This Constitution

Season 4, Episode 8 | The American Revolution Was a Women's War

• Savannah Eccles Johnston & Matthew Brogdon • Season 4 • Episode 8

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0:00 | 46:27

The American Revolution wasn't fought only on battlefields. It unfolded in homes, farms, towns, and military camps, where women faced shortages, violence, displacement, and the enormous responsibility of keeping families and communities alive.

In this episode, Savannah Eccles Johnston speaks with historian Carol Berkin, Presidential Professor of History (Emerita) at Baruch College, and author of Revolutionary Mothers, about the essential and often-overlooked role women played in the Revolution. They explore how women became central to colonial boycotts, managed farms while men were away, worked alongside the Continental Army, carried military intelligence, and sometimes disguised themselves as men to enlist.

Carol also explains how the Revolution changed women's civic identity. Their wartime contributions challenged long-standing assumptions about women's intellectual and moral abilities and helped expand educational opportunities after independence.

Tune in to discover why the Revolution cannot be fully understood without women and how adding their experiences transforms the story from a series of military campaigns into a complex home-front war involving an entire society.

In This Episode

  • (00:00) Intro
  • (00:16) Introduction to Carol Berkin
  • (00:59) The myth of women as passive observers
  • (03:13) How the Revolution politicized women
  • (07:21) Why were women essential to colonial boycotts
  • (10:27) Women as spies, couriers, and participants
  • (11:05) Running farms while men were at war
  • (15:27) Violence against women during the Revolution
  • (18:24) Why did women follow the Continental Army
  • (22:42) Who the camp followers really were
  • (23:45) The real story behind Molly Pitcher
  • (26:10) Women disguising themselves as soldiers
  • (27:00) Deborah Sampson Gannett's military service
  • (29:52) Women as spies and military couriers
  • (37:29) How the Revolution changed women's education
  • (42:56) Three overlapping revolutions for liberty
  • (44:09) How including women changes the Revolution
  • (49:06) Recommended books on women and the Revolution

Notable Quotes

  • (00:59) “The first thing I'd like to tackle is this myth of women as passive observers of a revolutionary war.” — Savannah Eccles Johnston
  • (08:17) “If women refused to join the boycott, we would still be singing Hail to the King.” — Carol Berkin
  • (29:52) “The idea that the war itself didn't involve women is nonsense.” — Carol Berkin
  • (42:56) “The revolution was a woman's war as well as a man's war.” — Carol Berkin
  • (44:09) “When you include women in the story of the revolution, it changes the nature of the revolution itself.” — Savannah Eccles Johnston
  • (45:31) “You're giving more than half the country an ability to see themselves in the American Revolution and to feel like they're part of it.” — Savannah Eccles Johnston

Resources and Links

This Constitution  

Savannah Eccles Johnston

Carol Berkin

[00:00:00] Intro: We the People do ordain and establish this Constitution


[00:00:18] Savannah Eccles Johnston: Welcome to This Constitution. My name is Savannah Eccles Johnston, and today we have just the most exciting guest. We have Carol Berkin here with us. Now, Carol Berkin, in case you've lived under a rock and never heard of her, is a professor emerita of history at Baruch College, City University of New York.


[00:00:34] Savannah Eccles Johnston: She's the author of lots of books about the American founding and the early republic, including my personal favorite, Revolutionary Mothers. She also does a lot of work, even in retirement, that doesn't seem to count as retirement, with K12 teachers in content education. So Carol, thank you so much for joining us today.


[00:00:52] Savannah Eccles Johnston: We're going to talk about women on the home front in the Revolutionary War. So this whole season is about [00:01:00] winning independence, and m- m- many of our episodes are about the Southern Campaign or the Battle of Saratoga, but we wanted to give a more complete view of the Revolutionary War, starting with women on the home front.


[00:01:15] Savannah Eccles Johnston: And the first thing I'd like to tackle is this myth of women as passive observers of a revolutionary war. So first, I'm wondering how essential women's labor was to sustaining the Patriot cause? 


[00:01:28] Carol Berkin: It's a home-front war, so it was fought in the 13 colonies. I mean, it was fought on American soil For a long time, I mean, it was a very long war, really till the peace treaty about eight years, and then there was a 10-year period leading up to the Revolution between 1763, and more than 10 years, and 1776, when the American movement for independence began.


