Colonial Women and Colonial Politics

Inspired Daughters of Liberty Support the Revolutionary Cause

Feb 3, 2008

Forbidden participation in the acceptable political arenas of their day, women of the 13 colonies created their own styles of political insurrection.

Colonial women were restrained from enjoying the same public participation in colonial politics as their male husbands, sons and brothers. However, women of the 13 colonies invented their own forms of political/economic dissent.

Colonial Women and Political Rebellion

Tea was the non-alcoholic beverage of the day. Colonial women not only boycotted English tea, they concocted an American brand brewed from native flowers and herbs called, Liberty Tea.

Funeral clothing and other fancy silks and materials imported from England were boycotted as the sphere of targeted merchandize expanded. To replace the boycotted articles of clothing, colonial women engaged in daylong spinning wheel parties. They spun their own wool yarns later woven into cloth, called, homespun. Colonial families wore the clothes of insurrection, literally!

Since colonial women often bought the necessities for the home and hearth, they happily boycotted any merchant selling imported English wares. So forceful were they in their boycotting only the foolhardy merchants dared to refrain from signing boycott agreements.

Public ostracism as well as the threat of tar and feathering, which the women happily engaged in, were the punishments for stocking/selling English wares. Public ostracism included flyers, such as: It is desired that the Sons and Daughters of Liberty refuse to buy from William Jackson, were distributed.

When colonial men traveled for political reasons, their wives and daughters not only ran the households/raised the families, but they also executed the affairs of family businesses in their husbands' absences. The wife of Benjamin Franklin, Deborah Read Franklin, managed his print shop and general store for years on end while he was in Europe.

Writing poetry in the community papers was another outlet for the colonial woman. An example, from The Massachusetts Spy:

English newspapers ridiculed American women in grotesque cartoons. They were drawn in ugly caricature. Yet, their Sons of Liberty counterparts supported them:

Never-the-less, from dawn to long hours after dusk, colonial women strained to rear their families, maintain their homes and nurture an emerging nation. If truly, necessity is the mother of invention, the women of the 13 colonies defined and refined it. Their creative deeds of insurrection distinguished them as the superwomen of their times.

Cokie Roberts, Founding Mothers (Harper Collins Publisher, Inc. 2004) pgs. 24-45.

The copyright of the article Colonial Women and Colonial Politics in Colonial America is owned by Jeannie Delahunt. Permission to republish Colonial Women and Colonial Politics in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.