Old Tales in a New Narrative: Rethinking the Story of Women and the American Revolution

Carol Berkin. Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America's Independence. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005. xviii + 197 pp. Notes and index. $24.00.

In Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America's Independence, Carol Berkin writes of women whose gentle outward appearance belies their daring revolutionary purposes. It is tempting to see such women as not only subjects of Berkin, but kindred spirits as well. In this slim and gracefully written work, Berkin takes on two daunting missions: to cure "the gender amnesia that surrounds the American Revolution" and to "tell the story of the Revolution and its aftermath with the complexity it deserves" (p. xi). In academic circles, of course, the complexity of the Revolutionary era and the important roles of women and gender ideology will not come as news. Berkin, however, has a different audience in mind: the broader public who thinks of the Revolution simply as "a quaint and harmless war" (p. ix). That Berkin seems likely to succeed in reaching and educating that broader audience is the result of one other ambitious purpose of her scholarship: to prove that it is possible to tell a complicated story which is also a ripping good yarn.

By writing women into the era, Berkin is not seeking to disrupt conventional periodization; the way in which she begins her account—"The year was 1765 and in the halls of colonial legislatures from Massachusetts to the Carolinas, colonial leaders rose to protest the disturbing signs that their rights as Englishmen were being threatened" —could come from the Revolution chapter of any well-written textbook in the land (p. 12). And despite the fact that her focus on women draws her outside the "the halls of colonial legislatures," Berkin is not interested in portraying the causes of the Revolution as anything other than conventionally political. Instead, Berkin's contribution in her opening chapters is to describe, in short and evocative vignettes, women's participation in the well-known boycotts and civic actions of the immediate pre-Revolutionary era. Drawing on the work of scholars such as Mary Beth Norton, Berkin argues that women's domestic duties took on political resonance in the years of the imperial crisis in a way that affected not only women's self-conceptions but also the events themselves. "The first political act of American women," she writes of these years, "was to say 'No'" (p. 13). Women's refusal to purchase and consume British goods had, Berkin continues, "an immediate and powerful effect, for women had become major consumers and purchasers by the mid-eighteenth century" (p. 14). Here as throughout the text, Berkin is eager to marshal evidence of women's capacity for self-determination. Thus although she acknowledges Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's argument that many women may have intended their participation in boycott-era spinning bees "as acts of charity for the poor, the widowed, and the ailing" only to have others recast their actions "in more radical terms," Berkin's true emphasis is on those women, such as the self-declared "daughter of liberty" Anna Winslow, who assertively claimed places for themselves in the Revolutionary ferment (p. 18).

When Berkin turns her attention to the effects of the Revolution on both women who stayed home and those who, for a variety of reasons, traveled with the armies, her work departs more strikingly from the popular understanding of the era, and it does so in a fascinating, immensely readable way. Berkin tells stirring tales—such as that of the woman who "donated the name plaques from her family's tombstones" in order to be melted down into bullets—while also making the broader point that women of all statuses shared the sufferings of a "homefront war," in which they were vulnerable to the loss of home, property, and even life. Her heartbreaking accounts of...