Browse Exhibits (1 total)

When people think about the role women played in the American Revoltion they tend to think of them as nurses, deputy husbands, and campfollowers. Therefore, there is little attention payed to the poltical views or actions taken by the women of this time period. As a society we largely associate political action with voting, running for office, campaigning, and organizing political movements. Women in the late eighteenth century were not able to do many of these things, largely because of the coverture law, which denied married women a civic identity independent of her husband. The result of this was that married women could not own property or sign contracts. Paired with their lack of voting rights women lacked virtually every path to formal political action. However, that does not mean that they were uninvolved with the poltics of the time, or that they were not politically active. On the contrary, they participated in a varity of non-traditon political activities and were vital the war effort on both a domestc and national level.