Daughters of Liberty

4 Key excerpts on "Daughters of Liberty"

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  To Be Useful to the World

  Women in Revolutionary America, 1740-1790

  • Joan R. Gundersen(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • The University of North Carolina Press

    (Publisher)

  Daughters of Liberty

  The active participation of women in the revolutionary war was effectively masked by the new domestic ideology. For some young women, the war had little effect on their daily routines except to provide opportunities to meet interesting young men in uniform or to limit social life due to absent young men. However, epidemics, food shortages, mob activities, and military actions along coast and interior ensured that at some point most women faced direct interruption of their lives due to the war.1 While Americans could reconcile such effects of war with the new domestic ideology, they would have to work harder to reinterpret women’s active roles and political mobilization during the war.

  Mass political mobilization was a trademark of the protest leading to independence. Women’s roles in church, market, and family ensured their participation in this mobilization. While men could be overtly and explicitly political, women’s motives often fused politics with religion. During the boycotts of the 1760s and 1770s, women’s home production took on political significance. Women often used overtly political language, such as calling themselves “Daughters of Liberty” when participating in large, public spinning events. However, the spinning matches often began with a church service, and clergy often received the results of the spinning. Of the more than forty-six spinning events in New England between 1768 and 1770—which involved 1,644 women—ministers hosted thirty of them and attracted 94 percent of all participants. Leaders characterized the boycotts as examples of virtuous denial, a discipline of piety familiar to women. As preachers theologically interpreted the struggle against the British each Sunday, women constituted the majority of their congregations.2

  Because the leaders of American protest in the 1760s and 1770s chose economic boycotts as a major weapon, the market decisions of ordinary women and men became political acts. Protest leaders could not afford to ignore women. A woman shopkeeper selling imported goods took a political stand simply by remaining open. However, most women shopkeepers had limited economic resources and could not afford to put their source of income on hold for long. Colonists pledged support for the boycotts by signing “Association” declarations. In Boston, for example, while in both 1768 and 1769 there were eight women who signed the Association, only two had signed both years. Leaders put pressure on women merchants to sign the Associations, if they did not volunteer. Those who refused, such as Anne and Betsy Cummings of Boston, found their names published in the local papers. They had no other source of income and thought their business was too small to attract interest. Bostonians who opposed the boycott pointedly began shopping at the Cummings’ store. Their customers thus further politicized their business.3

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  American Revolution

  People and Perspectives

  • Andrew K. Frank(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  The key to any boycott’s success, however, was the women. For example, without the support and participation of women, the boycott created by the Nonimportation Act would have failed miserably. Not only did women have to refuse to purchase English goods and wares, but they also had to increase their own produc- tion of goods to meet colonial demand. Women organized themselves into groups, such as the Daughters of Liberty, which held all-day sewing events in order to fill the need for cloth and other goods created by women’s participa- tion in the boycott (Engle, 1976, xiii). Even a wealthy woman like Deborah Franklin made her family’s clothing in support of the colonies (Gundersen, 1996, 150). For the first time, women found themselves and their actions playing a role in a larger struggle. For example, the decision to purchase clothing made and imported from England rather than weaving homespun became a political choice and an issue of loyalty as well (Hoffman and Albert, 1989, 18–19). The Daughters of Liberty actively participated in the conflict against the British by organizing women to spin cloth so that the colonists could become independent of foreign-made goods. (North Wind Picture Archives) 212 A M E R I C A N R E V O LU T I O N P E R S P E C T I V E S I N A M E R I C A N S O C I A L H I S T O R Y Women often came together and signed public agreements to support the Patriot cause. For example, in Edenton, North Carolina, women wrote a manifesto and signed it, agreeing that they would not purchase imported tea. Other women made public promises to be only courted by Patriot sol- diers. This politicization of women could also turn less than friendly. Women began to operate in social circles dictated by political affiliation. Neighbors who had once been friends now shunned each other over differing political beliefs.

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  Huck’s Raft

  A History of American Childhood

  • Steven Mintz(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Belknap Press

    (Publisher)

  16

  It is not accidental that early participants in the Revolutionary cause called themselves “sons” and “daughters” of liberty. The phrase “Sons of Liberty” grew out of the debate on the Stamp Act in Parliament in 1765. Charles Townshend, speaking in support of the act, spoke contemptuously of the American colonists as being “children planted by our care, nourished up by our indulgence . . . and protected by our arms.” Isaac Barre, a member of Parliament and friend of the colonists, responded to this condescending remark with outrage, declaring that the Americans were not children but “Sons of Liberty.” Sons of Liberty chapters formed in Boston and New York early in 1765. Growing out of the Committees of Correspondence that had been established in Massachusetts, New York, and Rhode Island in 1763 and 1764 to organize public opinion and coordinate patriotic actions against Britain, the Sons of Liberty organizations sought to prevent enforcement of the Stamp Act of 1765.17

  Young people played an active role in the ferment leading up to the Revolution. Teenage apprentices engaged in many mob actions that preceded the outbreak of war. Girls demonstrated their patriotism by participating in campaigns against the importation of British goods and in the production of homespun cloth. In an entry in her diary in February 1772, Anna Green Winslow, an eleven-year-old schoolgirl in Boston, described herself as “a daughter of liberty.” “I chuse to wear as much of our own manufactory as pocible,” she added. In 1770 in Boston, more than a hundred “young ladies” signed an agreement to refrain from buying or consuming imported tea. Betsy Foote, a Connecticut farm girl, was one of many young women politicized by Parliament’s actions. She recorded that after mending, spinning, milking, and performing various other chores, she carded two pounds of wood and “felt Nationly.”18

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  Friends of Freedom

  The Rise of Social Movements in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions

  • Micah Alpaugh(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  155 Warner, Protocols, 1–2. the sons of liberty and a movement model 43 2 From Boycott Mobilization to the American Revolution American patriots increasingly believed trans-colonial collective action could reset British imperial politics on a just basis. Over the decade preceding the War of Independence, boycotting remained colonial protesters’ principal method. Burgess George Mason wrote to George Washington in early 1769 that if Americans could “confine ourselves to Linnens Wollens,” this would “distress the various Traders & Manufacturers in Great Britain” and “awaken their attention [to] procure our redress.” 1 Colonial lobbyist Dennys de Berdt similarly recommended colonists “persevere in your scheme of oeconomy with silence & steadiness until the Enemies of America feel their error and alter their Conduct.” 2 The movement against imported finery extended to luxury’s high- est reaches: at a 1770 Virginia House of Burgesses ball, the nearly one hundred women attending wore homespun gowns, displaying their “Concurrence in whatever may be the true and essential Interest of their Country.” 3 Political direct action became stylishness itself. Only a year after overturning the Stamp Act, Americans mobilized again to oppose the Townshend Acts, which Parliament passed to raise colonial cus- toms revenue on imported paper, paint, glass, lead, and tea. Encountering hardened British opposition, colonists faced a tougher campaign, necessitating more diverse methods over a longer time period than in 1765–1766. Nonimportation boycotts, connected by corresponding committees across participating colonies, organized to pressure British authorities between 1767 and 1770. Yet colonial participation remained incomplete, resulting in only partial Parliamentary repeal. Facing adversity, patriots adapted their tactics to the complex political situation at hand.

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