Remember The Ladies

A century of episodes calls for a wider lens, and we open it fully: the founding wasn’t just hammered out in halls and pamphlets by famous men—it was argued, nurtured, and lived by women whose ideas changed the course of American liberty. We pull threads from homes and letters into the political tapestry, showing how civic virtue took shape through family, education, economic agency, and public authorship.

We explore Abigail Adams’s push for legal and economic recognition within marriage and household management, Mercy Otis Warren’s “deep cut” anti-federalist critique that helped spur the Bill of Rights, and Phillis Wheatley’s poetry that challenged a nation to confront slavery while speaking the language of freedom. We highlight Martha Washington’s essential leadership in sustaining morale and discipline around the Continental Army, and Deborah Sampson’s service that tested assumptions about who could act as a citizen-soldier. Together, these lives reveal freedom as more than license; it is the disciplined pursuit of the common good.

Rather than treating the founding as a static canon of documents, we frame it as an active conversation. Yes, read the Constitution and Federalist Papers—but also bring in the anti-federalists and the overlooked correspondence where influence travels across friendship, marriage, and print culture. As America approaches 250 years, this broader view makes the era more vivid and useful: plays, poems, letters, and household decisions shaped policy and principle as surely as speeches and votes. If you’re a teacher, student, or curious reader, you’ll find practical ways to study these connections and restore the women who helped build the republic.

If this perspective expanded your view of the founding, follow the show, share this episode with a friend who loves history, and leave a quick review telling us which text changed your mind.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Setting The Stage: Episode 100
• 1:43 Defining Women’s Varied Civic Roles
• 3:49 Case Studies: Adams, Warren, Wheatley, Washington
• 6:05 Freedom As Pursuit Of The Good
• 7:26 How To Read The Founding More Fully
• 9:10 Mercy Otis Warren And The Bill Of Rights
• 11:06 Finding Women’s Influence In Correspondence
• 13:11 Broadening America 250: Celebrating Women

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:46

Welcome back to Physics in New Year. This is our 100th episode, and I am so happy that we get to spend our 100th episode with Dr. Kirsten Burkhog. And the title of this is Remember the Lady. So if you haven't heard the previous episodes, I highly suggest it because I've learned so much, even about women that I thought I knew about. Dr. Burkhogg, thank you so much for coming back and being our guest for episode 100. So today we're kind of talking about, you know, remember the ladies, like what they left us, this civic virtue and family legacy. So how can we tie these women together to talk about civic virtue, equality, and family during the founding?

SPEAKER_01: 1:36

Thank you. It is an honor to be episode 100. And I think if there's anything that I hope people have taken away from the previous episodes on all of these women, is that they are widely varied. So I think it's sort of a fool's errand to ask the question like, what is a woman's perspective on virtue and citizenship at the American founding? Well, I don't know if I can tell you what women generally thought, but I can tell you what these women thought, and I can tell you what they did. And I can also tell you that women's perspectives have some differences from men's perspectives at the time of the founding. And we can also acknowledge that, that women are different, and that also women's women have a kind of unique perspective on these sorts of ideas, in particular at the founding, because it is primarily up to women to do the raising and education of children, to be the sort of stewards of homes and things like that. But at the same time, even in those roles, we see tons of difference and what it means to be a good and participatory citizen while also uh fulfilling these roles, that fulfilling these roles is part of what makes a good citizen. So for someone like Abigail Adams, you know, being a good steward of the home also meant the need for economic independence and recognition legally of women's economic independence, right? For Merci Otis Warren, you know, we see tensions between what it means to be a public-facing person and a woman. For Phyllis Wheatley, we didn't talk a lot about her family life. That's a very kind of interesting story there, but she has a lot to say about, you know, the weird functionings of domesticity in a world in which slavery is the sort of mode of operation. There are some things to critique there necessarily. And then we also see people like Deborah Sanson, who is quite different, who has a military career before she has a family, or Martha Washington, whose primary role is to be the support structure for her husband. So there's no one size fits all approach. But at the same time, for all of these individuals, they're all guided by similar principles. The idea that to be free, and to be free in this like deep and abiding sense, where it's not just about getting to do whatever you want, but about the freedom to pursue what is good, not just for you, but for the people around you, is motivating for each and every single one of them, from the people who actually fought in the revolution to those who are publishing about these ideas, to those who are just simply living out those ideas by, you know, how they acted. So I think there's this really big and expansive legacy to be left. And all of these women, I think we can all find something that we recognize, and we can all find something that unifies us and connects us in pursuit of ultimate ends, ultimate goals, and the desire that we should live in a virtuous political order that is good. Not just a political order that leaves us alone, but one that is actually oriented towards the best things, the good things. And for that, we need things like civic virtue.