[00:01:57] Carol Berkin: In all of this time, women [00:02:00] were critically important participants. To write a book, as so many men have done, as if the battles took place in some country far, far away, you know, a foreign land far away, where there were no civilians, is to really miss the point. In the 20th century, we've seen enough home front wars to know, you know, nobody says, "Oh, Palestinian women didn't notice there was a war going on," or, "Oh, Vietnamese women didn't notice there was a war going on," or...


[00:02:36] Carol Berkin: Only about America that I know of do people write books in which women used to tell my students, there's only one explanation, either they were all in some catatonic state, or they were all on drugs. Because if you couldn't notice that a war was going on when it was being fought on your farm, or in your town, or in your [00:03:00] city, or the army was marching through, you must have been really simple-minded.


[00:03:06] Carol Berkin: One thing is, I think one of the most radical impacts of the American Revolution, and historians love to talk about that, the radical implication, was the politicization of women. If you look at before the Stamp Act, the idea of women having a civic identity and a political identity, white women at least, was absolutely unheard of.


[00:03:34] Carol Berkin: It was assumed that though women did essential work for the survival of a family, men grew raw material, but women produced finished goods. You cannot eat a piece of flax. You cannot eat a live pig. You-- Women processed raw material into usable items, [00:04:00] meat, vegetables, cloth, whatever, and they reproduced.


[00:04:04] Carol Berkin: They were involved in production and reproduction. They reproduced the labor force. There's not a farmer in the seventeenth or early eighteenth century before the revolution who wouldn't say, "I need a wife. I couldn't possibly do this without a woman doing domestic activities." But it's also true that the ideology of the day was built on three pillars.


[00:04:30] Carol Berkin: The church said that because Eve was responsible for leaving the Garden of Eden, it proved that she had no moral capacity. And so she had to be under the control of man, or civilization couldn't develop, and there would be total chaos, and she would become either a witch or a crazy woman, or a dominating one.


[00:04:57] Carol Berkin: And so the idea was that [00:05:00] God had ordained her submissive position. The second was that science, as they understood it, had done so because how they came to this conclusion, I'm not clear. They said that women's brains were both smaller and weaker than men's, and so they didn't have the capacity to think rationally, which in those centuries meant making moral decisions of right and wrong.


[00:05:29] Carol Berkin: And so she had to obey her husband or her father. And the clincher to this was then that the laws followed that argument and made clear that women could not have economic independence. So, for instance, when you got married, you were called feme covert, woman covered, right? Anything she brought into the marriage now belonged to her husband, unless a prenup was signed, and not between the woman and the man, [00:06:00] but between her father and the man.


[00:06:02] Carol Berkin: Everything she brought into the marriage belonged to him, including her clothing and her jewelry. If she earned any money, it belonged to him. She couldn't buy, sell, or own property. In other words, she remained a kind of dependent infant legally, and all of that made it possible for it to seem absolutely correct that women could have no civic or political participation.


[00:06:31] Carol Berkin: They were to remain domestic. When the British started passing laws that the Americans thought were an infringement on their liberties, the governments of the colonies wrote angry statements, and they sent petitions, and they said, "You can't do this." And Parliament's response was, "Ho hum, who cares what those yokels think?"


[00:06:54] Carol Berkin: But the Americans came up with this brilliant idea, the boycott. They [00:07:00] boycotted British goods. What were the central British goods they boycotted? Cloth, which was what the Industrial Revolution was beginning with, right? Tea, which was the drink of choice in America and in most of Europe, and luxury goods, which the American upper elite couldn't get enough of. And who purchased these things for the family?


[00:07:27] Carol Berkin: Women. If women refused to join the boycott, we would still be singing Hail to the King. But they enforced the boycott. I mean, they didn't just themselves not buy these things. They picketed shops that dared to try to sell British goods. They were the heart and soul of the success of the boycotts, because all those laws that the British passed were repealed except for the Tea Act.


[00:07:57] Carol Berkin: I mean, the British economy went [00:08:00] pshhew. And how did women think about what they were doing? They thought, "I'm a daughter of liberty. You may be a son of liberty, but I'm a daughter of liberty." One young girl writes, "We commenced perfect statesmen. We talked about politics. We enacted politics." Overnight, literally, they went from being absolutely without a political identity to crowing about their extraordinary...


[00:08:32] Carol Berkin: In fact, women wrote articles to the newspaper criticizing men for not being patriotic enough, for not being, supporting independence enough, for being, in essence, wusses. You know, "Why aren't you doing something?" It was the most extraordinary transformation that I can think of in American history, except perhaps, you know, f- at the end of slavery.


