Speaker 1: Was the American Revolution a stag affair? Only men were involved?
Speaker 1: A group of women of my generation who historians began
Speaker 1: to think about this after we got tenure, very important
Speaker 1: after we got tenure. Before we got tenure, we wrote
Speaker 1: dissertations about white men, The science of Happiness, Appreciating modern painting,
Speaker 1: Dilemmas of modern medicae, Abraham Lincoln at the Civil War,
Speaker 1: history of jazz, the artistic genius of Michel Angeli, When
Speaker 1: intuition face turning points that changed American history, psychology of
Speaker 1: religious There One Day University. The most acclaimed and popular
Speaker 1: professors from top colleges. They're best lectures, fascinating conversations. Hi,
Speaker 1: I'm Richard Davies. Let's learn, and we said, this is
Speaker 1: an eight year home front war. Carolder in and my
Speaker 1: lectures Women of the American Revolution. It was fought and vileges.
Speaker 1: Did women not notice? Here's the question? Where is half
Speaker 1: the population? Almost every painting and nearly all of the
Speaker 1: history books about the American Revolution talk a lot about men.
Speaker 1: Women seem to be missing from the American Revolution. So
Speaker 1: why is that? Well that history is written by men,
Speaker 1: it's also written by people who largely believe that formal
Speaker 1: politics and military life, both of which produce great heroic figures,
Speaker 1: are the stuff of history. It took until the nineties,
Speaker 1: sixties and seventies to even begin to talk about what
Speaker 1: Jesse Lemish called history from the bottom up. As long
Speaker 1: as historians thought of ordinary people women African Americans as
Speaker 1: being passive figures, there was no reason to write about them.
Speaker 1: But you say they were not passive, Absolutely, they weren't.
Speaker 1: No one is a passive figure. One way to understand
Speaker 1: that is that people, many people don't have many choices,
Speaker 1: but they always have a choice. And when you make
Speaker 1: a choice about how you're going to live, about what
Speaker 1: you believe in, about how you're going to act, you
Speaker 1: are an agent of history. And that is the message
Speaker 1: of social history. So that instead of writing, for instance,
Speaker 1: Lincoln freed the slaves, you might want to consider that
Speaker 1: many slaves pick themselves up and walked to freedom or
Speaker 1: fought against their oppressors. So you begin to have a
Speaker 1: completely different perspective when you recognize that all those people
Speaker 1: that have been sort of passive observers of history are
Speaker 1: really active agents of it. And we have those of
Speaker 1: us who do African American history, those of us who
Speaker 1: do women's history, those of us who do working class history.
Speaker 1: The whole way I think that we look at history
Speaker 1: has been transformed since the late twentieth century in what way? Well,
Speaker 1: in that this rise of social history and this belief
Speaker 1: in what we call agency or being an agent making
Speaker 1: choices about your future, has changed where change in history
Speaker 1: comes from. That now we see change and continuity, which
Speaker 1: are the two essences of history. That those are driven.
Speaker 1: The engine of that is not just the men at
Speaker 1: the top, or even the women at the top, It's
Speaker 1: the people who participate in sustaining it or changing it.
Speaker 1: What is the mission of your one day university lecture?
Speaker 1: What are you hoping people will take away from it?
Speaker 1: I am hoping that they'll be entertained by the stories,
Speaker 1: because some of the amazing tales of women who are spies,
Speaker 1: and women who dresses men in the army, and women
Speaker 1: who write plays and are interesting in their own right.
Speaker 1: The heart of history is people, and a lot of
Speaker 1: these women are simply interesting people. But I also want
Speaker 1: them to see that they have been given a version
Speaker 1: of the American Revolution that is wildly incomplete. We know
Speaker 1: from home for on Wars in our modern times, that
Speaker 1: the entire civilian population is wrapped up in these wars.
