The dominant social construction of womanhood from 1945 to 1960, which became the dominant historical image of women later on, was one of the suburban housewife and mother — white, middle-class, straight, and patriotic, she was content to cook, care for the home, and raise children.^[1] But as Not June Cleaver, edited by historian Joanne Meyerowitz, demonstrates, the postwar era was far more complicated. Women were politicians, workers, union organizers, and strikers; they were Communists, peace activists, and secret abortionists; women were city-dwelling Mexican Americans, Chinese Americans, black Americans; they were lesbians with cultural creations, Beatniks who ran away from home, the poor just trying to survive, and tireless organizers pushing for civil rights and gender equality, whose efforts would expand in the 1960s.^[2] Though an anthology with the works of many historians, Meyerowitz’s text argues that women had more agency and more diverse experiences and ideologies than the historiography acknowledged; it “aims…to subvert the persistent stereotype of domestic, quiescent, suburban womanhood.”^[3] She further demonstrates that the postwar literature and “public discourse on women was more complex than portrayed” in works such as Betty Friedan’s famous The Feminine Mystique, which positioned women as well-trapped in the home, thanks to inculcating cultural messaging.^[4] Yet, as we will see, magazines and other media could in fact push back against the gender ideal and show this other side of the age.^[5] Let’s look closely at three papers in the text, each revealing how women broke the mold.

Donna Penn’s “The Sexualized Woman: The Lesbian, the Prostitute, and the Containment of Female Sexuality in Postwar America” examines the lives of lesbian women of the era and the larger society’s changing reactions to their existence. For a time adorned by the stereotype of the heterosexual wife, there was considerable effort — in films, books, articles by social scientists, and so on — expended on vilifying lesbianism in a harsher manner compared to prior decades, for instance by beginning to link gay women to the pre-established categorization of prostitutes as fallen women, sexual deviants in a criminal underworld.^[6] “Many prostitutes,” one expert wrote, “are latent homosexuals insofar as they resort to sexual excesses with many men to convince themselves that they are heterosexual.”^[7] Lesbians were often prostitutes, prostitutes were often lesbians, it was asserted — and prostitutes, as everyone knew, were of the wicked underbelly of society.^[8] This was different from the dominant prewar image of lesbians as refined middle-class women with lifelong female partners, otherwise respectable.^[9] Though some lesbians took assumptions of sexual depravity to heart, struggling with sexual identity under restrictive social norms and pressures, others pushed back against demonization.^[10] Defiant appearances in public, building community at lesbian bars, writing lesbian pulp fiction and articles, and more signaled a right to exist and to live true to the self.^[11] More intimately, a culture of “sexual ceremony and dialogue” developed that gave lesbians a coded language to express interest beyond the repressive gaze of the larger society, and which also subtlety subverted gender norms when butch women, who mirrored the man in heterosexual relationships, made giving pleasure, rather than receiving it, their “foremost objective.”^[12]

In “The ‘Other’ Fifties: Beats and Bad Girls,” Wini Breines shows the extent to which women and girls sought to escape from their dull, prescriptive futures as homemakers. Rather than happy in their place, as the standard image of the postwar era suggests, some dreaded “a life where nothing ever happened. I looked around me and saw women ironing dresses and hanging out clothes and shopping for food and playing mah-jong on hot summer afternoons, and I knew I couldn’t bear to spend my life that way, day after drab day, with nothing ever happening. The world of women seemed to me like a huge, airless prison…”^[13] So, like boys and men, girls and women became or imitated Beats, the free-spirited artists, writers, and musicians of New York City who rebelled against mainstream society, its conservatism, materialism, religiosity, male careerism, and so forth.^[14] Women and teens enjoyed rock and roll, jazz, sex, intellectual discourse, racial integration and black culture, bad boys, drugs, artistic creativity, Buddhism, and other experiences that they described as “Real Life,” an existence “dramatic, unpredictable, possibly dangerous. Therefore real, infinitely more worth having.”^[15] Not only did these exciting countercultural lives undermine the happy housewife trope, they contradicted the hegemonic ideal of girlhood — properly behaved, virginal, neatly dressed and done up, hanging out “around the malt shop” — found in magazines, novels, films, and other cultural outlets.^[16] Rebellious females also contradicted the notion, pushed by social commentators, that problem children of this generation were exclusively boys, who, unlike girls, were expected to make something of themselves, but were failing to do so after falling into delinquency, hipsterism, doping, and the rest.^[17] Although the stories of female Beatniks would not be well-captured until memoirs printed in the 1970s, the 1950s saw films like The Wild One and Rebel Without a Cause, which displayed girls’ interest in troublemakers and bad boys.^[18]