[00:08:56] Carol Berkin: So here were women who came [00:09:00] into the war with a political perspective. They were either gonna be a loyalist or a revolutionary, depending on how they saw the great debates of the American Revolution. So that's the way you have to think about why it was possible for women to do so many extraordinary things during the Revolution.


[00:09:25] Carol Berkin: Just ordinary women who never expected to do anything but kill the pigs for food, and make the dinner, and have children, all of a sudden are spies and couriers of messages for the military, and enlisting in the army, pretending they're men and enlisting. They do any number of heroic things because they feel they have a stake in preserving liberty and independence.


[00:09:59] Carol Berkin: And [00:10:00] also, when the men went off to fight in the army, women were left to run the farm. I always have students who say, "Oh, they must have really liked having the..." I said, "No, they didn't like that. They already had enough chores. They already had enough to do, and it was harder to do it because the British cut off a lot of essentials they needed."


[00:10:25] Carol Berkin: One of them was salt. The British wouldn't send salt, and you can't preserve anything for the winter without s- So the women are busy trying to find a substitute for sea salt, and they have children. So often they were pregnant every two and a half years, so they had a baby in their arms. They might be pregnant.


[00:10:45] Carol Berkin: They had young children, and they didn't have those little things you put in plugs to make sure the kids don't burn them. There were hazards on a farm. There were sinkholes. There were wild animals. There were, oh... So you had to watch your [00:11:00] kids. A child could walk into the enormous hearth, you know, a baby who doesn't know better, and be burned alive. So women had a lot on their plate.


[00:11:10] Carol Berkin: Now they were being asked to go out into the field. And so it wasn't like, "Woo, we get to do male jobs." It was, "Oh my God." And they did. They took on male jobs. It didn't make them feel better. It made them feel, "Oh my God, I wish this were over." Except wealthy women. If the farm was big enough and it had paid or indentured servants and it was operating and there was money to spend, we have a wonderful set of letters, which I, I'm sure if you've read Revolutionary Mothers, you know, you know them, where a very wealthy man who became a loyalist and he fled to England at the beginning of the war because he didn't wanna be put in jail or hanged, and [00:12:00] he left his wife in charge.


[00:12:02] Carol Berkin: She writes to him in the beginning, "Don't worry, dear, your farm is doing fine." Six months later, she writes to him, "Don't worry, dear, our farm is fine." And six months later, she writes to him, she says, "Don't worry, my farm is doing fine." So the transformation required you to be a member of the elite. For the average farm woman, which was most of American society, for the average farm woman, this was just another burden, and in terrible circumstances.


[00:12:41] Carol Berkin: The army would march through your town or through your farm, and they would take all the stored foods you had. In many cases, they would take all your furniture so that when they encamped, they could light a fire, and they could cook, and they could have warmth. The stories women [00:13:00] told of them leaving them without a chair to sit on, the, and they looted.


[00:13:06] Carol Berkin: They, you know, they took anything of value. One woman wrote, "They took the buckles, the silver buckles off my shoes." So they're suffering from shortages, suffering from the military taking their goods, and they're desperate in many cases, and that's why you see letters to their husbands in the army, "We have no food, and we will starve.


[00:13:32] Carol Berkin: We have no wood, and we will freeze. Come home. Pray, come home." 


[00:13:37] Savannah Eccles Johnston: You're starting to talk about here is the, the way that women experienced violence and destruction during the Revolutionary War, and often we think about, well, we tell the men's stories 'cause they're the ones who are getting shot and are out fighting the battles, but h- how are women experiencing this?


[00:13:53] Carol Berkin: Rape. We are just beginning to really pay closer attention to the fact that they ... I mean, [00:14:00] we know that when the British Army Enlisted men were treated so horribly. I mean, they were whipped and they were... But they were told, "To the victor belong the spoils," so women were part of the spoils. When the British Army marched from New York to Philadelphia, examples and instances of gang rape followed them everywhere, mothers and their daughters pulled out to the barn and raped We know that these things happened.


[00:14:30] Carol Berkin: We've just begun, partly some men and women didn't wanna report it because it was a shame, embarrassing, you know. Uh, w- and we know, for instance, when the British Army was at, housed, when they were in New York, the commander was on Staten Island, and he wrote with great humor. He said, "A day doesn't go by when a fair maiden goes out into," I'm paraphrasing, "goes out into her [00:15:00] garden and a soldier takes advantage of her."


[00:15:04] Carol Berkin: Y- women were not safe to leave their houses, and so there's a, there's rape, but there's also simply, I don't know if today we can imagine it, your house is probably the only real possession you have, and th- they were destroyed. Everything in them was taken from these women. So the suffering of soldiers, and this certainly, the American soldier, enlisted man, was treated really badly, too.