Speaker 1: Women were going out to hang up their laundry and
Speaker 1: the battles going on in their wheat fields, and they
Speaker 1: don't notice, they don't participate. It's an absurd version. What
Speaker 1: do you try to do, then, given that we've been
Speaker 1: fed this wildly inaccurate version of the history of the America,
Speaker 1: I try to deconstruct that version. I try to insert
Speaker 1: women here all along the way, Valley Forge. Insert women here,
Speaker 1: the boycotts that preceded the war, Insert women here, military
Speaker 1: life insert there's no part with the exception of formal
Speaker 1: political decision making. But everything else, everything else. You are
Speaker 1: only seeing a sliver of the complexity. So let's look
Speaker 1: at the everything else. Valley Forge. Valley Forge, like many areas,
Speaker 1: for instance, in Vietnam during the war, anywhere the army went,
Speaker 1: cities arose immediately because women, children, their pet dogs. They
Speaker 1: all flocked to the winter quarters of the army, because
Speaker 1: otherwise they might starve, they might be attacked by enemy soldiers,
Speaker 1: their farms might be burned down. Washington hated it. He
Speaker 1: hated it. He had this image of this professional army
Speaker 1: professional as the British Army was, and having you know,
Speaker 1: children running around was not his idea. So he wanted
Speaker 1: to be agile. He wanted the army to move, and
Speaker 1: every time he would try to move he as hilarious
Speaker 1: records in his quartermaster books. He says, I was trying
Speaker 1: to move the army quickly, but eight women were in
Speaker 1: labor and I had to wait until the babies were delivered.
Speaker 1: I mean, for Washington, this was a horrible thing. He
Speaker 1: didn't drive the women out. Anybody guess why because if
Speaker 1: the women left, the men would have left. And what
Speaker 1: did they do there? They gathered the fuel for fires.
Speaker 1: They nursed the soldiers who were largely sick from communicable diseases,
Speaker 1: not injuries. They did the laundry, and that was terribly
Speaker 1: important because these young boys who were soldiers were covered
Speaker 1: in lice. They prepared the food. They served in many
Speaker 1: ways as a sort of informal quartermaster corps, providing services
Speaker 1: and supplies that the men needed. And that's a perfect
Speaker 1: example of the small things that make a big difference.
Speaker 1: Those are the camps. What happened when the army traveled,
Speaker 1: many women went with them, and they were sent out
Speaker 1: onto the battlefield to scavenge boots, coats, any clothing that
Speaker 1: would be valuable, and weapons, and many of them were
Speaker 1: killed or wounded because they were in the midst of
Speaker 1: the battle. So they were not luxury items in this
Speaker 1: tale of the American Revolution. They were actually veterans of
Speaker 1: the battles. And one of the best examples of this,
Speaker 1: of course, the famous Molly Pitcher. You know, there was
Speaker 1: no such person. Molly was a very common nickname, and
Speaker 1: they were called Molly pitcher because in the forts where
Speaker 1: they fired cannons. And I had to learn this because
Speaker 1: I thought these women were bringing water to the men
Speaker 1: to drink. When you fire a cannon, it gets very hot,
Speaker 1: and in order to reload it, you have to reach
Speaker 1: inside it and tamp down the material that you're going
Speaker 1: to fire off. And if there are any sparks left
Speaker 1: in there and you push in the paper, that precedes
Speaker 1: the cannon ball boom. So they had to cool down
Speaker 1: the cannon after every firing. So the women would be
Speaker 1: in the barracks and then the men were at the
Speaker 1: cannons and they would fire the cannon and then they
Speaker 1: would shout Molly Pitcher, and a woman would come running
Speaker 1: out with a pitcher of water and it would be
Speaker 1: poured on the cannon. We have two hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: applications by women who were injured in a battle in
Speaker 1: the forts and who were asking for veterans pay, and
Speaker 1: there were probably a lot more, yes, many more, that
Speaker 1: we simply don't have records of. None of them, by
Speaker 1: the way, got anything you say women were political, that
Speaker 1: they became political in the seventeen sixties before the revolution exactly.
Speaker 1: I think one of the most radical consequences of the
Speaker 1: protests and the war was the instant politicization of women.
Speaker 1: For a century and a half, women had been told
Speaker 1: be silent, don't participate in public discourse, don't bother your
Speaker 1: heads with politics. You're not smart enough to do this.
Speaker 1: That's men's world. In seventeen sixty five, the stamp ac
Speaker 1: comes along, and the policy that got it repealed and
Speaker 1: the acts that followed repealed, was the boycott of British
Speaker 1: manufactured goods. Patrick Henry, a rated Legislature's Assembly, sent letters
Speaker 1: to Parliament. People wrote treatises about how unfair what the
Speaker 1: British were doing. In the response of Parliament was these Americans,
Speaker 1: the descendants of horse traders and thieves. That people in
Speaker 1: Parliament didn't even know that Virginia wasn't right next to Massachusetts,
Speaker 1: I mean America was. America was the boomdocks. They didn't care.
