1. As American as Motherhood and Apple Pie
The Founding Mothers
Kevin P. Dincher

2. Remember the Ladies

3. “… I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors.”
Abigail Adams

4. Ancient World
Middle Ages ( )
Reform Period (1500s)
Personhood and Identity
Relationship to a man (father or husband)
Status
No natural political/civil role
Inferior human being; weak (dangerous)
Property ethic (Not exactly a slave; extension of father/husband)
Property ethic (softening)
Marriage
Contract between 2 men
Norm: Polygamy Transfer of property
Economic relationship; valued as an asset or resource
Consent of woman not really considered?
Not a civil or religious institution
Norm: Monogamy
Transfer of property
Some degree of consent by woman
Minimal religious significance or involvement; no civil involvement
Civil/religious institutionalization

5. Industrial Revolution (1750-1850)
Enlightenment
( )
Industrial Revolution ( )
American Revolutionary Era ( )
Something New
Importance of the Individual
Natural Rights
Liberty
Fulfillment of the individual
Wealth redefined
Capital and production rather than property
Politicization of “women’s work”
What women do has political impact and consequences
Challenges
Women get their identity from relationship with father/husband
Women are not property
Women are not an extension of husband
Economics as primary basis for marriage
Opens the possibility of affection as primary basis for marriage
Women have no natural political role
What is that political role?

6. “… I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors.”
Abigail Adams

7. August 18, 1920 144 years after Abigail asked John to “remember the ladies”
19th Amendment to the US Constitution The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

20. Revolutionary Experience
Women?
Revolutionary Experience
Enlightenment
Tradition
Naturally inferior – weak and dangerous
Not a slave – but not a separate person
No property rights
No natural political ability/role
Natural rights
Not property, although not equal to men
Women have a political role/responsibility within the “domestic sphere.”

21. Remember the Ladies All MEN are created equal
Women, children and the landless has few rights
White European, land owners
Free holders
No OFFICIAL “Voice for Women”?
Reluctant Revolutionaries?
Too radical for the founders?
Adams: “If we give in …

22. Default Position: Coverture (Couverture)
Sir William Blackstone ( )
Commentaries on the Laws of England (1769)
Treatise on the common law of England
Pre-Revolutionary source of common law by United States courts
US Supreme Court relies on Blackstone‘ s work
Historical discussion that goes back to Revolutionary and pre-Revolutionary America
For example, the intent of the Framers of the Constitution

23. Coverture (Couverture)
Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England
The Rights of Persons
The Rights of Things
Of Private Wrongs
Of Public Wrongs
English social structure; relationship of people to one another:
King, aristocracy, commoners
Husbands and wives
Masters and servants (employers and employees)
Guardians and wards
Property rights
Torts and various methods of trial that existed at civil law
Jurisdictions of the several courts, from the lowest to the highest.
Criminal law and criminal justice system

24. Coverture (Couverture)
The husband and wife are one person in law
The “very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing”
Wife: called England’s law-French a feme-covert;
“Said to be covert-baron, or under the protection and influence of her husband, her baron, or lord; and her condition during her marriage is called her coverture.”

25. Coverture (Couverture)
“Upon this principle, of a union of person in husband and wife, depend almost all the legal rights, duties, and disabilities, that either of them acquire by the marriage.”
A man cannot grant any thing to his wife, or enter into covenant with her: for the grant would be to suppose her separate existence;
To covenant (contract) with her would be only to covenant with himself
All compacts made between husband and wife, when single are voided by the intermarriage.

26. Two Classes of Women Feme Sole Feme Covert Single Woman
Femme seule
Independent legal personality
Right own property
Right to enter into contracts in her own name
Married Woman
Femme coverte
Independent legal personality was suspended during marriage
Subsumed by that of her husband

27. Feme Covert
Woman’s independent legal personality was suspected during marriage
Subsumed by that of her husband
Married women did not have the legal capacity to
Enter a contract
Sue
Own personal property
Receive wages
Carry on a business
Manager her real property or receive rents/profits from it
Married women could not sue their husbands
Effectively gave married men immunity from prosecution for violent crimes committed against their wives.

