In Dependence: Women and the Patriarchal State in Revolutionary America

Jacqueline Beatty

Published by New York University Press 2023

In Dependence

Women and the Patriarchal State in Revolutionary America

Jacqueline Beatty

Volume 19 in the series Early American Places

https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479812134.001.0001

Overview
Contents

About this book

Examines the role of the American Revolution in the everyday lives of women

Patriarchal forces of law, finance, and social custom restricted women’s rights and agency in revolutionary America. Yet women in this period exploited these confines, transforming constraints into vehicles of female empowerment. Through a close reading of thousands of legislative, judicial, and institutional pleas across seventy years of history in three urban centers, Jacqueline Beatty illustrates the ways in which women in the revolutionary era asserted their status as dependents, demanding the protections owed to them as the assumed subordinates of men. In so doing, they claimed various forms of aid and assistance, won divorce suits, and defended themselves and their female friends in the face of patriarchal assumptions about their powerlessness. Ultimately, women in the revolutionary era were able to advocate for themselves and express a relative degree of power not in spite of their dependent status, but because of it.

Their varying degrees of success in using these methods, however, was contingent on their race, class, and socio-economic status, and the degree to which their language and behavior conformed to assumptions of Anglo-American femininity. In Dependence thus exposes the central paradoxes inherent in American women’s social, legal, and economic positions of dependence in the Revolutionary era, complicating binary understandings of power and weakness, of agency and impotence, and of independence and dependence. Significantly, the American Revolution provided some women with the language and opportunities in which to claim old rights—the rights of dependents—in new ways. Most importantly, In Dependence shows how women’s coming to consciousness as rights-bearing individuals laid the groundwork for the activism and collective petitioning efforts of later generations of American feminists.

Author / Editor information

Beatty Jacqueline :

Jacqueline Beatty is Assistant Professor of History in the Department of History and Political Science at York College of Pennsylvania.Jacqueline Beatty is Assistant Professor of History in the Department of History and Political Science at York College of Pennsylvania.

Reviews

Jeanne E. Abrams, University of Denver:
Impressive and comprehensive. Beatty skillfully utilizes a range of sources in a novel manner to illuminate the plight of women in an era when husbands who did not provide adequate support for wives and children, or even resorted to cruelty and abuse, were rarely held accountable. Yet, as Beatty demonstrates, women found ways to use the patriarchal system to their advantage to succeed in achieving redress. In Dependence is a well-researched and important addition to the scholarly literature on the role of women in early America.

Susan Branson, author of Dangerous to Know: Women, Crime, and Notoriety in the Early Republic:
A powerful book whose assertions transform our understanding of women’s agency in early America. Beatty masterfully teases out meaning from an exhaustive range of sources to demonstrate how women’s dependent status, rather than independent status, enabled them to achieve financial and legal protections.

Kelly A. Ryan, author of Regulating Passion: Sexuality and Patriarchal Rule in Massachusetts, 1700–1830:
A fascinating and affirming portrait of how women negotiated power by leaning into their dependent status. In Dependence is cogently argued and well written.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1 Sympathy and the State Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	17
2 Independence in Dependence Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	42
3 Sole and Separate Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	66
4 Matriarchal Allies and Advocates Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	86
5 The Problem of Dependence Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	112
6 To Have and to Hold Herself Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	140
7 The Rights Revolution Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	167
Conclusion: On Collaboration and Collective Action Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	193
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	199
A Note on Sources Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	203
Abbreviations Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	207
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	209
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	253
About the Author Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	263