Finally, there’s Deborah Gerson’s “Is Family Devotion Now Subversive? Familialism Against McCarthyism,” wherein the mainstream construction of American womanhood is shattered by women running their households without their husbands, organizing, and speaking up for Communism and free speech. When the Smith Act of 1940 eventually sent leaders of the Communist Party to prison or into hiding over their political and revolutionary beliefs, their wives formed the Families Committee of Smith Act Victims, which gave “financial, material, and emotional assistance” to each other, their children, and the prisoners.^[19] Fundraising allowed for childcare, trips to visit fathers behind bars, birthday presents, and more.^[20] But the Families Committee also existed to fight anticommunist policies and practices.^[21] It denounced the imprisonment of Reds and the FBI’s continued harassment and surveillance of the wives and children.^[22] In a sense, the Smith Act blew up the postwar ideal, creating single mothers who had to enter the workforce, become heads of households, and return to the world of organizing they had known as young Communist women.^[23] The Families Committee seized the opportunity to publicly turn American ideology on its head, through pamphlets, articles, and letters.^[24] To be a true American, a good mother, a healthy family in the 1950s was to be anticommunist — patriotic, loyal, conformist.^[25] But the U.S. government was, in its persecution of dissenters, attacking families and ignoring stated American values.^[26] “No home is safe, no family life secure, as long as our loved ones are persecuted and imprisoned for exercising their constitutional right to speak out for their political ideas,” the women wrote in one pamphlet.^[27] It was the Communists, in other words, who were fighting for secure, whole families, and the First Amendment. (Language that centered families, one should note, was a new tack for the Communist Party, which long focused on how power impacted workers; and the Committee itself represented a greater leadership role for women in the CP.^[28]) The all-female Families Committee continued its support network and its campaign of familial rhetoric until the late 1950s, when the Supreme Court ruled imprisonment over beliefs, even revolutionary ones as long as no specific plans for violence are made, to be unconstitutional, and Communist leaders were freed or returned from hiding.^[29]

Overall, while Not June Cleaver reveals women’s diverse identities, perspectives, and activities, Meyerowitz of course does not deny the conservatism of the era, nor the domestic ideal.^[30] But the work makes the case that dominant ways of living and meanings of womanhood (there were of course many white, middle-class, suburban housewives) were not as dominant as the historiography suggested. There were rebels and countercultures enough to toss out myths of homogeneity. There was sufficient diversity of postwar literature to question notions of textual ideological hegemony. We mentioned lesbian pulp fiction, blockbuster films with rebellious male and female teens, and articles by and about Communist women in newspapers. Meyerowitz, in her study of nearly 500 magazine articles from Reader’s Digest, Atlantic Monthly, Ebony, Ladies’ Home Journal, and more, found that “domestic ideals coexisted in ongoing tension with an ethos of individual achievement that celebrated nondomestic activity.”^[31] “All of the magazines sampled advocated both” housewifery, motherhood, and other stereotypical experiences and women’s advancement beyond them.^[32] Indeed, 99 articles “spotlighted women with unusual talents, jobs, or careers,” such as in politics or journalism.^[33] Another 87 articles “focused on prominent entertainers.”^[34] Compared to magazines of the 1930s and 40s, there was in fact less focus on the domestic sphere.^[35] But glorification persisted of the woman — sometimes the career woman — who was a “good cook” and “never a lazy housewife,” who was beautiful, married, motherly, soft-spoken.^[36] The postwar era, then, was less a regression for women who found new opportunities and independence during World War II (the ranks of working women actually grew after the troops came home^[37]), less a time of a universal gender ideology and a concretized women’s place, and more a clash of recent progress, new ideas, and different experiences against the larger, traditionalist society.

