How do those who are not free become free?
This was both the practical and intellectual challenge of American independence. The project of creating a polity that incorporated the ideals of universal liberty, equality, and justice into a democratic government was both novel and ambitious. In many ways, those most closely involved with the design of our political institutions succeeded in establishing a system in which local autonomy mattered, and checks and balances limited many—though far from all—of the most egregious abuses of government power.
Ideals rarely survive the transition to reality, especially in politics. The implementation of the ideals of liberty, equality, and justice has been rife with contradictions since well before day one. Fighting for your own freedom while simultaneously participating in slavery is an often-noted but truly remarkable hypocrisy. Defending land from intrusion when so many Americans had obtained that land by intruding on and displacing indigenous populations is another. Ignorance of the humanity of others is no excuse, and American women wasted no time in making the case that they had been excluded.
Women and the American Revolution
The willingness to deny liberties and justice to women is a uniquely puzzling aspect of the American founding. In one way, it’s understandable. Any organizational principle as enduring and deeply entrenched as patriarchal rule is difficult to see beyond. But on a practical level, it’s confounding. Women are part of every family unit. If there is any group of people who should have been difficult to overlook, it’s the women who were in virtually every home.
Most are familiar with Abigail Adams’s request to her husband John to “Remember the Ladies.” Less well known is his flippant response, in which he compared women’s concern about their rights to slaves who are “insolent” to their masters. He was firm in the conviction that he would not submit himself to the “Despotism of the Peticoat [sic].” The irony of an American revolutionary leader characterizing liberty as a win-lose proposition, in which one despotism must be replaced with another, seems lost on him. Abigail was not pleased—she recounted his disappointing response in detail in a letter to Mercy Otis Warren and strategized about how to move forward without his support.
If even those who share bed and board cannot be convinced, what is a woman left out of an era of liberty to do? And make no mistake, the value of liberty was not lost on ordinary women. Married women in particular had enjoyed greater practical freedoms in terms of personal autonomy and freedom of association in many of the colonies than they would have in Britain. Women had also played an important role during the revolutionary years, both as activists and as caretakers of homes and property while their husbands were away at war. Revolutionary army camps were anywhere from ten to thirty percent women, wives, and domestic workers, who kept soldiers clean, fed, and healthy.[2] The argument that women were incapable of responsibly exercising political and economic rights was being disproven by women’s actions every day.
A recent special issue of Markets & Society—co-edited by Stefanie Haeffele and me—asked contributors to reflect on the first 250 years of the experiment with liberal democracy in the United States. After offering to submit a paper on women’s freedom for this special issue, I realized the predicament I was in: The ideals of the American founding had clearly mattered and had become a part of American women’s heritage. Yet, in so many ways, the American founders and first generations of political leaders in the United States had failed to depart from the patriarchal values of the European aristocracy.
It must have been deeply disappointing for many women in the revolutionary era—to live in a milieu that prioritized freedom, to commit themselves to the cause, and then to be treated as if their own rights were an exception to the claim that all people should be free. This deep contradiction is the source of a significant controversy in our nation’s history: did American women become free because of American independence? Or did the establishment of a new nation that disregarded their rights and personhood only further entrench patriarchal practices that would have to be dismantled later, and by other means?
The answer—to both questions—is yes. The first state governments were established strictly within the tradition of coverture, a British common law doctrine that considered married women to be legally and economically under their husband’s authority, and thus incapable of independent legal action. Married women could not own independent property or sign enforceable contracts. They were considered legally inseparable from their husbands, and this status was all but irreversible due to the difficulty of procuring any divorce at the time. All women were excluded from public office, limited in the professions they could pursue, and denied the same education as their male peers. American independence did not change these ugly realities. Several generations of economic growth, expanding opportunity, and women’s rights activism would be required to change these social and political constraints.
Yet, in another sense, it’s also true that American independence did help women to become free. It may never have been the intention of the founders, and perhaps not even within the realm of their imaginations. But, for better or for worse, political tools and strategies, once created, can be put to unintended purposes. Independence not only involved the design of significant new political strategies and rhetoric, but it also brought practical changes in the way citizens could go about influencing the way they were governed.
