5. Republican MotherHood

Following the American Revolution, US culture morphed and shifted. Women in this new republic found new roles and expectations as mothers: for to give power to the masses in a democracy, meant men needed to be educated, and their mothers needed to do it. The ideal of a Republican Mother emerged and the dynamic women of the colonial and revolutionary eras became a thing of the past.

Following the American Revolution, American women’s world reverted into the home where education became increasingly important to support the new republic’s youth. Women knew significantly more than their grandmothers did about the world outside their home town and domestic comforts were becoming a new priority. While at the same time, women were increasingly finding work in “suitable” professions like teaching and writing. 

In the aftermath of the Revolution, new Americans learned how to realize their rights to life, liberty, and the ability to acquire and maintain property in dramatically different ways, based on their gender, race, class, and geographic location. Women in particular  had to develop their own ways to achieve those lofty revolutionary goals as women lost their official voice in American politics for the next century. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights were written by men and did not include a single acknowledgement, privilege, or protection for women. But women, in a variety of locations and environments were successful in finding a voice. 
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We know that many families that did not support separation from England left the United States to live in a more politically and socially hospitable environment. Those who possessed considerable wealth were able to escape to  England. Others, who found their limited property confiscated and Loyalists neighbors hanged for treason, traveled to new territories to start new lives. ​

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One such family, that of Ephriam and Martha Ballard, traveled to the frontier region of Hallowell, Maine. There, Martha established herself as a midwife and healer, delivering more than 800 babies in a long career. She was a trusted member of her community who saw families through childbirth, epidemics, deaths. 

Martha’s work as a midwife allowed her to  travel throughout the region. She knew the members of every family in Hallowell and the surrounding area. She was paid for her work, sometimes in coins, and frequently in food or rum. 
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On her family’s farm, she did the same work as a man, planting and harvesting food and herbs and chopping wood. Indeed, all members of the family, including young children, contributed to the growth of the farm. It was a matter of survival. On the frontier, boundaries between men’s and women’s work hardly existed. Martha could be independent because her community needed her skills. We know about Martha’s professional career because she left a diary that was discovered decades after her death.

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Martha Washington, Mount Vernon

Further south, another woman named Martha established precedents for a woman’s  supportive role. Martha Dandrige Custis Washington, a wealthy woman from Virginia, served as the hostess of the “Republican Court,” the social circle around President George Washington. A reluctant “first lady,” Martha nevertheless presided over the social affairs of the Washington administration in the temporary capitals of Philadelphia and New York. Martha Washington came from upper class Virginia society in which enslaved people served the needs of those who held title to their bodies and their labor. Nevertheless, after George Washington’s death in 1800, Martha freed the family’s slaves as of January 1, 1801.

The role of America’s First Lady as a political confidante of the president took shape over time. Dolley Madison, wife of the country’s fourth president, abandoned her Quaker background to become a dominant force in the social scene of  the country’s new Washington, D.C.. 

During her husband’s tenure as Secretary of State, she hosted social events at the White House for Prsaident Jefferson and helped to raise funds for the Lewis and Clark expedition to the west. As First Lady, Dolley brought together Federalists and members of her husband’s Democratic-Repubican party in social situations that facilitated occasional compromise between warring political factions. ​

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The Montpelier Foundation

Public Domain

When the capital was under British attack during the War of 1812, Dolley escaped the White House, saving a prized portrait of George Washington, although some think she is given too much credit, as slaves likely saved it.
As American cities grew in the early nineteenth century, middle class women were expected to take responsibility for life at home, including raising  children and maintaining religious and moral piety. Women and girls learned to read and write en masse and became the nation’s first consumer’s of books for light reading. Professional men were expected to compete in the world of work outside the home while their wives presided over the household. Some women who sought meaningful societal change outside the home became involved in social crusades to improve the lives of others, especially poor women and their children. 

