The Ladies Were Forgotten

Abigail Adams’ well-known request of 1776 to husband John, then a member of the Continental Congress, to “Remember the Ladies” in constructing a new government went unheeded by the Founding Brothers. Indeed, women, people of color, and even lower orders of white men served, in the minds of many of the founders, as templates to define those not worthy or capable of citizenship.

Nevertheless, as Rosemarie Zagarri argues in this provocative study, the American Revolution created an ongoing debate of “the rights of woman” and a new environment favorable to women’s participation in politics. “For a few brief decades, a comprehensive transformation in women’s rights, roles, and responsibilities seemed not only possible but perhaps inevitable” (p. 8). Zagarri’s thesis is double-edged, however, and it is the second edge that concerns her more, because the opening of possibilities also engendered a backlash that actually set back the cause of women’s rights and led to a greater rigidity that marginalized women from political life.

Zagarri’s description of the opening and closing of opportunities reminds one of Susan C. Faludi’s 1991 consciousness-raising best seller, Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women. Indeed, Faludi set the stage for her contemporary examination of a reaction to the revived feminism of the 1970s by noting that similar backlashes had taken place as a result of women’s gains in the mid-nineteenth century, the early 1900s, and the early 1940s. Zagarri now offers a similar, and mostly persuasive, argument applied to the post-Revolutionary years of the early republic.

Revolutionary Backlash is not simply women’s or gender history, but illuminates the political culture of the early republic in such detail and complexity that no political or cultural historian can afford to ignore it. Zagarri succeeds, then, in her aim of operating “at the intersection of political history, women’s history, and gender history” (p. 3).

In the early republic the question of “the rights of woman” remained closely tied to the dominant tradition of women’s supposed intellectual inferiority. As early as the seventeenth century in Europe, however, the issue of women’s equality of intellect had been raised; and centuries before scholars had taken an interest in women’s history, some to advance women, others to warn of the dangers of women meddling in men’s affairs. Overall, though, the early histories of women, according to Zagarri, “revealed the bankruptcy of the belief in women’s intellectual inferiority” (p. 16).

The story of Whig leaders enlisting women in the Revolutionary cause is well known, and Zagarri does not linger long over it. Rather, she concentrates on the unintended consequences of women’s patriotic mobilization and activism. Did women too enjoy the “natural rights” invoked to justify the rebellion? Although logic might suggest that they did (and John Adams recognized and feared the equation), opinions differed, and the weight of tradition stood against the affirmative. Still, the discussion had been broached as never before, and the 1792 publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman clearly influenced the educated classes to take a new interest in women’s education.

Zagarri carefully points out that Wollstonecraft and (probably) Abigail Adams were not lobbying for the right of suffrage. Rather, the former focused on male oppression and female education, while Adams likely was thinking of issues such as married women’s property rights. “Perhaps the most common usage of ‘women’s rights’ was in the context of discussions of women’s intellectual equality with men and their right to an adequate education” (p. 48).

Aaron Burr typified those few members of the Revolutionary generation who believed in women’s potential intellectual or spiritual equality with men. Married to a woman whose intellect he admired, Burr intended that his daughter would be a “fair experiment” in equal education. The context of women’s rights referring to intellectual and spiritual qualities explains why, as his...