Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America's Independence

Abstract

Revolutionary Mothers uses a topical, biographical approach to introduce a general readership to women's experiences during the American Revolution. Eight chapters on specific groups of women are bookended with chapters that look at women's status before and after the war. Carol Berkin's conclusion is that after a brief interlude of extraordinary activity during the Revolution, women settled into a new role that offered them expanded authority as intellectual beings and the moral arbiters of the new age in exchange for a reduced recognition as participants in the economy. Those who were poor or of color lost the most in this transformation. The opening chapter paints a gloomy version of women's lives before the Revolution. Prescriptive descriptions of women's roles are given more weight than the actual lives that women lived. The tight focus of the interior chapters on wartime participation provides little insight into the postwar changes in role definition Berkin discusses, but biographical profiles provide a lively human face on women's activities not only on the home front but also as protesters, spies, soldiers, wives of soldiers, escaped slaves, and Indian leaders. The stories are often bittersweet—women who escape slavery only to die of smallpox, women made homeless by war, hungry camp followers barely tolerated by the army. There are exceptions, resourceful spies and generals' wives who create a home in camp despite heavy odds, but overall Berkin notes time and again how women had to settle for less or were marginalized or domesticated.