In this sense, American independence did not make women free, but it did change the rules for becoming free in ways that made the quest for women’s liberty possible. We understand better today that processes of social change, like a quest to become free, are governed by complex networks of political and social rules. This insight comes to us from constitutional political economy. As James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock describe in The Calculus of Consent, to design political institutions is to deliberately choose the rules through which collective decisionmaking takes place. This can involve setting limits on government authority, establishing individual rights, setting procedures for introducing or changing law, and in general structuring the processes through which governance systems function. The rules of collective decisionmaking do not affect only government actors, but also voters, activists, lobbyists, civil society organizations, and anyone who is either required to follow the rules or seeks to change them.
In my contribution to that special issue of Markets & Society, I propose three ways that the American Revolution—the intellectual project, not the war itself—forever changed the rules by which people could become free.
Changing Ideas about Freedom
First, the revolutionary era was a period of great debate over the value of freedom and what it means to be free. The arguments and rhetorical strategies developed during this time were later used to argue for abolition, women’s rights, and other advancements of liberty.
Perhaps one of the most powerful examples of this is the way the Declaration of Independence itself was adapted as a way to protest other forms of tyranny. William Lloyd Garrison’s 1833 “Declaration of Sentiments of the American Anti-Slavery Convention” borrowed the language and structure of the Declaration of Independence to protest the tyranny of slavery. Fifteen years later at Seneca Falls, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her collaborators crafted a “Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions” that was very closely modeled on the Declaration of Independence. The women’s declaration begins, “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal” (emphasis added). Just like the Founders, these women followed their assertion of independence with a list of unjust tyrannies that gave them the moral right and even responsibility to throw off their oppressors. This included women’s exclusion from political office and the vote; married women’s legal dependence and lack of basic economic rights; women’s exclusion from employment, higher education, and professional careers; and much more.
In this way, the commitments to independence cultivated by the first generations of U.S. citizens became a shared understanding around which the problem of women’s rights could be understood. Women faced these legal, economic, political, and social restrictions because the general attitude in society—among both men and women—was that women were ill suited for public life and had no need of their own autonomy. But by relating women’s situation to that of the colonists under British colonial rule, the attitudes that had made it possible to exclude women from the revolutionary project began to seem doubtful.
Expanded Freedom of Action
Second, the revolutionary era brought with it a significant expansion in freedom of action, including for women. Women’s work as civil society leaders and as activists, both during the Revolution itself and in the abolition movement afterward, enabled them to step into the public sphere in new ways. They developed skills that could not be taken away, and women were now more empowered not just to argue for their freedom, but to organize to bring it about.
The emergence of robust civil society institutions went hand in hand with Americans’ general distrust of distant rule. Although women were rarely invited to join men’s associations, forming groups of their own was considered not only meritorious, but perfectly consistent with women’s expected role as domestic caretakers. Many of these early women’s associations were formed as religious charitable efforts. Women were also incredibly active in the abolition movement, forming their own clubs and collaborating with men’s abolitionist organizations.
It was in this context that Maria W. Stewart, a Black abolitionist from Boston, delivered her 1832 talk to the New England Anti-Slavery Society. Stewart drew on a commitment to the revolutionary ideals of liberty in her case for emancipation: “Did the pilgrims, when they first landed on these shores, quietly compase themselves and say, “The Britons have all the money and all the power, and we must continue their servants forever?”… No; they first made powerful efforts to raise themselves, and then God raised up those illustrious patriots, WASHINGTON and LAFAYETTE, to assist and defend them.” She argued that the abolitionists were now taking up this same revolutionary spirit in fighting for emancipation. At the time, associations were almost always strictly segregated by both gender and race. As such, Stewart’s lecture is considered a likely candidate for the first time in U.S. history that a woman delivered a secular public address to a so-called “mixed” audience.[3]
Participating in civil society was a socially acceptable way for women to transgress the traditional boundary between home and public life. In addition to changing society for the better, these women were also changed. Lydia Maria Child put it well: “They have changed the household utensil into a living, energetic being; and they have no spell to turn it into a broom again.”[4]
And this is only the tip of the iceberg. In addition to the organizational capabilities developed in civil society, the first generations of American women were also entering public life and gaining financial independence through their participation in the first phases of the Industrial Revolution. The women who worked in textile mills and other early large-scale manufacturing endeavors in the first part of the nineteenth century were able to move away from home, financially support themselves and family members, and build social and intellectual communities with other women. These experiences navigating public life and fighting for change would be put to thorough use in the quest for their own rights.