[00:15:36] Carol Berkin: Partly 'cause there weren't a lot of resources, but also because the officer corps was as elitist as the British officer corps. Hmm. They looked on the enlisted men on the whole as sort of another animal, and we know this because a lot of the soldiers, the privates, kept journals, and you can see that [00:16:00] they were treated, both by prosperous people in towns they encountered and by their commanding officers, as sort of the scum of the earth.


[00:16:10] Carol Berkin: But women were in danger of starving or freezing, and it's also true that women, what did this poor woman say, "Pray, come home," when her husband didn't come home? She went to Valley Forge to join the army. Hmm. So that picture that everybody knows of the soldiers traipsing through the snow, right, at Valley Forge, is phony because Valley Forge was not an all-guy experience.


[00:16:40] Carol Berkin: It became a city overnight because all the women who were scared of being raped or starving to death or their kids dying, raced to wherever the American army settled, Monmouth or Valley Forge, anywhere it settled for the winter. [00:17:00] There they came with their favorite animals, with their favorite pots and pans, with th- and with all their children, so that overnight those places were bustling cities.


[00:17:12] Carol Berkin: Washington hated it. He wanted a professional army like the British had, but he couldn't do anything about it because if he sent the women home, the men would go with them. So they put these women to work. And they did the nursing of soldiers that got sick. They gathered the firewood. They cooked the meals.


[00:17:35] Carol Berkin: And the most, they mended the clothes. The most important thing they did was washing the clothes, and I really have to tell you this : The boys who enlisted in the American Army were often 17, 18-year-old apprentices or farm boys, and they didn't know very much, but they knew that women did the laundry. So they came to the military in whatever clothes they had, and they just stayed [00:18:00] in them.


[00:18:00] Carol Berkin: Anybody who's had a teenage son knows if your son thinks his socks are lucky, he'll wear them until they can walk on their own, right? They, and my son, who's now 42, could take a computer apart and put it back together, but he couldn't figure out how to work the washing machine. He was really befuddled by that.


[00:18:20] Carol Berkin: So these boys just stayed in their clothes, and of course, they got lice. And they got lice, do you think that taught them, "Oh, we should really try to do something"? No, they just scratched. They scratched endlessly, so they had scabs all over their arms. And the person in the regiment who was responsible for reporting every month how many battle-ready men there were would say, "Well, you know, 15 of the guys, uh, couldn't possibly fight because they're covered in scabs everywhere."


[00:18:49] Carol Berkin: So also they were extremely bored because there was nothing to do in the camp. And so the boys invented games. So they invented competitive [00:19:00] games, one of which was throwing hot tar at the lice and everyone's in life, and then seeing who killed the most lice. So now they had burns, and they had scabs. When women ca- I mean, you know, boys.


[00:19:13] Carol Berkin: When women came to the camps, not only did they wash their own husband's or father's clothes, but they were responsible for washing the clothes of every man in the camp. And of course, my students, I have to say there were no washing machines. So the women worked like dogs. You know, you had to have a big cauldron of water, and you washed it, and then you beat them on the rock.


[00:19:41] Carol Berkin: It was not easy. And that was the most important thing that women did in the camps. Without that, we wouldn't, half the men wouldn't be able to fight. So I think, and if you think I'm making it up, everywhere the military went, the [00:20:00] first signs they put up in towns, in taverns, everywhere, "We need laundresses."


[00:20:06] Carol Berkin: They understood the value of what women did. Now, in addition, these women were called camp followers. When I started this book, I thought that they were prostitutes. The American Army did not allow any prostitutes on the military grounds because In the beginning when they had, then the prostitutes got the guys drunk and stole their weapons.


[00:20:32] Carol Berkin: So, you know, now there might've been prostitutes around outside the camp, and there were, but in the camp, camp followers were wives, daughters, and fiancées of the men who were fighting. So in the forts, the camp followers became what we call today Molly Pitchers. New Jersey, bless its heart, thought there was a [00:21:00] person named Molly Pitcher.


[00:21:02] Carol Berkin: It's like Rosie the Riveter, you know? Yeah, I know Rosie. So they have a rest stop named after an imaginary woman or a mythological woman. But anyway, the women were in the barracks over here. There was a huge empty space in the fort, and then the cannons were over here. They didn't want them too close in case one exploded, so we were over here.