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^[1] Joanne Meyerowitz, ed., Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 1-3.

^[2] Ibid., 3-11.

^[3] Ibid., 1-2, 4, 11.

^[4] Ibid., 2-3.

^[5] Ibid., 229-252.

^[6] Ibid., 358-372.

^[7] Ibid., 370.

^[8] Ibid, 370-371.

^[9] Ibid., 369.

^[10] Ibid., 372-378.

^[11] Ibid., 375-378.

^[12] Ibid., 374-376.

^[13] Ibid., 389.

^[14] Ibid., 382-402.

^[15] Ibid, 391-392.

^[16] Ibid., 385-386.

^[17] Ibid., 382-383.

^[18] Ibid., 396, 398.

^[19] Ibid., 151.

^[20] Ibid.

^[21] Ibid., 157, 160.

^[22] Ibid., 152, 157-158, 165.

^[23] Ibid., 162, 155-156.

^[24] Ibid., 164-168.

^[25] Ibid., 152.

^[26] Ibid., 152, 165.

^[27] Ibid., 165.

^[28] Ibid., 166, 170-171.

^[29] Ibid., 165.

^[30] Ibid., 4, 9.

^[31] Ibid., 231-232.

^[32] Ibid., 231.

^[33] Ibid., 232-233.

^[34] Ibid., 232.

^[35] Ibid., 249.

^[36] Ibid., 233.

^[37] Ibid., 4.

In Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign, English scholars Katherine H. Adams and Michael L. Keene seek to lift American suffragist Alice Paul into history’s pantheon of nonviolent theorists and leaders, alongside Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and others.^[1] One might posit, particularly after the first few pages of the introduction, that the authors intend to elevate Paul into her proper place as a major figure in the fight for women’s right to vote, alongside Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, Carrie Chapman Catt, and Anna Howard Shaw, having been long ignored and unknown.^[2] The work does this, certainly, but is not the first to do so. Adams and Keene make clear that prior works of the 1980s and 1990s at least partially accomplished this, and clarify what makes their 2008 text different: “It is time for a thorough consideration of her campaign theory and practice.”^[3] They see a “blank space” in the history of Paul, the need for an examination of “her reliance on nonviolence” and “her use of visual rhetoric,” the foundations of her theory and practice, respectively.^[4] Of course, a “consideration” is not a thesis, and the reader is left to ascertain one without explicit aid. After the parenthetical citations, this is the first clue, for those who did not examine the cover biographies, that the authors are not of the field of history. Fortunately, it grows increasingly clear that Adams and Keene are arguing Paul was one of world history’s great nonviolent theorists and activists, not simply that she was one of America’s great suffragists, seconding prior works.

The introduction, after the comments on the text’s purpose, notes that Paul “established the first successful nonviolent campaign for social reform in the United States, experimenting with the same techniques that Gandhi employed in South Africa and India.”^[5] This is the first mark of her full significance. The book concludes with the reiteration that she “created the first successful nonviolent campaign for social change in the United States. Like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, she used every possibility of a nonviolent rhetoric to bring both a greater sense of self and civil rights to a disenfranchised group.”^[6] In between, especially in the second chapter, on Paul’s theory, “like Gandhi” is used repeatedly. For instance, it or something analogous is employed on pages 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, and 41. “Like Gandhi, [Paul] would not alter her course to placate unhappy adherents.”^[7] (The parallel thinking and work is outlined, but the authors do not actually cite evidence concerning what influence Gandhi, leading passive resistance in South Africa until 1914 and in India after that, had on Paul, or vice versa, despite teasing that the two may have met in 1909.^[8]) Not being Paul’s contemporary, King receives less attention. But by the end of the chapter and the book, the message is received: Paul’s name, her ideology and campaign, should be spoken in the same breath as other historical icons of nonviolent mass movements. There are few similar glowing comparisons to, say, Stanton or Anthony, further suggesting the authors’ primary intent.