Speaker 1: But when the Americans decided to boycott British tea and
Speaker 1: British cloth, Parliament perked up because the British Industrial Revolution
Speaker 1: that was beginning was based on cloth and America was
Speaker 1: the primary market. And the British East India Tea Company
Speaker 1: guess who all the stockholders were. Men in Parliament. And
Speaker 1: when Americans said, we're gonna boycott everything you planned to
Speaker 1: sell us until you repeal the Stamp Act and then
Speaker 1: later the Townsend Acts and the Tea Act, we're not
Speaker 1: going to buy anything from you. Well, who was responsible
Speaker 1: for making that boycott work? Who bought the cloth, who
Speaker 1: needed the cloth? Who had the tea parties? Women? It
Speaker 1: was all about women participating. And when they started to participate,
Speaker 1: they became politically conscious that what they were doing was
Speaker 1: defending the liberty of American colonists. And they said it
Speaker 1: by referring to the cloth they spun as liberty cloth.
Speaker 1: And they referred in their letters to one another to
Speaker 1: being perfect statesmen talking about politics. And all those men
Speaker 1: who had told them to be quiet for hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty years, all those ministers who had told them to
Speaker 1: be quiet, are now suddenly singing their praises, now suddenly
Speaker 1: saying you are the defenders of American liberty. Horsaf for you.
Speaker 1: So if those women had merely been meek and silent
Speaker 1: fall exactly, there wouldn't have been the energy behind Exactly.
Speaker 1: Women signed petitions, uh declarations that they put in newspapers,
Speaker 1: and they signed it with their names, and they expressly said,
Speaker 1: we are doing this ourselves, not because our husbands suggested it.
Speaker 1: I mean, this is political action, and it happened literally overnight.
Speaker 1: It's the most extraordinary politicization of a group of people
Speaker 1: that I know of, and they are responsible for the
Speaker 1: repeal of every one of those laws. You sound fired
Speaker 1: up by this stuff always. I once had a student
Speaker 1: who said to me, you know, miss Birkin, I don't
Speaker 1: I don't care that much about history, but it seems
Speaker 1: to there's so much to you that I'm going to
Speaker 1: do the work in this class. And I never understand
Speaker 1: why people don't realize how interesting the past is and
Speaker 1: how important it is to get it right. Why well,
Speaker 1: because myths are dangerous. Myths reinforced the idea that the
Speaker 1: American Revolution was a stag event, you know, only men,
Speaker 1: only men did it plays a role in assumptions that
Speaker 1: generation after generation will have about what women can do
Speaker 1: and what women can't do, And so it's really important
Speaker 1: to understand what roles they played to shape attitudes later on.
Speaker 1: The consequences of that are really relevant right up until today,
Speaker 1: right up until modern times. One of the many unreported
Speaker 1: acts of women in the American Revolution was how they
Speaker 1: took over farms and shops and businesses. Why was that
Speaker 1: so difficult to do housework in the eighteenth century was
Speaker 1: household production? Men were the unskilled laborers. Women were the
Speaker 1: skilled laborers. Men did the grunt work in the field,
Speaker 1: but women processed raw materials into usable items. Everybody acknowledged
Speaker 1: that there was not a farmer in the world who
Speaker 1: didn't want to have a wife because she knew what
Speaker 1: was called the mysteries of house swiffery. Any medieval scholars
Speaker 1: out there, okay, who had mysteries raftsmen, the mysteries of goldsmithing,
Speaker 1: the mystery of barrel making, these were the secrets of
Speaker 1: the profession, and that meant that you were an artisan.
Speaker 1: They talked about the mysteries of how swiffery, meaning they
Speaker 1: knew that women had production skills that men did not have,
Speaker 1: and that was the primary activity besides bearing children that
Speaker 1: women had. Their houses were filthy. They didn't bother with
Speaker 1: washing and cleaning. My students think housewife. They decorate the table,
Speaker 1: they make the napkins matched the place matt, they put
Speaker 1: flowers on the table. That's not what how swiffery was.
Speaker 1: How swiffery was turning flax into cloth, slaughtering pigs and chickens,
Speaker 1: and preserving and cooking the meat, taking the apples from
Speaker 1: the orchard, and making cider, making butter, all of the
Speaker 1: things that families needed. As my son once said to me,
Speaker 1: I would have just ordered in pizza. Not a historian,
Speaker 1: my son. So here's what you're gonna see. A man
Speaker 1: goes off to war. A woman is left not only
Speaker 1: with all the maintenance and the production chores, but with
Speaker 1: maybe she's pregnant, maybe she has a baby in her arms.
