As with every social pattern, an exception can be found. Mercy Otis Warren was among the most famous and effective propagandists of the prewar period. She was also an active participant in the strategy sessions led by the cousins, John and Samuel, whom Loyalist governor Thomas Hutchinson disdainfully referred to as “that brace of Adamses.” Warren had access to the inner circles of Massachusetts radical politics as the favored daughter and beloved sister of the James Otises, whose reputation as “troublemakers” was transatlantic. Many a New England Loyalist’s diary or postwar memoirs held these two gentlemen entirely responsible for the Revolution. Mercy Otis’s access to radical circles was solidified when she married James Warren, for the leaders of Massachusetts’s opposition forces met in Warren’s home. Yet if gender determined her proximity to the sources of power, talent and intelligence determined her participation in their activities. Because she had a genius for satire, a flair for drama, and a willingness to use both, she became the opposition’s most effective shaper of popular opinion save perhaps for Samuel Adams. Her plays and poems filled Massachusetts newspapers in the 1770s, and were widely reprinted elsewhere. In satires such as The Defeat and The Group, she gave her colony’s growing crisis its cast of characters. The ambitious supporter of the Crown Thomas Hutchinson became Rapatio, Bashaw of Servia; General Timothy Ruggles was hounded by the sobriquet “Brigadier Hate-All”; and Crown propagandist Jonathan Sewall felt himself eternally marked as Beau Trumps. The heroes of her own cause, colonial resistance, were ennobled as Brutus or Cassius, reinforcing the theme that the opposition was acting to preserve rather than harm the British constitutional tradition.

  A white woman had to step far outside her customary roles to participate in the realm of propaganda and strategy. But she had only to step into her kitchen or parlor to be in the center of the third arena of protest: economic sanctions. As early as 1765, the colonists’ policy of nonimportation and consumer boycott of British-made goods became the most effective means to combat the Crown’s new trade policies. This strategy reflected an awareness that the role of the colonies in Britain’s mercantile economy had shifted dramatically during the eighteenth century. Where once their value to England lay in the production of raw materials, by the 1760s the colonies had grown into an important market for British manufactured goods. Shipments of everything from cloth to tea, paint, and salt, as well as reshipments of European products from British ports, were central to the economic expansion and well-being of the mother country. A blow to this commercial link was a blow certain to be felt in the halls of Parliament. As household managers and as major consumers, white women’s cooperation was vital to the success of any proposed boycott.

  In 1765 New York and Boston merchants organized the first of the nonimportation movements to protest Britain’s first direct tax on the colonists, the Stamp Act. The idea spread rapidly. Newspaper contributors called on colonists to give up all imported luxuries and finery and to embrace austerity until Parliament repealed this first direct tax on its colonies. When the Stamp Act was, indeed, repealed, colonists laid much of the credit for this change in policy to their boycott. Not surprisingly, they turned once again to nonimportation in the wake of the Townshend Acts and the much hated Tea Act. In both instances, boycott organizers made a conscious effort to elicit the cooperation of housewives and their daughters.

  The importance of women’s support for these boycotts was rarely underrated, although some leaders believed it would be difficult to arouse female patriotism or stir women to act. In 1769 Christopher Gadsden spoke frankly to his colleagues in the South Carolina assembly:

  I come now to the last, and what many say and think is the greatest difficulty of all we have to encounter, that is, to persuade our wives to give us their assistance, without which ‘tis impossible to succeed … for ’tis well known, that none in the world are better oeconomists … than ours. Only let their husbands point out the necessity of such conduct; convince them, that it is the only thing that can save them and their children, from distress, slavery, and disgrace; their affections will soon be awakened, and cooperate with their reason.

  Gadsden’s argument both complimented and insulted the women who were the indirect audience of his oratory. His assumption that women were politically ignorant and naturally indifferent to public matters ran side by side with his praise for their “notable housewifery.” Such a view was common, particularly among the genteel classes. It was widely believed that women’s political choices were, and ought to be, controlled by male relatives. This “natural” subordination based on gender was reinforced by a social subordination based on the absence of property. As every English child knew, a propertyless person could take no part in making political decisions.