28. Coverture (Couverture)
England
The Married Women’s Property Act of 1870
The Married Women's Property Act 1882

29. Coverture (Couverture)
United States
1809: Connecticut
Allowed a married woman to write a will
Impact on property and contracts?
Beginning in late 1830s
Married Women’s Property Acts: 3 phases
Allowed married women to own property
Allowed married women to keep their own income
Allowed married women to engage in business

30. Early Changes in Property Rights
1821 ME
Allowed to own and manage property in their own name during incapacity of spouse
1835 AR
Married women allowed to own (but not control) property in their own name MA TN

31. Early Changes in Property Rights
Panic of 1837
1839: Mississippi
Woman could own property in her own right but could not manage it or sell it without husband’s consent.
Safe from husband’s debt collector’s
Martin van Buren

32. Early Changes in Property Rights
1840: Texas
1843: Maryland
1844: Michigan
1845: New York and Pennsylvania
1846: Arkansas
: Ohio, Indiana, Iowa
1849: Tennessee
1852/1872: New Jersey
1855: Massachusetts
1860: 14/34 States
1865: 29/34 States
Civil Rights Act of 1866
Rights of African-Americans
Opponents: change the status of married women

33. Early Changes to Property Rights
1849: California Constitution
Spanish civil law rather than English common law
Community Property
1860: 14/34 States
1865: 29/34 States
Civil Rights Act of 1866
Rights of African-Americans
Opponents: change the status of married women

34. Coverture (Couverture)
1867: Illinois Supreme Court (Cole v Van Riper)
"It is simply impossible that a married woman should be able to control and enjoy her property as if she were sole, without practically leaving her at liberty to annul the marriage.“

35. Coverture (Couverture)
1869: Harriet Beecher Stowe
“The position of a married woman … is, in many respects, similar to that of the negro slave. She can make no contract and hold no property; whatever she inherits or earns becomes at the moment property of her husband… Though he acquired a fortune through her, of though she earned a fortune through her talents, he is the sole master of it, and she cannot draw a penny…. In the English common law a married woman is nothing at all. She passes out of legal existence.”

36. Coverture (Couverture)
1972
Two US court cases allowed a wife accused in criminal court to offer as a legal defense that she was obeying her husband's orders.

37. Remember the Ladies Husbands Fathers Women
Smart enough to give their wives room to act
Fathers
Enlightened enough to educate their daughters
Women
Bold enough to speak/act for themselves

38. “Smart” Husbands: Margaret Hardenbroek (c. 1635–1691)
“She-Merchant”
Circa 1635: born in the Netherlands
1659: Immigrated to New Amsterdam
: Pieter de Vries
: Frederick Philipsen

39. “Smart” Husbands: Ann Smith (1696-1763)
Publisher/Printer
1696: Born in Boston
1723: married James Franklin ( )
: New-England Courant
Silas Dogood
1727: Newport, Rhode Island
: Rhode-Island Almanack (Poor Robin)
: Colony of Rhode Island
: Rhode Island Gazette

40. “Smart” Husbands: Ann Smith (1696-1763)
Publisher/Printer
1735: James Franklin died
“Widow Franklin”
1736: General Assembly of Rhode Island
Official printer
Law records, legal forms, election ballot, currency
Controversy
: Revived Rhode-Island Almanack
1741: Began selling Poor Richard’s Almanack

41. “Smart” Husbands: Ann Smith (1696-1763)
Publisher/Printer
1748: “Ann and James Franklin”
1745: Acts and Laws of Rhode Island (500 copies)
1758: Newport Mercury
Newport Daily
“First female editor”
1762: “Franklin & Hall
Samuel Hall (son-in-law)

42. “Smart” Husbands: Ann Smith (1696-1763)
Publisher/Printer
1763: a woman whose “economy and industry … supported herself and her family, and brought up her children in a genteel manner.”
The woman who owned the press on which Benjamin Franklin learned to set type.
1986: one of the first inductees and first woman inducted into the Journalism Hall of Fame at the University of Rhode Island

43. “Smart” Husbands: Deborah Reed (1708-1774)

44. Enlightened Fathers: Eliza Lucas Pinckney (1722-1793)
Saint Peter's Episcopal Churchyard Philadelphia
Erected By The Eliza Lucas Chapter, Colonial Daughters Of The 17th Century

45. Enlightened Fathers: Eliza Lucas Pinckney (1722-1793)
1722: Born in Antigua, West Indies
Oldest of four (2 brothers and a sister)
Cabbage Tree, one family's three sugar plantations
200 slaves
All 4 children sent to England for education
1738: South Carolina
3 plantations
Chief one: Wappoo Creek outside of Charleston

46. Enlightened Fathers: Eliza Lucas Pinckney (1722-1793)
1739: War with Spain
Lieutenant Governor of Antiqua
1740: War of Austrian Succession

47. Enlightened Fathers: Eliza Lucas Pinckney (1722-1793)
Plantations: rice
Experiments
Lumber/Oak
Ginger, cotton, alfalfa, silk
Indigo
1744: successful crop
: 5,000 pounds
1748: 130,000 pounds
1776: 1/3 of total exports from SC

48. Enlightened Fathers: Eliza Lucas Pinckney (1722-1793)
1744: Marriage to Charles Pinckney
1733: attorney general of South Carolina
Speaker of the assembly in 1736, 1738 and 1740,
Chief justice South Carolina in 1752–1753
Agent for South Carolina in England in 1753–1758.