The text is organized largely chronologically. The first chapter concerns Paul’s youth, education, and activism in England, while the second chapter, exploring Paul’s theory of nonviolence, is the most thematic. Then chapters three through nine focus on the different activities of the American campaign for women’s right to vote (“The Political Boycott,” “Picketing Wilson,” “Hunger Strikes and Jail”), following its escalation over time (1912-1920).^[9] Of course, some of the activities span the decade — chapter three examines the Suffragist paper and its appeals, an ongoing effort rather than strictly an early one.

Adam and Keene use letters, newspapers, photographs, pamphlets, books, and other primary documents of the era to illuminate Paul’s campaign of powerful visuals, persistent presence, and bold acts of protest, as well as her commitment to peaceful resistance and disruption. The Suffragist publication is the most cited source, and Paul’s personal letters are oft-used as well.^[10] At times, the authors also cite a plethora of secondary sources, perhaps more than average for historical texts — possibly another subtly different tack of the English academics. Five secondary sources are used on pages 28 and 29 alone, for instance. This is during an exploration of the goals, tactics, and philosophy of nonviolent action, and the effect is twofold. While it fleshes out the conclusions people like Paul, Gandhi, and King reached, it pulls the reader out of the historical moment. An example:

As Paul’s clashes with Wilson and the legislature escalated, she was keeping her movement in the public eye, but she also risked alienating those with the power to pass the bill. Increasingly strong nonviolent rhetoric could have the wrong effect, as William R. Miller notes: if campaigners “embarrass the opponent and throw him off balance,” they could “antagonize the opponent and destroy rather than build rapport.”^[11]

The best works of history often use secondary sources, but this repeated structure, Paul’s strategies approved or critiqued by more modern texts on movement theory, begins to feel a bit ahistorical. It is looking at Paul through the judging lens of, in this case, Miller’s 1964 Nonviolence: A Christian Interpretation. It would have been better for Adams and Keene to use, if possible, Paul’s own writings and other primary sources to capture this idea of the cost-benefits of confronting power. Then secondary sources could be used to note that those in later decades increasingly came to accept what Paul and others had determined or theorized. Perhaps the authors were summarizing and validating that which they did not see summarized and validated in the 1910s, but this is done often enough that one suspects they were stuck in a mindset of working backward.

Nonetheless, the work’s sources powerfully accomplish its purpose, the elevation of Alice Paul. This exploration of her ideological foundations, her theory of passive resistance to change perceptions (and self-perceptions) of women, and her steadfast strength and leadership through a dangerous campaign secure her “place in history.”^[12] Adams and Keene demonstrate how Paul’s Quaker background and reading of Thoreau and Tolstoy molded a devotion to nonviolent direct action and “witnessing,” or serving as an example for others.^[13] And they show how closely practice — strategies and tactics — followed theory, a key to placing Paul alongside Gandhi and King. Under her direction, visual rhetoric was used to witness and make persuasive appeals, growing from “moderate to extreme forms of conventional action and then from moderate to extreme forms of nonviolent action,” all widely publicized for maximum impact.^[14] It began with articles, cartoons, and photographs in publications like the Suffragist, as well as speeches and gatherings, to artful parades, coast-to-coast journeys, and lobbying, and then escalated to a boycott of Democrats for opposing women’s rights, a picket of the White House, and a badgering of President Wilson wherever he went. Upon arrest over picketing, the suffragists engaged in work and hunger strikes (Paul was force-fed). After release from prison, they burned Wilson, and his words, in effigy.^[15] Rejecting the more violent methods of England’s suffragettes, Paul and the American activists were nevertheless abused by police, crowds, and prison overseers.^[16] Fierce opposition stemmed from reactionary ideologies of womanhood (neither the vote nor direct action was thought the purview of proper ladies), nationalism (such strong denouncements of Wilson and pickets during World War I were deemed unpatriotic and offensive),^[17] and likely power (victory could lead to domino effects — the fall of other repressive laws against women, as well as attempts by other subjugated groups to rise up). As Paul had envisioned, their struggle demonstrated to themselves and all Americans women’s strength and power, making it increasingly difficult to argue against suffrage over notions of women’s dependency and weakness.^[18] Adams and Keene’s primary sources thoroughly depict all of these developments. For instance, an article in the Washington Star in early 1917, while suffragists tried not to freeze during their daily protest in the capital, demonstrated how direct action informed views on women: “Feminine superiority is again demonstrated. The President of the United States took cold during a few hours’ exposure to conditions the White House pickets had weathered for weeks.”^[19]

