Women Begin to Speak Up
After the Revolutionary War, women began to question why they weren’t being treated as political equals. A growing number of women voiced their frustrations through letters to their husbands, hoping their concerns would be taken seriously. Many argued that their contributions during the war had earned them a place in shaping the new government. Despite these efforts, most women were either dismissed outright or offered polite explanations about why granting them the right to vote would be a mistake. This response reflected the prevailing customs and traditions of the time, which defined women’s roles as domestic and subordinate to men. Women’s push for equality was consistently denied by men, including their own husbands, who relied on long-standing societal norms and gender hierarchy to maintain the male dominance in politics and government.
Abigail Adams wrote one of the most well-known letters relating to women’s suffrage at the time. She wrote to her husband asking him to “remember the ladies and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors” and not to “put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands” when creating the new governmental policy for the United States.1 She even warned her husband of the dire consequences of rebellion if the ladies are once again, kept in the dark: “If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.”2 Even with the warning of a potential rebellion against the law, Adams replied with a rather harsh letter stating, “As to your extraordinary Code of Laws, I cannot but laugh… we know better than to repeal our Masculine systems… we have only the Name of Masters, and rather than give up this, which would compleatly subject Us to the Despotism of the Peticoat.”3 Another example of women being confined to societal norms can be found in Richard Lee Henry’s letter to his sister, Hannah Corbin. In response to her inquiry about the lack of voting rights for women, Lee’s best justification was that “[women voting] has never been the practice either here or in England,” directly pointing to custom and tradition.4
The more letters you look at, the more you realize they say the same thing. Women voting was not customary and was too masculine for them to partake in. They didn’t know what they were talking about and they should leave politics to those who do. This is made even more clear when men discussed the topic behind closed doors. In 1792, John Adams wrote to William Sullivan in which he admitted women were as intelligent and as capable of making good judgments as the men. He confessed to Sullivan, “You ought to admit Women and Children: for generally Speaking, Women and Children, have as good Judgment, and as independent Minds as those Men who are wholly destitute of Property.”5 With this confession, it becomes clear that the argument against women’s intelligence was just an excuse to keep them out of their male domain and allow men to remain at the top of the gender hierarchy. Women were falsely accused of being incapable or not intelligent enough solely because the men of the time wanted them to remain present in their roles as homemakers.
Although women of the time made a strong effort to gain a right to representation after the Revolutionary War, the resistance they were met with was too strong to overcome at the time. Men, including their own husbands, refused to see women as political equals and created false narratives about them to reduce them to their traditional gender roles. Women were continuously dismissed as uneducated and unfit to vote even when men, such as John Adams, knew this wasn’t the case. Women like Abigail Adams spoke out in an attempt to gain fairness and inclusion in governmental policy. However, custom and tradition kept them confined to their domestic roles with society insisting that politics was a male domain and should remain that way.
1“Abigail Adams to John Adams, 31 March 1776,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/04-01-02-0241. [Original source: The Adams Papers, Adams Family Correspondence, vol. 1, December 1761 – May 1776, ed. Lyman H. Butterfield. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963, pp. 369–371.]
2Ibid.
3“John Adams to Abigail Adams, 14 April 1776,” Founders Online, National Archives.
4“Richard Henry Lee to Hannah Corbin, 17 March 1778,” Stratford Hall Historic Preserve, Lee Family Archives.
5‘‘Copy of an Original Letter from Mr. John Adams, to a Gentleman in Massachusetts,’’ Universal Asylum & Columbian Magazine (Philadelphia), April 1792, 219– 22.