Whose American Revolution Was It?: Historians Interpret the Founding

V. Writing Women into the Revolution

224 Gregory H. Nobles not always rely on the use or even the threat of armed power to enforce their authority, as they had tried in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. In many cases—most notably the ones Taylor has described but not those alone—they had to seek peace through conciliation.210 But to make the necessary concessions to insistent settlers in the lower reaches of their own society, those leaders in post-Revolutionary America had to insist on property concessions from Indians. Looking ahead from Taylor’s territory in the North to the subsequent spread of white settlement at the expense of Native peoples in the nineteenth-century West, we can anticipate the pattern that was to become increasingly clear: the interplay of race and class became an essential element in shaping the future of the new nation. V. Writing Women into the Revolution 12. Energy and Innovation since 1980 In 2005, a ballroom-full of scholars in Philadelphia at the annual meeting of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR) turned their attention from discussing events that happened two centuries ago to reflect on a significant phenomenon only a quarter century in the past—the publication, in 1980, of two innovative and imaginative books, Mary Beth Norton’s Liberty’s Daughters and Linda Kerber’s Women of the Republic.211 It is never easy to point to a particular moment of emergence in any field of scholarship, but the SHEAR session underscored a scholarly consensus that the appearance of those two books gave the study of women in the Revolutionary era a striking significance it had scarcely known before . Susan Klepp, the chair of the SHEAR program committee that organized the plenary session, opened the proceedings by noting that “no reading list for graduate students in early American history or women’s history 210 For Taylor’s briefer but broader view of the post-Revolutionary backcountry, see also “Agrarian Independence: Northern Land Rioters after the Revolution,” in Young, ed., Beyond the American Revolution, 221–45. 211 Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (Boston, 1980); Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill, NC, 1980). For the papers in the 2005 SHEAR panel, see “Women Making History, 1750–1800, 1980–2005,” Uncommon Sense 121 (2005), available online at http:// oieahc.wm.edu/uncommon/121/women.cfm (accessed July 30, 2010). The online version, which is the most readily accessible, does not include pagination, and the references that follow will be only to the essays themselves. Historians Extend the Reach of the American Revolution 225 would be complete without including these often paired monographs.” Indeed , as Rosemarie Zagarri, one of the other panelists, later observed, “It is no exaggeration to say these two books defined a research agenda for a whole generation of scholars.”212 The previous generation of scholars had had no such agenda, primarily because it had precious few women. Throughout most of the post–World War II era, women had been all but invisible in scholarly writing on the Revolution—an invisibility that stemmed, of course, not from the demography of eighteenth-century society, in which women accounted for essentially half the population, but from the demography of the twentiethcentury historical profession, in which women had been exceedingly scarce and in which male historians refused to take women seriously as a category worthy of research, whether in the Revolutionary era or any other period. The most significant survey of women in the Revolutionary era before the publication of the Norton and Kerber books was a 1976 essay titled “The Illusion of Change” by Joan Hoff Wilson.213 Assessing the admittedly scant secondary literature available at the time, Wilson reached the disconcerting conclusion that “the American Revolution produced no significant benefits for American women,” particularly in terms of legal and political equality. The Revolutionary era even resulted in a loss of some of the social openness that had existed in the colonial era, creating greater constraints rather 212 Susan Klepp, “A Quarter Century of Women and the American Revolution,” and Rosemarie Zagarri, “On the Twenty-fifth Anniversary of the Publication of Liberty’s Daughters and Women of the Republic,” Uncommon Sense 121 (2005). 213 Joan Hoff Wilson, “The Illusion of Change: Women and the American Revolution,” in Young, ed., American Revolution, 385–431. For over a century up to that time, the most ambitious survey was Ellen F. Ellett, The Women...