Overall, Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign is an excellent text for general readers. Due to its oddities, it may not be the best example of historical writing for undergraduate and graduate students — though that is not to say the story of Paul and the more militant American suffragists can be passed over. Adams and Keene’s thesis, though somewhat unconventional, is compelling and urgent. Alice Paul’s name must no longer be met with blank stares by the average American, but, like the name Gandhi or King, with recognition and respect for her many accomplishments.

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^[1] Katherine H. Adams and Michael L. Keene, Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), xv-xvi. 

^[2] Ibid., xi-xv.

^[3] Ibid., xv-xvi.

^[4] Ibid., xvi.

^[5] Ibid., xvi.

^[6] Ibid., 247.

^[7] Ibid., 35.

^[8] Ibid., 26.

^[9] For a summary of the campaign, see ibid., xiv or 40.

^[10] Ibid., Works Cited and 258.

^[11] Ibid., 39.

^[12] Ibid., 247.

^[13] Ibid., 21-25.

^[14] Ibid., 40.

^[15] Ibid., xiv, xvi, 40, 246.

^[16] Ibid., 201-204, for example.

^[17] Ibid., 92-94, 126-127, 165-166, 167-172, 216.

^[18] Ibid., xvi.

^[19] Ibid., 166.

Deborah Gray White’s 1985 text Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South seeks to demonstrate that black womanhood — its meaning and function — in antebellum America differed substantially from white womanhood.^[1] It is not only that the roles of black female slaves contrasted in many ways with those of white women, it is also the case, the Rutgers historian argues, that white society’s view of women’s nature shifted in dramatic ways when it came to black women, driven by racism and the realities of slavery.^[2] Likewise, the slave experience meant black women (and men) had different perceptions of women’s nature and place.^[3] If this sounds obvious, it is only due to the scholarship of White and those who followed. The relevant historiography in the mid-1980s was incomplete and, White argues, incorrect. “African-American women were close to invisible in historical writing,” and it was assumed that black women’s roles and womanhood mirrored those of white women.^[4] Indeed, historians were inappropriately “imposing the Victorian model of domesticity and maternity on the pattern of black female slave life.”^[5] Because white women were “submissive” and “subordinate” in white society, it was presumed that “men played the dominant role in slave society” as well.^[6] Thus, female slaves recieved little attention, and beliefs that they did not assert themselves, resist slavery, do heavy (traditionally masculine) labor, and so on persisted.^[7] Ar’n’t I a Woman? offers a more comprehensive examination of enslaved black women’s daily realities, sharpening the contrast with white women’s, and explores how these differences altered ideologies of womanhood.

