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

Abstract

In Revolutionary Mothers: Women in 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 American and to story of Revolution and its aftermath with complexity it deserves (p. xi). In academic circles, of course, complexity of Revolutionary era and important roles of women and gender ideology will not come as news. Berkin, however, has different audience in mind: broader public who thinks of Revolution simply as a quaint and harmless war (p. ix). That Berkin seems likely to succeed in reaching and educating that broader audience is result of one other ambitious purpose of her scholarship: to prove that it is possible to tell complicated story which is also ripping good yarn. By writing women into era, Berkin is not seeking to disrupt conventional periodization; way in which she begins her account-The year was 1765 and in halls of colonial legislatures from Massachusetts to Carolinas, colonial leaders rose to protest disturbing signs that their rights as Englishmen were being threatened -could come from Revolution chapter of any well-written textbook in land (p. 12). And despite fact that her focus on women draws her outside the halls of colonial legislatures, Berkin is not interested in portraying causes of 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 well-known boycotts and civic actions of immediate pre-Revolutionary era. Drawing on work of scholars such as Mary Beth Norton, Berkin argues