  Yet Gadsden was wrong. Before he issued his appeal, women of his own elite social class had been mulling over the political events of the era in their diaries and letters for several years. Furthermore, free colonial women expressed a clear understanding that their economic decisions—what to buy, what to declare a necessity, what to eschew—had become political decisions. This political awareness was dynamic, growing stronger and more widespread over the decade between the Stamp Act and the Declaration of Independence.

  Thus, women who boycotted tea and wore dresses of homespun rather than imported cloth publicly defined these choices as political ones. When a group of Newport, Rhode Island, women substituted an herbal drink for imported tea, they declared it a matter of honor. When “upwards of 300 mistresses of Families, in which number the Ladies of highest rank and influence” signed a petition to abstain from tea drinking, they stated their motivation clearly: “to save their abused Country from ruin and Slavery,” from dangers brought on by Parliament’s “unconstitutional” attacks. These petitioners also knew how to give their tactic greater legitimacy. In the petition they linked their action to the actions of “the very respectable body of Merchants and other inhabitants” of Boston. And in Philadelphia, when Hanna Griffitts set the politics of tea drinking to verse, she established a direct relationship between housewives and the oppression of the British government.

  For the sake of Freedom’s name

  (Since British Wisdom scorns repealing)

  Come, sacrifice to Patriot fame

  And give up Tea, by way of healing

  This done, within ourselves retreat.

  The Industrious arts of life to follow

  Let proud Nabobs storm and fret

  They cannot force our lips to swallow.

  Even a nine-year-old like Susan Boudinot of Pennsylvania was capable of relishing a well-executed political gesture. When offered a cup of tea at the home of New Jersey’s Loyalist governor, William Franklin, Susan curtsied, raised the cup to her lips, and then tossed its contents out the startled Franklin’s window.

  Perhaps the most widely circulated declaration of political sentiments came from Edenton, North Carolina. Here, the newspaper carried a resolution drawn up by fifty-one local women to boycott English goods. The Edenton statement was based on a sense of civic duty and responsibility. “As we cannot be indifferent on any occasion that appears to affect the peace and happiness of our country, and as it has been thought necessary for the publick good to enter into several particular resolved,” wrote the Edenton women, “it is a duty we owe not only to our near and dear relations and connections, but to ourselves who are essentially interested in their welfare, to do everything as far as lies in our power to testify to our since adherence to the same.” The “Edenton Resolve” prompted a broad spectrum of male response, from enthusiastic acknowledgment to satiric attack. Patriot men could hardly denounce the commitment that their own orators had urged upon the “ladies.” But their Loyalist tormentors knew exactly where to aim their blows, suggesting that the colonial protest had set a sexual revolution in motion, creating aggressive women and emasculated men. Patriot ministers might continue to call on women to use their power, “to strike the Stroke, and make the Hills and Plains of America clap their hands,” but American men remained ambivalent about the consequences of this political awakening. Not every man would, as the Presbyterian preacher William Tennett III promised activist women, “rise and call you blessed.”

  Women’s response to male criticism and male approval, but especially to male “guidance,” is instructive. When male writers to the newspapers suggested that patriotic women substitute rum for tea, women fired back that they did not welcome such advice. They would replace tea as they themselves saw fit, just as they would be their own judge of what to wear in place of British finery. And although the local committee men granted an ailing Salem woman an exemption, she steadfastly refused to drink tea. Nonconsumption was, she reminded them, a matter of personal principle. Historians can find similar evidence that by the 1770s women of all ages and regions had a well-developed sense of their own political agency. Even a thirteen-year-old could speak confidently in her diary of her independent political choices. “As I am (as we say) a daughter of liberty,” she wrote in the early 1770s, “I chuse to war [wear] as much of our own manufactory as pocible.”

  The fourth arena for protest was the streets. For many centuries the crowd had been a recognized form of political expression for those without access to formal political power in English society. In England and the colonies, protests against rising food prices, onerous taxes, and infractions of popularly held moral standards were a tradition among the poor. Not surprisingly, opposition to British policy took to the streets as well. Sometimes these mass demonstrations were organized and led by elite politicians and businessmen who saw their value as propaganda and who recognized the need to mobilize broad popular support. But the sailors, dockworkers, and servants who participated in what critics called “riots” and supporters called “demonstrations” were just as often the agents of their own political acts.

