Nick Gier, Professor Emeritus, Philosophy and Religion, University of Idaho
Men of sense in all ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the servants of your sex.
– Abigail Adams to her husband, March 31, 1776
I cannot say that I think you are very generous to the ladies; for, whilst you are proclaiming peace and good-will to men, emancipating all nations, you insist upon retaining an absolute power over wives.
– Abigail Adams to her husband, May 7, 1776
The women of the early American Republic were not allowed to vote or even to own property; indeed, they were the legal property of their husbands. Nevertheless, they did as much as did the men to win independence from Great Britain.
During the past decades feminist writers have brought long neglected facts to light, and now NPR’s Cokie Roberts has weighed in with some stellar research in her two books “Founding Mothers,” covering the Revolution, and “Ladies of Liberty,” covering 1796 to 1825.
Today there is still is much debate about women in combat, but historians have found a number of women who were in the thick of fighting the British. As was the custom in those times, wives and children followed the troops into battle. In addition to their domestic duties, American women routinely cleaned and loaded muskets and artillery pieces.
On June 28, 1778, during the Battle of Monmouth, Mary Hays, even though much of her skirt had been shot off by a British cannon ball, took over the firing of her wounded husband’s artillery piece. After a long struggle for vindication, the State of Pennsylvania eventually gave Hays a military pension of $40 per year.
After her husband was killed at Fort Washington, Margaret Corbin took over his cannon, and she, as Roberts describes, “fought bravely, sustaining three gunshot wounds, until the British took over the post.” The Daughters of the American Revolution were successful in having Corbin reburied at West Point, the only Revolutionary War veteran to have attained that honor.
Martha Washington also accompanied her husband into battle, staying with troops during the horrible winter in Valley Forge. She, too, acted courageously attending daily to the soldiers’ needs. Some claim that many more would have deserted that winter had it not been for Martha’s morale boosting visits.
Abigail Adams was much more forward about the rights of women than most of her peers. She begged her husband not to put “such unlimited power into the hands of husbands,” and warned him such arbitrary power is a thing “very hard, very liable to be broken.”
In another letter to her husband, who appeared to share his wife’s views on slavery, Abigail argued slavery “always appeared a most iniquitous scheme to me – to fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have.” Abigail was a Unitarian and she joined others of her faith in the abolitionist struggle.
One of Roberts’ juiciest discoveries was in a letter by Louisa Catherine Adams, wife of John Quincy Adams. During the long debates about the Missouri Compromise, the good congressmen managed to father 40 illegitimate children. Louisa Adams proposed the philanderers donate their $2 per month pay raise to establish a Foundling Hospital for their ill begotten progeny.
As a mother of two writing in her home’s playroom and emerging each night to cook dinner, Roberts said she wrote her books with America’s girls in mind. In the same NPR interview, she also said her research allows us to “get to know the men better, because they are three dimensional when women are writing about them. They’re not just bronze and marble.”
Nick Gier, a University of Idaho professor emeritus, broadcasts as the Palouse Pundit every Wednesday morning on KRFP (FM 90.3).