White primarily uses interviews of elderly female ex-slaves conducted in the 1930s, part of the Federal Writers’ Project under the Works Projects Administration.^[8] Enslaved and formerly enslaved women left behind precious few writings.^[9] Anthropological comparison and writings about American female slaves from the era — plantation records, articles, pamphlets, diaries, slave narratives, letters, and so on — supplement the WPA interviews.^[10] Organized thematically, the first chapter centers the white ideology of black women’s nature, while the remaining five chapters emphasize the realities of slavery for black females and their own self-perceptions, though there is of course crossover.

Given White’s documentation, it is interesting that historians and the American South perceived black women in such disparate ways. Historians put them in their “proper ‘feminine’ place” alongside Victorian white women.^[11] They were imagined to fit that mold of roles and expectations — to be respectably prudish, for example.^[12] But whites, in their expectations, positioned enslaved black women as far from white womanhood as possible. This is one part of the text where the primary sources powerfully support White’s claims. For Southerners and Europeans before them, black women had a different nature, being far more lustful than white women. The semi-nudity of African women and, later, enslaved women in the South, was one factor that led whites to view black women as more promiscuous, with the fact that whites determined slave conditions seemingly unnoticed.^[13] To whites, the “hot constitution’d Ladies” of Africa were “continually contriving stratagems [for] how to gain a lover,” while slaves were “negro wenches” of “lewd and lascivious” character, not a one “chaste.”^[14] Black women were “sensual” and “shameless.”^[15] White women, on the other hand, were covered, respectable, chaste, prudish.^[16] This was true womanhood; black women stood outside it. True, there existed a long history in Europe and America of women in general being viewed as more licentious than men, but White makes a compelling case that black women were placed in an extreme category.^[17] They were not expected to be prudish or in other ways fit the Victorian model of womanhood, because they were seen more as beasts than women.^[18] Racism wrought a different kind of sexism.^[19]

Of course, Ar’n’t I a Woman? is about realities as much as it is expectations. The work argues that enslaved girls believed in their equality with boys, as opposed to the inferiority and weakness taught and held true by whites, that the slave community practiced something far closer to gender equality, and that “women in their role as mothers were the central figures in the nuclear slave family.”^[20] What it meant to be a woman was quite different for enslaved black women — a woman was physically strong, the family head, an agent of resistance and decision, worthy of equality. “In slavery and in freedom,” White concludes, “we practiced an alternative style of womanhood.”^[21] Some of this appears interpretive, however. “Most slave girls grew up believing that boys and girls were equal” is a conclusion based on oral and documentary evidence that slave children engaged in the precise same work and play, without categorization of masculine and feminine spheres.^[22] But White does not quote former slaves or writings of the era explicitly asserting this belief. And the conclusion is far more confident than the prior “young girls probably grew up minimizing the difference between the sexes…”^[23] While White’s interpretation is not unreasonable, more primary evidence is needed before shifting from supposition to assertion.

Overall, however, this is a vital text. It convincingly demonstrates how black womanhood was viewed differently by black women and white Southerners alike compared to white womanhood. Intersections of race and gender — how sexism was different for black women due to their race, and how racism against them was impacted by their sex — are well-explained and examined.^[24] Showing the interplay between these beliefs and enslaved women’s roles, White makes a course correction for the field, which had entertained various myths. Equally important, she offers an intimate view of the terrors, drudgery, resistance, support systems, families, and much else experienced by black female slaves, which had been sorely lacking in the historiography. Short in length yet broad in scope, the work is highly readable for a general audience, and experiencing it is a powerful education.

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^[1] Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999), 22.

^[2] Ibid., 5-6, 14.

^[3] Ibid., 14, 141.

^[4] Ibid., 3, 21-22.

^[5] Ibid., 21.

^[6] Ibid.

^[7] Ibid.

^[8] Ibid., 24.

^[9] Ibid., 22-24.

^[10] Ibid., 23-24.

^[11] Ibid., 22.

^[12] Ibid.

^[13] Ibid., 29-33.

^[14] Ibid., 29-31.

^[15] Ibid., 33.

^[16] Ibid., 31, 22.