Speaker 1: She hasn't wean, she has toddlers, and there are no
Speaker 1: safety latches on anything. So you're watching your children. You
Speaker 1: are holding your children, and now you have to also
Speaker 1: go out and manage the field. But it depended a
Speaker 1: lot on whether you were wealthy enough, because for the
Speaker 1: average American farm woman, this was a tremendous heroic action.
Speaker 1: For many years, we have letters from from farm wives
Speaker 1: saying to their husband's in the army, we interest coming.
Speaker 1: Your children will freeze, we have no firewood, Your children
Speaker 1: will starve. The British Army has taken all our food.
Speaker 1: Come home, Come home. Married women were men's property. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: legally you were the ward of your father, and when
Speaker 1: you got married you became fem covert woman covered taken
Speaker 1: care of by a man, and you lost your legal identity.
Speaker 1: You couldn't sewer, be suits, you couldn't own property everything
Speaker 1: you brought into the marriage, and your body belonged to
Speaker 1: your husband. When a slave ran away, the poster put
Speaker 1: up said runaway. If a wife ran away from her husband,
Speaker 1: the poster said, she has abducted her body from me.
Speaker 1: In the twentieth century, there was still states that said
Speaker 1: that a woman's body belonged to her husband. Did the
Speaker 1: status of women change as a result of the war,
Speaker 1: that's a very complicated question. They didn't get married women's
Speaker 1: property rights, They certainly didn't get political rights. Very little
Speaker 1: changed in terms of the context in which they would
Speaker 1: make their choices, but some things did change that would
Speaker 1: have long term consequences. Even before the Revolution, Enlightenment ideas
Speaker 1: had come to the elites of the colonies, and the
Speaker 1: Enlightenment ideas, among other things, made this remarkable observation that
Speaker 1: all human beings are capable of rational thought. This was
Speaker 1: a new idea. Throughout the whole colonial period. It was
Speaker 1: assumed that women, because they had small and weak brains
Speaker 1: that science in the eighteenth century smile and weak brains,
Speaker 1: couldn't think rationally, and what that meant was they couldn't
Speaker 1: judge right from wrong. Children we're not raised by women.
Speaker 1: Women could teach girls household production, but the educating of
Speaker 1: their children to be citizens in the community, only the
Speaker 1: rational partner could do that. As manufacturing and trade further
Speaker 1: developed in the Northeast, more men were separated their business
Speaker 1: from their home, so they weren't really around to educate
Speaker 1: their sareness about how important it was to be patriots
Speaker 1: and to sacrifice. The out of the Dada, But the
Speaker 1: Enlightenment and the Revolution had taught them that women, contrary
Speaker 1: to earlier thought, were actually capable of ration sational thought.
Speaker 1: They were actually capable of deciding right from wrong, and
Speaker 1: they had proved it day after day in the American Revolution.
Speaker 1: And a lot of the women they were talking about
Speaker 1: when they talked about American women were middle and upper
Speaker 1: class white women, right, That's who they envisioned. And these
Speaker 1: women didn't have to engage in how swiffery anymore. In
Speaker 1: towns and cities, you could buy cloth, you could buy
Speaker 1: chickens already killed, you could buy produce, you could go
Speaker 1: to a green grocer, and you had servants, and you
Speaker 1: had slaves who could do the actual housework. So these
Speaker 1: women didn't have how swiffery chores anymore. So the idea
Speaker 1: developed that you would let women socialize the children. Not
Speaker 1: only would you let them, but you would persuade women
Speaker 1: that this was the most important civic duty in the existence.
Speaker 1: On your shoulders rests the survival of the republic. And
Speaker 1: women took up the challenge. And what happens after the
Speaker 1: American Revolution in every colony from Massachusetts to Georgia is
Speaker 1: the rise of young ladies academies. It is very dangerous
Speaker 1: to educate people, very dangerous, and it's very dangerous for
Speaker 1: a group of women to be all together for several
Speaker 1: years talking about their condition. What you mean, It isn't
Speaker 1: just me, it's the whole society. Seventy years later, which
Speaker 1: in historical terms is just a little blip, women gather
Speaker 1: at Seneca Falls, they write the Declaration of Sentiments, and
Speaker 1: they demand equality. That's the consequences of the revolution. Thank
Speaker 1: you very much, Thank you. I'm Richard Davies. Thanks for listening.
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