[00:21:26] Carol Berkin: So the men would fire the cannons when the British and Indians were attacking, flaming arrows coming over, cannonballs coming over, and then they would shout out, Molly was a very popular nickname, "Molly Pitcher," and a woman would come running out with a pitcher of water. I thought, thought at first, 'cause I'm really dumb, I thought it was 'cause the men were thirsty.


[00:21:52] Carol Berkin: It wasn't for the men. It was to cool down the cannon. That's what you used the water for, because if you didn't do that, when the [00:22:00] guy reached inside to reload it, he'd burn his arm off, right? These women ran across a big empty space. Nobody said to the British, "Excuse me, a woman's coming through. Please don't fire a cannonball."


[00:22:13] Carol Berkin: So they were wounded because they were hit in the midst of the war, and we know that this is the case because at the end of the war, 250 women who had been Molly Pitchers sued for veteran's payment because they had been wounded. So this image that women weren't involved in the war isn't even true. That is, th- they were, and the women who followed the ground army, many of them continued when the camp broke up and they went back to battle because it was spring.


[00:22:49] Carol Berkin: The women went along with them. And in the midst of a battle, the women were sent into the battlefield to scavenge for [00:23:00] weapons and coats and boots and anything they could, and they, they were wounded. There's n- no military activity the women weren't involved in. And many women, and we have no idea how many of them, because if they got away with it, many of them cut their hair, not as short as mine is at the moment, but they cut their hair.


[00:23:23] Carol Berkin: And puberty did not hit as early as it does here, so many a 17-year-old, 18-year-old boy didn't shave yet, and his voice hadn't changed, and women didn't have breasts. But if they did, they could tie them down. They cut their hair. They put on male clothes, and they enlisted in the army. If they got away with it, we have no idea who's a woman and who's a man, 'cause they're listed in the army under a male name.


[00:23:52] Carol Berkin: But we do know one woman, a very famous woman, Deborah Sampson Gannett, and she's famous because [00:24:00] she was an indentured servant in a household. She was about 18. She was indentured when she was five, but when she was about 18 or 19, a big strapping young woman who was stuck being a servant all her life, heard that they were offering bonuses, signing bonuses to men to join the army.


[00:24:20] Carol Berkin: So she put on a male outfit, she walked over the line to Connecticut, she signed up, she got a bonus. She came home, she put her dress and apron back on, and she said, "Boy, that was easy." So she tried it again in Massachusetts, which was her home state. And for reasons, who, who knows, she stayed in the army as Private Robert Shurtliff for two and a half years.


[00:24:47] Carol Berkin: And she was wounded. She was wounded in the leg. Her story is really marvelously raunchy. Apparently, she picked up women in the taverns like the men did. [00:25:00] She drank with the guys. She cursed like a sailor. I mean, no one knew she was a female until the war was over, and her partner with the army was in Philadelphia, and she got what they called camp fever.


[00:25:14] Carol Berkin: Any, any time anybody ran a temperature, they called it camp fever. And the doctor comes and opens up her shirt, and he goes, "Oh, my goodness," right? And he realizes she's female. Well, she had such a good military record that instead of throwing her out, they gave her an honorable discharge. Paul Revere heard about her, and he campaigned for her to get a veteran's pension, and she did.


[00:25:43] Carol Berkin: She went back to work in the fields, 'cause men got paid more than women, of course, if they did field work, for a while. And then one day, as she recounts it, she was completely illiterate, but she told her story to a Boston guy who, [00:26:00] they published it. She said, "Oh, the sun was shining, and the flowers were out, and the birds were singing," and she put her dress on and a bonnet, and she got married and had five kids, and she became Deborah Sampson Gannett.


[00:26:13] Carol Berkin: Here's the clincher. When she died, Samuel Gannett sued for a widow's pension, 


[00:26:21] Savannah Eccles Johnston: and he got it 


[00:26:22] Carol Berkin: So she's just one of many, many, we'll never know how many were women. But the idea that the war itself didn't involve women is nonsense because there they were in the camps, there they were on the battlefield, there they were being Molly Pitchers, there they were being soldiers, and they worked for the military as spies, and if you were caught and you were put on those spy prison ships in New York Harbor, that was a death sentence.


[00:26:59] Carol Berkin: They worked [00:27:00] as couriers, and that was terribly important because a soldier riding between two parts of the army, you know, a general here, a general there, would be picked up immediately by British scouts But a young girl riding, and if they caught her, she said, "I went to see my sick uncle," you know? So a lot of these couriers who carried really important information were y- were girls.


[00:27:29] Carol Berkin: The funny part of it is the way we know about them, largely the DAR saved the recollection of them by naming chapters after these young women. 