^[17] Ibid., 27 and Carol F. Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998), xiii-xiv. See chapter 5, especially pages 153-162, as well.

^[18] White, Woman?, 31.

^[19] Ibid., 5-6.

^[20] Ibid., 118, 120, 142.

^[21] Ibid., 190.

^[22] Ibid., 118, 92-94.

^[23] Ibid., 94.

^[24] Ibid., 5-6.

Historian Mary Beth Norton, in her 1980 text Liberty’s Daughters, argues that the American Revolution changed colonial women’s self-perceptions, activities, and familial relationships.^[1] The tumultuous years of 1775 to 1783, and the decade or so that preceded them, reformed the private lives and identities of literate, middle- and upper-class white women in particular, those in the best position to leave behind writings chronicling their thoughts and lives — though Norton stresses that the war touched most all women, making it safe to assume its effects did as well to some degree.^[2] Early and mid-eighteenth century women generally existed within a “small circle of domestic concerns,” believing, alongside men, in strictly defined permissible feminine behavior, proper roles for women, and their own inferiority and limited capabilities.^[3] Politics, for instance, was “outside the feminine sphere.”^[4] But in the 1760s and early 1770s, Norton posits, the extreme political climate in the colonies, the tensions and clashes with the British government and army, began to shake up the gender order and create new possibilities. Women began writing in their journals of the major events of the day, avidly reading newspapers, debating politics as men did, participating in boycotts and marches, and even seizing merchant goods.^[5] They published articles and formed relief efforts and women’s organizations.^[6] The Revolution, in other words, was women’s entry into public life and activism, with no more apologies or timidity when pushing into the male sphere of policy, law, and action.^[7]

The war also changed women’s labor. Some worked with the colonial army as cooks, nurses, and laundresses, often because they needed stable income with husbands away.^[8] More still took over the domestic leadership and roles of their absent husbands, managing farms and finances alike, and would later no longer be told they had not the sense or skills for it.^[9] Political debate, revolutionary action, and household leadership with business acumen profoundly shifted women’s views of themselves. “Feminine weakness, delicacy, and incapacity” were questioned.^[10] Equal female intelligence was affirmed.^[11] Some women even applied the language of liberty, representation, and equality to critiques of women’s subservience.^[12] While still constrained in countless ways, by the end of the century, these new ways of thinking had opened even more opportunities for women. More independent, they insisted they would choose their own husbands, delay marriage, or not marry at all; more confident in their abilities, they pushed for girls’ education and broke into the male field of teaching; and so on.^[13]

Norton’s engaging text is organized thematically, with a tinge of the chronological. It charts the “constant patterns of women’s lives” in the first half, what stayed the same for American women from before the Revolution to after, and the “changing patterns” in the second, how their lives differed.^[14] Norton describes this as “rather complex,” stemming from various modes of thought on many issues changing or remaining static at different times — they did not “fit a neat chronological framework.”^[15] The result for the reader is mixed. On the one hand, the layout does allow Norton to demonstrate how women viewed themselves and society before the war, then chart ideological growth and offer causal explanations. This is helpful to the thesis. On the other hand, the first half contains a wealth of historical information that is, essentially, only tangential to the thesis. For if the text presents what did not change, as interesting and valuable as that is, this has little to do with the argument that the American Revolution altered women’s lives. For example, Norton explores views on infants, nursing, and weaning in the first half of the work.^[16] As these were “constant” beliefs in this era, not impacted by dramatic events, they are not much explored in the second half. Thus, the reader may correctly consider much information to be irrelevant to the main argument. Of course, it is clear that Norton did not set out only to correct the historiography that concluded “the Revolution had little effect upon women” or ignored the question entirely; she also saw that a wide range of assumptions about eighteenth-century American women were wrong, which to correct would take her far beyond the scope of Revolution-wrought effects.^[17] Inclusion of this secondary argument and its extra details makes Liberty’s Daughters a richer and even more significant historical work, but gears it toward history undergraduates, graduates, and professionals. A general audience text might have been slimmer with a fully chronological structure, focusing on select beliefs in the first half (pre-Revolution) that change in the second (political upheaval and war).