Magazines and books were designed with the female audience in mind, recommending fashion, etiquette, and lists of the “true” qualities of a woman: beautiful, unassuming, chaste, submissive, and domestic. It is ironic that many of the women writing these recommendations themselves actually spent much of their life in professions outside the home.
Inspired by the religious fervor of the Great Awakening, these women helped to found alms houses and institutions to provide aid to women whose husbands had abandoned them to alcohol. Women raised money for charity and crusaded against the evils of “demon rum.” These women were able to succeed outside the home, even as they remained firmly within the women’s sphere of action.
Middle class urban women were expected to perform “women’s work” at home while women  on the frontier could leverage agency and respect in their communities because of their skills and the need for their labor.  

Fanny Wright was an English heiress who immigrated to the United States in 1825.  She was passionate about social reform, especially abolition, and among her many accomplishments, became one of the first female American lecturers. When she began touring, crowds of people came to see her, although Collins explains, “simply to have a look at the lecturing lady. It was a phenomenon only slightly less surprising than a talking dog.”  ​​

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Public Domain

In the early 1800s the demand for public schools was incredibly high and there simply weren’t enough educated men to fill the positions. Because corporal punishment was so heavily applied in schools, educated, middle class women were looked at reluctantly to take up these posts believing that women would be unable to punish effectively. Gail Collins explained that “gender roles gave way to necessity. There simply weren’t enough men available to staff the public schools, while the pool of available educated women was huge. And the price was right. In 1838, Connecticut paid $14.50 a month to male teachers and $5.75 a month to women.”  Superintendents around the country openly bragged about the productivity of the female teachers, who worked for less than half the income of the men.

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​The qualities of the “true” women, however did not extend to enslaved women. Laws in slave states stated that children born of enslaved mothers became the property of the masters. This essentially made it legal to rape female slaves to grow slave populations and created bizzare relationships between wives of plantation owners and the enslaved women their spouse impregnated. All this was further complicated by the horrifying reality that at any moment enslaved mothers could be torn from their children in sales. 

Women of color had to work hard to establish spaces in which they could assert their right to life and liberty. Women on the plantation often did the same work as men in the fields. In the house, women who served as cooks or seamstresses could inhabit positions of respect. Women also served as leaders in the community of enslaved people as they taught survival skills to their children and helped to maintain families in spite of the ever-present threat of punishment and sale.
We know little about Sally Hemmings, who was the “property” of Thomas Jefferson, author of the “Declaration of Independence”  and the third President of the United States. Sally bore Jefferson six children, four of whom survived childhood. 

We do know that she had the opportunity at freedom while in France with Jefferson and opted to return with him to Virginia, and that through her intimate relationship with him, she was able to negotiate an easier life, even as she and her children remained enslaved people. Two of her children, Beverly and Harriert, left Monticello in the 1820s, while Madison and Eston gained their freedom in Jefferson’s will on his death in 1826 due to Hemmings negotiations. In the 1980s, a DNA analysis matched Jefferson and a descendant of Eston Hemings, proving Jefferson’s paternity beyond a doubt. 
Sally Hemmings established her identity beyond her status as the property of a president. But whether there was love in this relationship is difficult to know.

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Lewis, Clark, and Sacagawea, Wikimedia Commons

One of President Jefferson’s major accomplishments in his first term was the purchase of the Louisiana Territory from
France in 1803. With this bold move, Jefferson nearly doubled the land area of the United States. But neither Jefferson nor anyone in Washington, D. C. had an idea of who or what lay in the new territory beyond the Mississippi River. In August of 1803, Jefferson issued a proclamation giving Merriwether Lewis and William Clark the authority to lead the Corps of Discovery to explore and document their findings in the new territory. But Lewis and Clark could not succeed on their own. They needed the assistance of Sacagawea, a Lemhi Shoshone woman. 

Sacagawea had been captured by a rival tribe in her youth and forced into a marriage with a French trader who abused her. This experience however exposed her to a variety of native and European languages. At only sixteen years of age she would have likely been hopeful to serve as  a guide and translator for the Lewis and Clark Expedition navigating unfamiliar rivers and encountering villages of unfamiliar tribes, as well as reuniting with her own tribe. Although many of the interactions were peaceful, some were hostile and Sacagewea served as the chief negotiator. Chiefs would sometimes offer native women for sex to Lewis and Clark’s team to convey peaceful intentions.

