Women During The American Revolution

During the years leading up to the American Revolution and prior to it women assumed many different roles and legal statuses regarding their citizenship, rights, and expectations. Many of these expectations varied not only by the time but was governed by state law. This meant that many of the rights that women had were varied from place to place and left up to the individual state to decide. Different states had different religious, economic, as well as social standings on the place of women.

In every state, many women's legal statuses were tied to her marital status. Unmarried women and widows were usually bestowed with more rights than married women in most cases. Given the right to live where they pleased and to support themselves in …show more content…
Until Republican Motherhood came along. During the American Revolution, the idea of Republican Motherhood changed the way women reviewed and it also change their expectations as to what they were supposed to do. Another thing that helped this way of thinking take root was the Great Enlightenment, post-revolutionary preachers and ministers mostly in Puritan heavy areas preached about the moral superiority of men and their intellectual status above women. As the Enlightenment happened they then began to reject this idea. They began to think about how the newly forming American government; the Republic, that in order for it to succeed in the world would only come about if all citizens are educated and virtuous. This meant that it became women's new role as the primary educators of children. This meant that women need to be educated in religious and moral virtue as well as civic responsibilities in order to pass on these ideologies to their children. Women were expected to instill the ideas of independence, liberty, freedom, and national pride.This would ensure the continuation of strong belief in American values. This is why some of the first American female academies came about in the 1790s. Republican Motherhood not …show more content…
Great women like Abigail Adams. Abigail Adams was the embodiment of Republican Motherhood she helped raise John Quincy Adams one of America's first presidents by showing him the values of American society and not only that but she advocated for even more rights for women in the area of education and the right to exercise the same freedoms their male counterparts could. In her letter to John Adams she wrote “ If you complain of neglect of education in sons, what shall I say with regard to daughters, who every day experience the want of it? With regard to the education of my own children, I find myself soon out of my depth, and destitute and deficient in every part of education. . . . I most sincerely wish that some more liberal plan might be laid and executed for the benefit of the rising generation, and that our new constitution may be distinguished for learning and virtue. If we mean to have heroes, statesmen and philosophers, we should have learned women. The world perhaps would laugh at me, and accuse me of vanity, but you I know have a mind too enlarged and liberal to disregard the sentiment. If much depends as is allowed upon the early education of youth and the first principles which are instilled take the deepest root, great benefit must arise from literary accomplishments in women.” She shows in her letters to her husband that she not only understood the importance of education what it could

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