49. Enlightened Fathers: Eliza Lucas Pinckney (1722-1793)
1753 – Eliza presented the Princess of Wales with a dress made of silk produced on the Pinckney plantations.
President George Washington
Served as a pallbearer at her funeral
First woman to be inducted into the South Carolina Business Hall of Fame.

50. Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History

51. Abigail Smith Adams (1744-1818)
Born: Weymouth, MA
Parents
Rev. William Smith
Liberal Congregationalist
Elizabeth Quincy

52. Abigail Smith Adams (1744-1818)
1764
Marriage to John Adams
Third cousins
John: 29
Abigail: 20
Letters
Circuit Judge
Continental Congresses (1774 – 1789)

53. Abigail Smith Adams (1744-1818)
Abigail Adams
Adams’ farm and law practice
Scandalous!
Managed investments without John’s approval
Bond speculator
1785: “this money which I call mine”

54. Abigail Smith Adams (1744-1818)
Abigail Adams
Mercy Warren
Catherine Macaulay

55. Catherine Macaulay (1731 –1791)
Born: Catherine Sawbridge in Kent, England
atharine Graham
"a thoughtless girl till she was twenty, at which time she contracted a taste for books and knowledge by reading an odd volume of some history, which she picked up in a window of her father's house".
Letter from Macaulay to Benjamin Rush

56. Catherine Macaulay (1731 –1791)
Born:
Catherine Sawbridge
Kent, England
1760:
married George Macaulay
1778
William Graham
She was 47; he was 21

57. Catherine Macaulay (1731 –1791)
"a thoughtless girl till she was twenty, at which time she contracted a taste for books and knowledge by reading an odd volume of some history, which she picked up in a window of her father's house".
Letter from Macaulay to Benjamin Rush

58. Catherine Macaulay (1731 –1791)
The History of England from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line.
8 volumes written between 1763 and 1783
British history:
Constant struggle for virtue and liberty not yet achieved
Win back rights crushed by “Norman yoke”
Critically acclaimed, financially successful and politically influential in her own period.
Played a significant role in the formation of revolutionary ideology

59. Catherine Macaulay (1731 –1791)
Letters on Education with Observations on Religions and Metaphysical Subjects (1790)
Apparent weakness of women was due to their “mis-education”
Mary Wollstonecraft
British writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights.
A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792)

60. Revolutionary Women

61. Abigail Smith Adams (1744-1818)
Education
Regretted own lack for formal education
Women should educate themselves and be recognized for their intellectual capabilities
Liberty
Slavery was evil and threat to American democracy
Women should not be subject to laws they did not have a say in making

62. Abigail Smith Adams (1744-1818)
Abigail Adams
Mercy Warren
Catherine Macaulay

63. Mercy Otis Warren (1728–1814) Propagandist for the Revolution
Correspondence
Plays
Pamphlets
Poetry

64. Mercy Otis Warren (1728–1814) Correspondence Abigail Adams
Catherine Macaulay
Martha Washington
Hannah Winthrop
John Adams
Samuel Adams
John Hancock
Patrick Henry
Thomas Jefferson
George Washington

65. Mercy Otis Warren (1728–1814) Plays 1772: The Adulateur
Directed against MA governor, Thomas Hutchinson
Foretold the Revolution
1773: The Defeat
Anti-Hutchinson
1775: The Group
Satire re: abrogation of MA charter of rights
1776: The Blockheads
1779: The Motley Assembly

66. Mercy Otis Warren (1728–1814) Post Revolutionary Writings
1788: Observations on the New Constitution
Opposed ratification
1790: Poems, Dramatic and Miscellaneous
The Sack of Rome and The Ladies of Castille
Liberty
Social and moral values needed for the new republic
1805: History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution
Jefferson
Adams

67. Mercy Otis Warren (1728–1814) Women Advanced rights/education
“Domestic sphere”
Statue dedicated to Warren.
Erected July 4, 2001 in Barnstable, MA