When they reached the Pacific coast, she insisted on leaving the camp to do the final stretch to see the Pacific Ocean. When she and her husband died young, her child was raised by Clark. She became a symbol of friendship between the Corps of Discovery and native people.

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But  friendly interactions between natives who had lived in settled communities in the west for centuries and white explorers soon gave way to the assumption on the part of Americans that the territories beyond the Mississippi River were “empty” and ripe for “civilizing.”  The concept of “Manifest Destiny,” the idea that the conquest of new lands was part of America’s destiny, inspired a rhetoric of conquest. The visual representation of Manifest Destiny was a female figure who led white Americans west to their prosperous future. It is notable that in this famous painting no women are portrayed as moving west, when in reality, so many women did. 

When settlers moved west, bringing  farms, schools, churches, telegraph wires, and railroads, women once again found ways to establish agency in their communities. Women and men were needed to work the land, and there was less separation between work and home, men’s work and women’s work. Once again, whatever the social or class context, women found ways to assert their value in society.

By the end of this era, so much remained in question. We know about Martha Ballard’s life and career through her diary, which was discovered decades after her death. Do you think there were other Martha Ballards? What do you think their diaries would reveal about life in the new United States in the years following the Revolution? Think about the motivation of urban middle-class women to help poor people. Why do you think it was important for these women to have roles outside of their homes? Consider also the power of race in de-valuing the talents and accomplishments of enslaved women of color. How did these women fulfill roles as mothers and leaders in their communities within the horrifying limits of plantation life? To what extent does the history of American women, their herstory, needs more research to be told more completely.

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Bibliography

Bell, Karen Cook. “Black Women and American Freedom in Revolutionary America.” Black Perspectives. July 13, 2021. https://www.aaihs.org/black-women-and-american-freedom-in-revolutionary-america/. 

​Collins, Gail, America's Women: Four Hundred Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines. New York, William Morrow, 2003.

DuBois, Ellen Carol, 1947-. Through Women's Eyes : an American History with Documents. Boston :Bedford/St. Martin's, 2005.Indians Editors. “NATIVE AMERICAN WOMEN.” Indians. N.D. http://indians.org/articles/Native-american-women.html.

Frederick Cook and George S. Conover, eds, Journals of the military expedition of Major General John Sullivan against the Six Nations of Indians in 1779, 1887 (Auburn, N.Y.: Knapp, Peck, & Thomson, 1887). New-York Historical Society Library. 

NY Historical Society Editors. “Madam Sacho and Sullivan’s Army: Soldiers’ accounts of encounters with a Haudenosaunee woman who lost everything during General John Sullivan’s raids against Native communities in New York.” New York Historical Society. Women in the American Story. N.D.
https://wams.nyhistory.org/settler-colonialism-and-revolution/the-american-revolution/madam-sacho/.

Pearsall, Sarah M.S. “Recentering Indian Women in the American Revolution.” 2013. https://history.msu.edu/hst202/files/2013/04/Indian-Women-in-Revolution.pdf.

Thompson, Mary V. “Martha Washington and the American Revolution.” Mount Vernon. N.D. https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/martha-washington-and-the-american-revolution/.

Ware, Susan. American Women’s History: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Primary AUTHOR:

Jacqui Nelson

Primary Reviewer:

Dr. Barbara Tischler

Consulting Team

Editors

Kelsie Brook Eckert, Project Director
Coordinator of Social Studies Education at Plymouth State University

Dr. Barbara Tischler, Consultant
​Professor of History Hunter College and Columbia University

Dr. Alicia Guitierrez-Romine, Consultant
Assistant Professor of History at La Sierra University

Jacqui Nelson, Consultant
Teaching Lecturer of Military History at Plymouth State University

Dr. Deanna Beachley
Professor of History and Women's Studies at College of Southern Nevada

Alice Stanley

Reviewers

18th Century
Dr. Margaret Huettl
​Hannah Dutton
​Dr. John Krueckeberg

19th Century
Dr. Rebecca Noel
Michelle Stonis, MA
Annabelle L. Blevins Pifer, MA
Cony Marquez, PhD Candidate
​
​20th Century
Dr. Tanya Roth
​Dr. Jessica Frazier
Mary Bezbatchenko, MA