Local Autonomy and Experimentation
Third, the first United States governments established a political system that prioritized local autonomy, divided authority, and checks and balances to limit abuses of power. This constitutional structure facilitated legal and social experimentation, including with respect to advancements in women’s rights. Experimentation soon followed: the New Jersey Constitution of 1776 was the first state constitution that didn’t set a gender requirement for voting, and women retained the right to vote for thirty-one years.
Most legal restrictions on women’s rights had been established by courts and legislatures operating at the state or territory level, or they had been imported from the English common law, which the states enforced. This meant that instead of having only one government to appeal to for change, women’s rights advocates in different states could pursue different strategies. The political context and local appeal of women’s rights also varied greatly. Diversity in local conditions allowed those jurisdictions that were ready for and capable of reforming women’s rights to do so without needing to wait for ideological and political change at a national level. And those states that have yet to reform can learn from what has worked well or not so well in other jurisdictions.
As the United States expanded, western territories were particularly active leaders in women’s rights reform. Not only were the governments of western territories smaller and more accessible to activists, they were also engaged in active political competition.[5] Western territories were under extreme pressure to attract women residents in order to grow their population numbers. As a result, they were important early movers in a variety of women’s rights reforms. The first four states to enact women’s suffrage in the nineteenth century were all along the western frontier. Access to divorce—an important women’s rights issue in that era because of how uniquely vulnerable marriage laws made women to financial, sexual, and physical abuse—was also driven by states and territories along the frontier. The spread of married women’s property acts, which entitled women to own property and keep earnings independently of their husbands, was also the result of competition between state and territorial governments for women workers and residents.
Becoming Free
Because of these changes in ideological, civic, and political rules during the revolutionary era, my ultimate answer to the question of whether or not the American Revolution helped women become free is yes. Although it would have been nice for the intention to be there, the Revolution brought changes in the process through which people could become free, and that was an important step in the right direction. The prevalent ideas and attitudes of the majority, though, were simply too flawed for them to appreciate the inconsistencies in their own arguments for freedom, justice, and equality. Still, to have created an opportunity for future generations to work toward freedom, and to have disseminated the rhetoric of universal liberty, is meaningful in its own right.
Perhaps the best way forward is to forgive but not forget the flaws of the movement for American independence. It is true that the choices made to exclude particular people from the cause of liberty caused significant harm across generations. We are not immune to repeating these mistakes. Still today in the United States, immigrants can be denied constitutional rights; adults under 21 and felons, even those with nonviolent convictions, are denied the right to vote; and regulatory and licensing agencies routinely establish different procedures based on industry, specialty, and type of experience. This kind of discretion can easily be used to target particular groups. Political and ideological centralization makes it difficult for less common values and preferences of all kinds to receive fair representation. There are likely other ways that the principle of equal liberty continues to fall short.
It is also true that maintaining equal liberty for all is an incredibly difficult ambition that has failed more than it has succeeded. Any move in the direction of liberty for all cannot be taken for granted, but should be studied carefully in order to learn as much as we can about how people can become free. Rather than being an indictment of the ideals of the American founding, the fact that we can now better see our failures and appreciate how much better it is to have moved towards a more inclusive and egalitarian society is a positive testament to the enduring spirit of liberalism in American society.
Notes
[1] This essay draws on “‘The Public is Not Prepared’ for Free Women, Yet Here We Are,” forthcoming in Markets & Society.
[2] Jan E. Lewis, 2008, “A Revolution for Whom? Women in the Era of the American Revolution,” in A Companion to American Women’s History, edited by Nancy A. Hewitt, 83–99, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. See also Serena Zabin, 2021, “Women and the Long American Revolution,” in A Companion to American Women’s History, edited by Nancy A. Hewitt and Anne M. Valk, 117–136, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
[3] Marilyn Richardson, 1987, Maria W. Stewart, America’s First Black Woman Political Writer: Essays and Speeches, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
[4] Quoted in Carolyn L. Karcher, 1994, The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, p. 322.
[5] McCammon, Holly J., and Karen E. Campbell. 2001. “Winning the Vote in the West: The Political Successes of the Women’s Suffrage Movements, 1866–1919.” Gender & Society 15 (1): 55–82.