Norton uses letters, journal entries, newspaper articles, and other papers — primarily the writings of women — from hundreds of colonial families to build her case.^[18] She presents documents from before, during, and after the war, allowing fascinating comparisons concerning women’s ways of thinking, activities, and demands from society. A potential weakness of the historical evidence — there are few — mirrors a point the historian makes in her first few pages. Literacy and its relation to class and race have already been mentioned, constituting a “serious drawback”: the sample is not “representative.”^[19] Similarly, are there enough suggestions of new ways of thinking in these hundreds of documents to confidently make assertions of broad ideological change? In some cases yes, in others perhaps not. For example, Norton cites women’s views on their “natural” traits. Before the Revolution, “when women remarked upon the characteristics they presumably shared with others of their sex, they did so apologetically.”^[20] One trait was curiosity. Norton provides just a single example of a woman, Abigail Adams, who felt compelled to “‘excuse’ the ‘curiosity…natural to me…’”^[21] The question of curiosity then returns in the second half of the text, after the war has changed self-perceptions. Norton finds that women had abandoned the apologies and begun pushing back against male criticism of their nature by pointing out that men had such a nature as well, or by noting the benefits of derided traits.^[22] Here the author offers two examples. “The sons of Adam,” Debby Norris wrote in 1778, “have full as much curiosity in their composition…”^[23] Judith Sargent Murray, in 1794, declared that curiosity was the cure for ignorance, worthy of praise not scorn.^[24] Clearly, one “before” and two “after” citations are not an adequate sample size and cannot be said to be representative of women’s views of curiosity. It is often only when one looks beyond the specific to the general that Norton’s evidence becomes satisfactory. Curiosity is considered alongside delicacy, vanity, helplessness, stupidity, and much else, and the mass accumulation of evidence of beliefs across topics and time convincingly suggests women’s views of their traits, abilities, and deserved treatment were changing.^[25] One might say with more caution that connotations concerning curiosity shifted, but with greater confidence that women’s perceptions of their nature transformed to some degree.

Overall, Norton’s work is an important contribution to the field of American women’s history, correcting erroneous assumptions about women of the later eighteenth century, showing the war’s effects upon them, and offering sources some historians thought did not exist.^[26] While one must be cautious of representation and sample size, in more than one sense, and while the thesis could have been strengthened with data tabulation (x number of letters in early decades mentioned politics, y number in later decades, z percentage contained apologies for entering the male sphere of concern, etc.), Norton provides a thorough examination and convincing argument based on a sufficient body of evidence. Few students will forget the new language found in primary documents after the outbreak of war, a metamorphosis from the commitment “not to approach the verge of any thing so far beyond the line of my sex [politics]” to “We are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.”^[27]

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^[1] Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800 (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1996), xix, 298.

^[2] Ibid., xviii-xx.

^[3] Ibid, chapter 1, xviii. 

^[4] Ibid., 170.

^[5] Ibid., 155-157.

^[6] Ibid., 178.

^[7] Ibid., 156.

^[8] Ibid., 212-213.

^[9] Ibid., chapter 7, 222-224.

^[10] Ibid., 228.

^[11] Ibid., chapter 9.

^[12] Ibid., 225-227, 242.

^[13] Ibid., 295, chapter 8, chapter 9.

^[14] Ibid., vii, xx.

^[15] Ibid., xx. 

^[16] Ibid., 85-92.

^[17] Ibid., xviii-xix.

^[18] Ibid., xvii.

^[19] Ibid., xix.

^[20] Ibid., 114.

^[21] Ibid.

^[22] Ibid., 239.

^[23] Ibid.

^[24] Ibid.

^[25] Ibid., chapters 4 and 8 in comparison, and parts I and II in comparison.

^[26] Ibid., xvii-xix.

^[27] Ibid., 122, 226.