SPEAKER_00: 5:12

Well, and I love that, you know, all of these women we talked about all have a sense of civic duty, but it's different for all of them. And one of the things that I've really been reflecting on, especially doing this podcast, you know, or coming up on America 250, is we tend to really look at the roles of the men, right? These great thinkers, these people who wrote, and we history tends to forget the women, you know, and I love the Abigail Adams, like remember the ladies. So these values are so important. And so if I am a teacher or a student or just somebody who is interested in this, you know, and you said it's a fool's errand, right? This is not a one-size-fits-all thing, but where can we see some of the influences of these women in the work that the men are credited for?

SPEAKER_01: 6:11

That's a great question. And I think part of it is just expanding our view of the things that are important. So, for example, when I teach the Constitution and the Constitution Convention, of course, I always have my students read the document itself. You have to know what's in it. Yeah. And then I have them read the Federalist papers, right? The Federalist papers written by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay. And the Federalist Papers are not completely unbiased documents. These are a bunch of Federalists trying to convince people that these that the Constitution needs to be ratified. But at the same time, they give us a lot of context and depth and reckoning with the potential questions that are involved with the Constitution and the ratification debates. But that's not enough either, right? We have to understand what the anti-federalists are responding to because they're making arguments that are about what people are saying. So there's a whole uh swath of things you could consider the anti-federalist papers. They're a lot less organized, written by a lot of people who are writing under, you know, pseudonyms, Brutus and Sentinel and whatnot. And I think there's a kind of limited number of those that we include, but that is a college-level American politics class. And if you don't take an American or a college-level American politics class, then you might not even ever get to the anti-federalist papers. And that means you're probably not getting to like the deep cut anti-federalist papers, which include people like Mercy Otis Warren. And the fact that Mercy Otis Warren is a deep cut in the anti-federalist papers is shocking because her essay on the Constitution is what prompts the Bill of Rights, right? Like this really important change happens as a result of the essay she writes. But we don't always see that because we're not always reading contextually, right? We're reading the document itself. We're reading a couple of things maybe that give us a little bit of supporting info, but we're rarely getting the depth that is available to us. You know, Merciotis Warren's writing is available to us. So I think part of getting to women's contributions is just simply looking for them. So for John and Abigail Adams, read a couple of things John Adams wrote. Take a look at his letters with his wife, see what's going on there, see if you can find any connections. And, you know, they might not always show up in like perfectly clear one-to-one ways, but you can get a sense for how these things are shaping the ideas of the founders. And correspondence is a really great source for a lot of this because John Adams, for example, isn't just corresponding with his wife, he's corresponding with Merci Otisporin as well. They're very good friends. And he's also in contact with other women. And he's not the only founder that is in contact with women. At the very least, almost all of the founders were contact in contact with their wives, if they had them. But they had broader social circles that included women. So I would say if we want to find where the women are influencing the founding, we just have to go to where women's writing exists and where we have access to it and see if we can draw any connections between those conversations and the ones that we're seeing play out on a more explicitly political stage.

SPEAKER_00: 9:27

So as we get close to America 250, you know, again, we'll be celebrating Thomas Jefferson, like you said, like all of these men. What do you think is the best way we can also celebrate the women of the founding, giving them kind of that equal station in really the founding and the birth of our nation?

SPEAKER_01: 9:47

I think that the best way to honor the women of the founding isn't necessarily to say that we shouldn't read the men of the founding. I always say that I love the founders. I think everyone should read the founders. I think we probably don't read the founders enough. But I think a large part of this would just be simply realizing that the founding era is truly a historical moment. And historical moments are really big and they include things beyond just what we tend to focus on. So being curious about that depth and thinking about the fact that women had serious ideas, that they contributed to the American founding, that this is a moment that goes way beyond the doors of Independence Hall. I oftentimes I talk about with my students the fact that we can have lots of critiques of the founding in hindsight, but it is this really remarkable moment. Just if we consider the canonical founders, that this many really brilliant men, really learned men, are all in the same room, pulling in some semblance of the same direction at the same time, is just the odds on that are insane. But the thing is, is that that moment, that crazy moment of just explosion of intellectual, you know, ideas and you know, these new theories of how government was supposed to be run and people's roles in them, it wasn't just confined to the founders. This is everywhere. It is this moment that's infecting people and it's infecting discourse, dialogue, culture, plays that people are watching, poems that they're reading. It is, it is way, way bigger than just the events that we think of as the founding. If we can start thinking about the founding in those terms, I think it makes it both, you know, if it can be, even more exciting, right? This is this is a big moment that is even bigger than we realize that it is oftentimes. And it gives us the permission to ask, you know, how are other people thinking about and receiving and contributing to the conversations around the founding? And how how are all of these things coming together to set the stage really for the American political project and American society as we know it today.

SPEAKER_00: 12:14

And birthdays are always such a good time to really reflect and see, you know, where we've come from, where we want to go. And we would be remiss to not remember the ladies. Dr. Virkov, thank you for being our guest for episode 100 of Civics in the year and for really taking us through all of these incredible women who had such a hand in the founding of our nation.

SPEAKER_01: 12:39

Thank you.