  Few of these crowds were exclusively male. If women did not take an active part in acts of destruction such as the raid on Thomas Hutchinson’s Cambridge home, they did not shy away from acts of physical violence. Generally, crowd actions organized by elites conformed to genteel notions of respectability and discouraged female participation. But the more spontaneous the demonstration, the more likely the participation of women. Women joined in the tarring and feathering of local merchants who continued to import British goods, and sometimes organized their own intimidation efforts against perceived enemies of either sex. In 1775, when a Massachusetts woman expressed her politics indirectly by naming her newborn son in honor of the British commander Thomas Gage, a crowd of patriot women attacked her house, fully prepared to tar and feather both mother and child.

  Even when they did not participate directly, evidence of women’s solidarity with the demonstrators’ cause was considered critical. Women were valued as spectators or witnesses, in part because workingmen often couched their protest against British policy in terms of its devastating impact on “widows” and “fatherless” children. But the women of their class did not need to be told where their interests lay. Many felt the impact of British policy directly, especially the wives and daughters of Boston and New York dockworkers, who suffered when moonlighting British soldiers took their men’s jobs away. Thus, throughout the 1760s and early 1770s, working-class women attended ritual events such as commemorations of the Stamp Act repeal, the hanging of political enemies in effigy, and funeral marches for protesters killed by British soldiers. On the evening that British tea was dumped into the murky waters of Boston Harbor in 1774, the silent witnesses lining the wharfs and docks included several women and children.

  Women who supported the American protest did not hold a monopoly, of course, on activism or on an emerging political consciousness. Political involvement was evident among the wives and daughters of Crown officials and supporters who were often the earliest victims, if not the intended targets, of their neighbors’ protests. Indeed, attacks on their male relatives served to sharpen the political awareness of these women and to force them to follow political developments more closely than many of their neighbors. Terrifying experience was a strong impetus to political awareness for a woman like Anne Hulton, who watched her brother, Customs Commissioner Henry Hulton, flee a jeering Boston mob. By 1774, attacks on the homes of known Crown sympathizers had become common, and while the men fled to safety, their wives often found themselves facing an angry and sometimes drunken crowd.

  Women shopkeepers or merchants who supported Crown policy were directly challenged to conform with the boycott regulations or suffer the consequences. Gender was no protection for Anne and Betsy Cumming when they were accused of breaking the nonimportation agreement in 1768. When members of the local boycott committee entered her shop, Betsy defended herself firmly and directly. “I told them we have never entered into eney agreement not to import for it was verry trifling our Business,” she later explained to her aunt. She reprimanded the men for trying to “inger two industrious Girls who ware Striving in an honest way to Git their Bread.”

  And like Grace Galloway, many Loyalist women developed a sense of the price of political commitment before their Revolutionary neighbors were forced to do so. In October 1775, a Virginia woman was called before a local Committee of Safety to answer accusations that she was engaged in Loyalist activities. When she refused to cooperate with this extra-legal Revolutionary committee, they declared her “insolent, scandalous, and indecent,” judged her “an enemy of her Country,” and instructed her neighbors “to break off all kinds of intercourse and connection with her.” Thus, even before independence was declared, social isolation for some had begun.

  As the likelihood of war grew stronger, women’s activism intensified. In New England, where fighting preceded a formal declaration of war, observers on both sides remarked on women’s enthusiasm for the conflict. In early September 1774, local militias were mustered in response to a false report that Boston-based British troops planned to attack neighboring Cambridge. The women, recorded one eyewitness, “surpassed the Men for Eagerness & Spirit in the Defense of Liberty by Arms.” He marveled that “at every house Women and Children [were] making Cartridges, running Bullets, making Wallets, baking Biscuit, crying and bemoaning & at the same time animating their Husbands & Sons to fight for their liberties, tho not knowing whether they should ever see them again.” The observer’s amazement is more surprising than the behavior of these Massachusetts women. For these women knew, as did most colonial women, that the approaching war would be a home-front war. Loyalist or patriot, Indian, African, or European, American women understood that such a war allowed no civilians. Even if a family was to attempt strict neutrality, the effects of war—scarcity, inflation, danger, and dislocation—would find them.

