteen Colonies declared their independence from the British, she became America’s first recorded female voter. Central toCOPYRIGHTED scholars of women’s history MATERIAL is why the American Revolution – with its rhetoric of no taxation without representation and its themes of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness – did not liberate American women. After the war, revolutionary leaders encouraged And Yet They Persisted: How American Women Won the Right to Vote, First Edition. Johanna Neuman. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Companion website: www.wiley.com/go/Neuman 0004435890.INDD 1 08-10-2019 13:53:15 2 And Yet They Persisted women to act as keepers of civic virtue, teaching young Americans the perils of monarchies, instilling a quality of democracy in the next gen- eration of patriots. Historian Linda K. Kerber, who coined the phrase “the Republican Motherhood,” noted that this new function restricted women to the domestic arena, while giving them new standing in the polity. Others have countered that this post‐revolutionary era saw more of a turn toward a Republican Womanhood, tethered less to a woman’s role as a mother than to her place as a citizen in the new republic, with influence not only on children but also on suitors, husbands, and brothers. By whatever name, the emphasis on women’s role in America’s new democracy unleashed a surge of interest in female education and public participation. That is why it is important to begin this account of women’s suffrage not in the 1840s, when women’s rights activists began to call conventions, but in the 1790s, when they began to participate in the nation’s political life. It was here, early in the Republic’s history, that women joined the public sphere, learning “to stand and speak.” This controversial first step toward activism would have lasting effects on the fight for the vote over the next two centuries. Antecedents of Republican Motherhood Like other linguistic constructs of history, patriarchy was a concept designed by men, to favor men. In Biblical story, Eve lured Adam to sin, casting both of them from the Garden of Eden. In ancient Greece, Aristotle excluded women from the polis, which he regarded as the highest calling in life, arguing that those who did not participate in the political life of the state were little better than idiots. The main function of wives in ancient Greece was to produce male heirs – girl infants could be killed at their father’s discretion. Part of the patriarchal code required dividing the female population into respectable and non‐respectable women, rewarding women who showed their obedi- ence to men through sexual subordination, allowing men to roam the sexual field with slaves, lower‐class women or young men. Men would fight wars, oversee property, participate in the nation’s public life, and dictate the rules for women and children at home. Women would obey or find themselves further degraded as prostitutes or impoverished servants. By the time of British kings, men had devised a new construct of power. The concept of coverture was embedded into Common Law, ensuring that a woman, on marriage, would cede all legal rights to her husband. She had no right to own property or keep income, no parental rights over her children, no standing in the law to make contracts or petition for divorce. Though they flew the British flag, the colonies survived in a 0004435890.INDD 2 08-10-2019 13:53:15 The Dawn of Republican Motherhood 3 land of natives, immigrants, and territorial ambition. Soon some laws of patriarchy loosened. Wives of German and Dutch immigrants, not bound by English laws, had more control over their own property, and could write wills. Once talk of rebellion began, with its rhetoric of “unhappy families” and “tyrannical rulers,” colonies such as Massachusetts and Connecticut liberalized divorce laws, allowing women to divorce on grounds of adultery, bigamy or impotence. And by the 1750s, opportu- nities for both girls and boys to obtain a formal education increased, as academies in New York and Philadelphia advertised in newspapers. In 1792, amid the French Revolution, English author and philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft further stoked the debate over education by pub- lishing a tract, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, pondering the injustices of male privileges and the meaning of women’s rights. If women were assumed to have natural rights, conferred by God, then it was up to the state to validate them, she argued. The book, which sparked debate on both sides of the Atlantic, contested the male view of women as superficial. If women lacked the language of politics, she argued, it was only for lack of adequate education. Dismissing the idea of teaching women “ladylike” demeanor, she advocated co‐educational institutions where women would be schooled for their minds, not their manners. “I do not want them to have power over men but over themselves,” she wrote. “Their first duty is to themselves as rational creatures.” With the sure knowledge that her idea might “excite laughter” among men, she also suggested “women ought to have representatives, instead of being arbitrarily governed without having any direct share allowed them in the deliberations of government.” The title of Wollstonecraft’s book paid homage to the manifesto of the French Revolution, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. But even before its publication, men and women in the colonies had pondered the roles of male and female citizens in a new republic. After the Revolution, American women would instill civic virtue in the next generation, while men attended to the dirtier call of politics. This gendering of America – much like the effort by Europeans to impose gender‐based divisions of labor on native peoples – reassured men such as John Adams that “power always follows property.” But on some level, Republican Motherhood was thus the price patriarchy paid for its survival. It was also the vehicle women would use to wrest new rights from a stubborn male polity. Winning the War, and the Peace Before the 1760s, many women were limited by their obligations in the home. The work was difficult and exhausting – described as backbreaking duties in the fields, repeated childbirths, taxing meal preparation and 0004435890.INDD 3 08-10-2019 13:53:15 4 And Yet They Persisted daily, and daylong, efforts to keep dust and dirt from invading primi- tive homes. Indentured servants, black and white, suffered from broken bones and pulled muscles from lugging 20‐gallon containers of water from well to home, for bathing and cooking. For the African Americans who were enslaved, one fifth of the nation, duties were exhausting, tinged with the threat of whippings and separation from loved ones on the auction block. Women who expressed interest in politics were rare, as it was considered unnatural. Exceptions were made for some upper‐class women, such as Mercy Otis Warren, who during the war years published plays and poems under the pseudonym, “A Columbian Patriot.” But once appeals for resistance spread through the colonies, women for the first time joined debates, wrote missives, and asked their husbands to send them updates on military developments. “Nothing else is talked of,” Sarah Franklin wrote to her father Benjamin Franklin. “The Dutch talk of the stomp tack, the Negroes of the tamp, in short everyone has something to say.” Traveling from Cambridge to Boston, one writer reported seeing “at every house Woman & Children making Cartridges, running Bullets, making Wallets, baking Biscuit, crying & bemoaning & at the same time animating their Husbands & Sons to fight for their Liberties, tho’ not knowing whether they should ever see them again.” As her husband John Adams set off for the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1776, Abigail Adams wrote him a letter. Hungry for details of the war effort, she begged him to write often, with details on “what sort of Defence Virginia can make against our common Enemy? Whether it is so situated as to make an able Defence?” In joining a governing body that would lead the Thirteen Colonies dur- ing the Revolution, she urged him to “Remember the Ladies,” warning that women would foment a rebellion “if attention is not paid” to their interests, that they would “not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.” She was not the first woman to seek a voice in politics.