[00:27:41] Savannah Eccles Johnston: Oh, I should pause you here. The DAR is the Daughters of the American Revolution. Daughters of the American 


[00:27:44] Carol Berkin: Revolution, and they collected family accounts, and they were wonderful in sharing with me.


[00:27:52] Carol Berkin: I mean, they were so good about saying, "Yes, we have a great-grandson's account and a great-granddaughter's [00:28:00] account." Okay? So these young women, in all the accounts that I read, never rode out on a nice moonlit night. All the accounts begin, "It was a dark and stormy night." So apparently from Maine to Georgia, it was always a dark and stormy night when they rode out, but they did.


[00:28:23] Carol Berkin: There were young girls who rode out into the county to call the militia, their father's militia company. There were women who, in the South where the campaigns were, the two major campaigns were, the guerrilla warfare that went on, that is the patriots were the guerrilla fighters, the women stored ammunition and weapons in their homes, and if the British or the loyalists had a hint that was happening, they would come to the house, and women did extraordinary [00:29:00] things.


[00:29:01] Carol Berkin: They burned their own house down or blew their own house up with the ammunition there in order to prevent the British fr- and loyalists from getting those supplies. The number of women who did heroic things that they never did, if you would ask them five years before, they would've said, "Don't be ridiculous, I could never do..."


[00:29:24] Carol Berkin: They did remarkable things. And one woman, there was a decorative sword her husband had acquired from the Far East, I don- And the British come up her walkway to the house, and she comes out with the sword, brandishing the sword. And she says, "You take one more, you know, one more step closer, and I'm gonna kill you."


[00:29:48] Carol Berkin: And they were so startled by the sight of this matron, you know, this woman i- in her 40s waving this sword in the a- that they left. And [00:30:00] so women played, in Charleston, for instance, which was occupied by the British, women from areas outside of the controlled city, matronly women would come, and the guards would say, "Halt, you can't go in."


[00:30:17] Carol Berkin: And the woman would say, "Oh, my daughter is sick, and there's an apothecary," you know, a pharmacist we would say, "in town that has something to give her. Can't I just go in? I'll come right back out." And they always let her go in, and hooked on one of her petticoats was a message between the guerrilla leader outside and the patriots inside. The numbers of stories are countless of women who in fact risked their lives.


[00:30:47] Carol Berkin: You know, if you were caught disguising yourself as a man in the military, if you were caught, the only way you could get out peacefully was to say, "Oh, I signed up [00:31:00] because my husband is here, and I missed him so much, and I, I'm just a girl, and I, I really wanted to be with..." If you didn't do that, if you said, "I signed up 'cause I wanted to fight for independence," you were labeled a whore, and you were marched out of the camp stripped to the waist with your hands tied in front of you behind a cart, and as they marched you out of the camp, the drum and fife corps played a tune that came to be called The Whore's March.


[00:31:34] Carol Berkin: There were penalties for being caught in any number of circumstances, and so there's no aspect, the only aspect of the war women played no role in was high politics. There were no women writing the Declaration of Independence. There were no women writing the Constitution. There were no women in the state governments.


[00:31:58] Carol Berkin: That would be [00:32:00] beyond the pale in the mi- And so my students always say, "Why didn't they, they should've been more feminist. They should've organized." Most women after eight years of war just wanted to go back to their normal life. Their farms might have been in ruins. Their husbands might have been, what do we call it, PTS- PTSD.


[00:32:25] Carol Berkin: Who knows what they had. They just wanted their family to be back at home. That seemed more important to them than, you know, campai- For, there was no place they could campaign for political rights anyway 'cause they were on a farm 20 miles away from anybody else. But the desire for normal life was really very intense.


[00:32:51] Carol Berkin: But among the urban elite, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Baltimore, there were [00:33:00] women and men, intellectuals, who thought it was important to try to figure out what the republic would need- 


[00:33:09] Savannah Eccles Johnston: Yeah ... 


[00:33:10] Carol Berkin: and what role women should play. They knew they couldn't go back to the old claim that women were morally incompetent because women had shown that they were capable of making moral and rational decisions throughout the war.


[00:33:30] Carol Berkin: So they decided that they could no longer say women's brains were incapable, and they felt that the reason women seemed dumber than men was the lack of education. And so one of the great results after the war of this recognition that women had brains was the rise of young ladies academies in every state.