  The women of Lexington and Concord were among the first to experience the terrible realities of war. “We were roused from the benign Slumbers of the season,” wrote Hannah Winthrop to Mercy Warren on April 19, 1775, “by beat of drum and ringing of Bell, with the dire alarm that a thousand of the Troups of George the third were gone forth to murder the peaceful inhabitants of the surrounding villages … It seemed necessary to retire to some place of safety til the calamity passed.” There proved to be few places of safety. As the battle reached the outskirts of Cambridge, Winthrop saw “the glistening instruments of death, proclaiming by an incessant fire, that much blood must be shed, that many widow’d & orphan’d ones be left.”

  Like the “crying,” “bemoaning,” and “animating” women of Cambridge, colonial women of every region moved quickly to aid in the mobilization for war. Their cooperation was vital, for the newly constituted continental government had few resources and would rely heavily in the beginning on popular contributions to equip its army. Patriot women found that several areas of household production shifted easily into wartime production. Sewing circles redirected their efforts, causing fancy embroidery on fancy linen to give way to the plain stitching necessary for soldiers’ shirts. As a result, continental soldiers, most of them farmers and laborers, could be seen parading in uniforms made of rich fabrics originally intended for Sunday suits or ladies’ gowns. Girls and their mothers took up knitting, producing stockings and gloves for the soldiers. Acting as a sort of volunteer quartermaster corps, women of all ranks mounted drives to collect basic, essential materials, asking other housewives to contribute pewter plate, candlesticks, and ordinary window weights to be melted down for cannonballs and shot. One New England woman, eager to contribute metal for bullets, melted down not only her pewter tableware and her clockweights but all the nameplates from her family’s tombstones.

  As always, the most assertive efforts by women proved disconcerting to some men. While the Philadelphia physician Dr. Benjamin Rush applauded the fund-raising efforts of his wife and her genteel friends, praising them for “at last becom[ing] principals in the glorious American controversy,” the newly appointed commander in chief, General George Washington, was less enthusiastic. Washington’s personal vision of female patriotism belonged to those who could be passive and admiring, and who could quietly suffer through the turbulence of war. When Philadelphia’s Julia Stockton Rush, Sally Bache, and Esther DeBerdt forwarded to Washington the money they had collected, he felt obligated to thank them graciously. He refused, however, to acknowledge their accompanying letter, which audaciously instructed him on the allocation of those funds.

  Soon, however, the growing shortage of essential household supplies began to absorb women’s energies. As Britain moved to cut off the colonies’ regular channels of trade, sugar began to disappear from tables, and salt, pins, molasses, and medicine vanished. The problems were exacerbated by merchants who took advantage of the situation and began to hoard their stock, hoping to charge higher prices as the scarcity increased. Women responded angrily. In East Hartford, Connecticut, twenty women marched in “martial array & excellent order” on a shop where a store of sugar was being kept. Although the owner insisted that the sugar was being held for the American Army, the protesters were unconvinced. They “requisitioned” 218 pounds of his supply. Similar stories followed from across the regions. In 1777 a Poughkeepsie, New York, merchant was rumored to be hoarding sugar. When his wife tried to avoid a confrontation by offering to sell the cache at four dollars a pound, local women were unsatisfied. Accompanied by two continental soldiers, a crowd of twenty-two women demanded entry to the merchant’s home, saying that they would have the sugar “at their own price.” Armed with a hammer and scales, they proceeded to weigh the sugar they wanted and to leave behind a far smaller sum than the anxious woman had suggested. The following year, almost a hundred women assembled with a cart and marched to the warehouse of a wealthy Boston merchant suspected of hoarding coffee. When he refused to turn over the keys to his storerooms, the women seized him by the neck and tossed him into the cart. They quickly relieved him of the keys, opened the warehouse, hoisted out the coffee, loaded it into the cart, and drove off. As Abigail Adams reported, “A large concourse of Men stood amazed silent Spectators.”

 

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