Stripped and Script: Loyalist Women Writers of the American Revolution by Kacy Dowd Tillman

Abstract

Reviewed by: Stripped and Script: Loyalist Women Writers of the American Revolution by Kacy Dowd Tillman Ami Pflugrad-Jackisch STRIPPED AND SCRIPT: LOYALIST WOMEN WRITERS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, by Kacy Dowd Tillman. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2019. 224 pp. $28.95 paperback. Kacy Dowd Tillman's new book, Stripped and Script: Loyalist Women Writers of the American Revolution, makes an impressive contribution to our understanding of how white women in the era of the American Revolution shaped and expressed their political identity. She joins a growing number of scholars who assert that women in revolutionary America were political beings with their own individual political allegiances. Stripped and Script explores the political identity of eight Philadephia-area women, using "intimate political writing conducted in domestic spaces" to uncover a sliding scale of political allegiances among these elite, white women as they experienced the shortages, traumas, and loneliness of the homefront during the American Revolution (p. 24). The women—Grace Growden Galloway, Sarah Logan Fisher, Elizabeth Drinker, Margaret Hill Morris, Anna Rawle, Rebecca Shoemaker, Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson, and Deborah Norris Logan—crafted self-described politicized epistolary narratives that ranged between disaffected, pacifist, neutral, loyalist, and patriot. Tillman skillfully argues that these manuscripts were political tools and that the women used this epistolary space to express and refine their political ideas, loyalties, and opinions. Consequently, she asserts that the women used writing as a means of political engagement that is part of the larger national revolutionary narrative. Tillman uses "letter-journals" as the primary form of source material for her study, although she also occasionally includes the women's public petitions, poems, and individual letters. Letter-journals took on heightened importance when Philadelphia was under military occupation during the war (by the British, United States, or both depending on one's political orientation). Sending letters during the war was difficult and dangerous, so the women created sets or booklets of continuously scripted letters that spread across multiple days and pages and then sent them all together as a single packet or bundle (pp. 12–15). According to Tillman, these bundles of letters written over time often took on the character of a journal, and the writer sometimes moved back and forth between addressing her intended recipient (a husband, sister, or child) and a more autobiographical style of writing. For Tillman, this fluid form of writing creates an epistolary space where these women developed, expressed, and refined their multifaceted political [End Page 161] allegiances in forceful and bold ways that early American women did not dare speak out loud in public. Interestingly, however, Tillman contends that because letter-journals were circulated among family and friends and sometimes read aloud by others, published in part, or surveilled by military and political officials, these manuscripts were in essence semi-public in nature. Tillman argues that the authors were aware that others might read their letters and in some cases intentionally penned them as political narratives in ways that allowed them to make public statements, while simultaneously maintaining their status as respectable femes covert. One of the most important contributions Stripped and Script makes to existing studies of early American women is that it broadens the way scholars define political loyalty. Beyond just oaths, military service, and formal or legal definitions of treason, Tillman deftly establishes that women's epistolary writings blurred the boundaries between public and private and can be used as a way to access elite, white women's political ideas. These women's writings clearly demonstrate that they thought deeply about their own political loyalties and had strong opinions about the events of the revolution. Moreover, Tillman demonstrates that the women in her study had well-developed, strong political opinions that were different than those of their husbands or fathers. This injection of women's political allegiances into the broader narrative of the American Revolution promises to reshape the history of the early American political culture in important ways. Less convincing is Tillman's use of metaphorical rape. There are several places throughout the book where Tillman suggests that the women in her study intentionally deployed the rhetoric of rape to reframe rebel soldiers and their supporters in a negative light (p...