[00:33:55] Carol Berkin: Only upper echelon girls went to them, but they [00:34:00] had the same curriculum that men's prep schools had. And so here you are educating a whole group of women in political theory and history and science and you know, that was pretty dangerous to have done. These women did not expect to then go out and run for political office, and no one would've let them.


[00:34:21] Carol Berkin: But the idea was before the revolution, because women were thought to have weak brains, the father was responsible for socializing both the m- sons and daughters, not the mother. Wasn't the mother who raised the children. The mother could teach the girls domestic chores, and the father could... But what your role is in society, how you should behave, what your obligations are to you- that was all taught by the father.


[00:34:51] Carol Berkin: After the war, men are beginning to move their work out of the house. Many of them were the [00:35:00] beginning of American trade and commerce. Who's gonna educate the children? And they said, "Mothers can do it. They're competent to do it. Let's have them do it." And look how important that job is, because they said in a republic, the only thing that will sustain the republic is not a standing army, not a king and tradition.


[00:35:25] Carol Berkin: It's the willingness to sacrifice your life and your riches and your honor to support the republic, to defend independence and liberty, and that's what you are to raise your sons to believe and raise your daughters to believe. And so they became what some of them even called Republican mothers, but I think civic mothers is a better term really, because what they were doing was [00:36:00] keeping women in domestic setting, but giving them a role that had to do with civic society, to do with politics outside of the home.


[00:36:13] Carol Berkin: It didn't last very long, because after, and you can read all their writings who, you know, support this. They were very literate people. After the War of 1812, Americans were confident that they would never be taken over again by Britain or any other country, and so you didn't really have to worry too much about keeping your s- sons alert to the fact that at any moment they might have to give up their lives.


[00:36:42] Carol Berkin: And so Republican motherhood ceased to be really that important, and instead you finally got domesticity, the 19th century. Haven in a heartless world, your job was to comfort your husband from his tough day [00:37:00] outside the home. But it lasted for a generation, and ultimately women's education led to women becoming teachers in the 19th century, and it led to, my students say, "Oh, please, 70 years later, that's a lifetime."


[00:37:19] Carol Berkin: I said, "You know, in history 70 years is like a little blip." So from the end of the revolution to Seneca Falls, not that long. But the revolution set up the possibility by destroying the idea that women's brains were weak, destroying the idea that they could not be moral creatures, educating many of them, and ultimately leading to them demanding equality.


[00:37:50] Carol Berkin: You know, end of story. The revolution was a woman's war as well as a men's war. And finally, of course, I have to [00:38:00] say that there were three revolutions going on, not one. All three of the revolutions were fighting for liberty and independence. Native American tribes were fighting to preserve their land, their culture, their independence.


[00:38:16] Carol Berkin: African Americans were fighting to win their independence and their liberty. So you have to see the American Revolution as sort of overlapping wars that use exactly the same ideology, so that Black slaves fought for liberty and freedom against the very men who wrote the Declaration of Independence. I mean, it's a much more complex war when you interject race and status into it, so.


[00:38:51] Savannah Eccles Johnston: The one thing that I'm taking away from this is that when you include women in the story of the revolution, it changes the nature of the revolution [00:39:00] itself. 


[00:39:00] Carol Berkin: Yes. Yes. It becomes, once a complicated home front war, and it becomes a war with an ideology that has an incredible impact on every group involved, even without suffrage, even without the vote.


[00:39:20] Carol Berkin: It's the stage on which the revolution is performed becomes a lot more crowded when you interject women into it, and it becomes more real. Mm-hmm. I mean, really, how could people, how could you write a book that tells the complete history of the American Revolution and not have the word women in the index?


[00:39:44] Carol Berkin: It's absurd. I mean, when you, God bless them, they were doing research, they were... But i- it's just ridiculous. It's absurd to argue that this was a military event, pure and simple. [00:40:00] 


[00:40:00] Savannah Eccles Johnston: One thing that I think is so important about the work you've done, especially in the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, is you're giving more than half the country an ability to see themselves in the American Revolution, and to feel like they're part of it.


[00:40:14] Carol Berkin: Exactly. I started writing women's history when I had my daughter, and I thought, my oldest child, and I thought, "I want her to be able to look into the past and see her face." And there were no- believe me. W- in fact, my husband and I used to read kids books to my kids, and change the gender. You know, the runaway bunny became a girl.


[00:40:43] Carol Berkin: We, uh, because none of the creatures were... And one day, my daughter comes home from school, and she says, "Mom, the runaway bunny was a boy." She thought we had been lying to her. Now, of course People don't face that problem. [00:41:00] But it was so stark. There were girls' toys, there were boys' toys. God forbid a girl should say, "I'd like tinker toys."


