In Dependence : Women and the Patriarchal State in Revolutionary America / Jacqueline Beatty.
Beatty, Jacqueline, author.
2023
HQ1418 .B39 2023
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Title In Dependence : Women and the Patriarchal State in Revolutionary America / Jacqueline Beatty.
Author Beatty, Jacqueline, author.
ISBN 9781479812134
DOI https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479812134.001.0001
Published New York, NY : New York University Press, [2023]
Copyright ©2023
Language English
Language Note In English.
Description 1 online resource : 11 b/w illustrations
Other Standard Identifiers 10.18574/nyu/9781479812134.001.0001 doi
Call Number HQ1418 .B39 2023
Dewey Decimal Classification 305.420973/09033
Summary Examines the role of the American Revolution in the everyday lives of womenPatriarchal forces of law, finance, and social custom restricted women's rights and agency in revolutionary America. Yet women in this period exploited these confines, transforming constraints into vehicles of female empowerment. Through a close reading of thousands of legislative, judicial, and institutional pleas across seventy years of history in three urban centers, Jacqueline Beatty illustrates the ways in which women in the revolutionary era asserted their status as dependents, demanding the protections owed to them as the assumed subordinates of men. In so doing, they claimed various forms of aid and assistance, won divorce suits, and defended themselves and their female friends in the face of patriarchal assumptions about their powerlessness. Ultimately, women in the revolutionary era were able to advocate for themselves and express a relative degree of power not in spite of their dependent status, but because of it.Their varying degrees of success in using these methods, however, was contingent on their race, class, and socio-economic status, and the degree to which their language and behavior conformed to assumptions of Anglo-American femininity. In Dependence thus exposes the central paradoxes inherent in American women's social, legal, and economic positions of dependence in the Revolutionary era, complicating binary understandings of power and weakness, of agency and impotence, and of independence and dependence. Significantly, the American Revolution provided some women with the language and opportunities in which to claim old rights-the rights of dependents-in new ways. Most importantly, In Dependence shows how women's coming to consciousness as rights-bearing individuals laid the groundwork for the activism and collective petitioning efforts of later generations of American feminists.
Access Note Access limited to authorized users.
System Details Note Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
Digital File Characteristics text file PDF
Source of Description Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 29. Mai 2023)
Series Early American Places ; 19
In EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2023 English
EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2023
EBOOK PACKAGE History 2023 English
EBOOK PACKAGE History 2023
New York University Press Complete eBook-Package 2023
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Frontmatter
Contents
Introduction
1 Sympathy and the State
2 Independence in Dependence
3 Sole and Separate
4 Matriarchal Allies and Advocates
5 The Problem of Dependence
6 To Have and to Hold Herself
7 The Rights Revolution
Conclusion: On Collaboration and Collective Action
Acknowledgments
A Note on Sources
Abbreviations
Notes
Index
About the Author

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