[00:41:07] Carol Berkin: No, no, no, that's... Have a baby doll, one that wets and pees, you know? I said, "Who, well, who even wants that when they're grown up? W- what do you..." So it was a wasteland, and when you wanted to teach a- I had a wonderful dissertation advisor. I loved him, but when I told him I would really like to write a dissertation about women in the colonial period, he said, "Carol, that would be lovely, but there's nothing to say about them, and there are no sources."


[00:41:40] Carol Berkin: And he truly believed that. He had the good grace five years later to say to me, "I was wrong." We would go to archives, and the archives would say the Joe Blow papers, his political papers, you know, they'd do inventories, his business papers, his personal [00:42:00] writings, and then there would be something called miscellaneous or just other papers, and you know what was in those?


[00:42:08] Carol Berkin: Women's diaries, women's letters, women's poetry, women's... And we would demand that the archive change the inventory and put women's material. It was overwhelming what we found. There's still stuff we'd like to find, but we looked at court cases suddenly, and we realized that in the 17th and 18th century, there was no professional legal profession toward the end of the 18th century, and so anybody could testify.


[00:42:43] Carol Berkin: And so you have women getting up in court and testifying and, and nobody had, nobody had noticed. It was so strange. There it was in front of their faces, and they didn't see it. So 


[00:42:57] Savannah Eccles Johnston: I'm wondering if, as kind of a, a [00:43:00] sign-off, if you can give us just three books, in addition to Revolutionary Mothers, that you wish the average American would read to celebrate America 250 that tells the real story of the American Revolution, the American Revolution that the entire country can say, "This is our revolution, and it matters."


[00:43:17] Carol Berkin: The two critical books that preceded mine that really created early American history were Mary Beth Norton's Liberty's Daughters and Linda Kerber, K-E-R-B-E-R, Women of the Republic. Linda's book is an intellectual study of what I was describing about women's roles, and Mary Beth's is a social history.


[00:43:44] Carol Berkin: They both, when I say suffered, they didn't have as much material on Black women or Indian women or in, or on poorer white women. So they often write as if the middle class [00:44:00] were women, you know, were all... But they're still amazing books that, uh... And then there are, Rosemary Zagarri has a book about the backlash against women having a public role.


[00:44:14] Carol Berkin: The odd thing is women stopped writing about women in the revolution. Our three books, I think, are sort of the... There are others, there are articles, and there are collections of articles, but they're still in the scholarly world. But you can get Mary Beth's book in paperback, and it's a great read, and she has wonderful stories in it about girls and about women at tea parties, you know, saying, "We're gonna write a manifesto that says we're not gonna drink tea anymore."


[00:44:47] Carol Berkin: It's, uh, her book is very readable and very, very good. 


[00:44:52] Savannah Eccles Johnston: Okay, so to those who are listening, you've got to read Norton and Koerber, and Rosemary Zagarri's wonderful book, [00:45:00] Revolutionary Backlash. 


[00:45:01] Carol Berkin: And they can read Revolutionary Mothers, my book. Oh, 


[00:45:04] Savannah Eccles Johnston: that's required reading. You've got to read Revolutionary Mothers.


[00:45:07] Savannah Eccles Johnston: Well, thank you so much. I just sat and enjoyed it and just tried to take everything in. 


[00:45:13] Carol Berkin: Well, Savannah, I apologize. I just talk people's ear off because- No, it's the 


[00:45:17] Savannah Eccles Johnston: best ... 


[00:45:18] Carol Berkin: I just love this subject. Once had a student who said to me, "You know, Professor Bergen, I don't care about any of this, but it seemed to matter so much to you that I just-"


[00:45:28] Carol Berkin: had to do the reading." 


[00:45:29] Savannah Eccles Johnston: I think I could listen to 10 straight episodes from you. Thank you so much for joining us. We appreciate it. 


[00:45:35] Carol Berkin: Thanks a lot. Thanks for inviting me. 


[00:45:40] Outro: The Constitution is more than parchment under glass at the National Archives. It's a blueprint for American self-government that shapes every part of our civic life, from the rights we cherish to the laws we live under.


[00:45:53] Outro: We explore the ongoing battle over the meaning and relevance of America's founding document. [00:46:00] This Constitution will equip you to engage the most pressing political questions of our time. Join us every two weeks as we hash out constitutional questions together. This podcast is ordained and established by the Center for Constitutional Studies at Utah Valley University, the home of Utah's Civic Thought and Leadership Initiative.