Carol Berkin Essay Example

because historians generally have not integrated women into the larger story of the American Revolution and because most general readers know little about American women's history.

Women, Carol Berkin argues, participated in every aspect of the Revolution, though they typically were not its central actors.Berkin describes women's involvement in pre-Revolutionary protests and boycotts, their harrowing experiences in a war that blurred boundaries between battlefield and home front, and the heroic exploits of female spies and saboteurs on both sides. It must also be noted that Separate chapters tell the stories of loyalist exiles, Native Americans, and African American women--groups for whom the Revolution posed special difficulties and (far less often) opportunities. Another discusses camp followers, who included both poor women working as nurses, cooks, and laundresses, and genteel officers' wives.

Again, Carol Berkin deals deftly with the issue of region, neither ignoring the centrality of African Americans, Indians, and partisan warfare in the southern campaign nor exaggerating the largely nascent sectional differences of the Revolutionary era. She gives ample coverage to the war in the southern states, culling local histories for stories of heroines like Mammy Kate (an enslaved woman who helped her master escape from a British prison) and Emily Geiger (a South Carolinian who carried a note for General Nathanael Greene, which she ate upon being captured and then delivered the message orally after the British released her).Elsewhere in the book however, Berkin focuses more on northern women. Neither Clementina Rind (the patriotic Williamsburg newspaper editor) nor Virginians Hannah Lee Corbin and Mary Willing Byrd (who applied the Revolutionary dictum "no taxation without representation" to propertied single women and widows, such as themselves) appear

in her narrative, though she does include the North Carolina episode known as the Edenton Ladies' Tea Party.Carol Berkin could be said to be fighting "gender amnesia," the national forgetfulness that has erased women's contributions from this country's memory of its War for Independence.

This book is highly readable and valuable sources, especially since most histories of the era still place women to one side of the "real" story of the Revolution. Berkin takes us at a swift pace through the experiences of women in the revolutionary years: as substitutes for husbands who had run the family farm or business, as combatants, as followers of the armies, as loyalists, as slaves, and as Native American observers of the conflict.In general, women were engulfed in a war not of their own making and that would not benefit them. Berkin's brisk clip and ability to condense complex material makes her book a useful text for teachers and offers the general reader a spirited overview of women's experience. In another vein, Berkin sets out to rebuild our understanding of the Revolution and to remind readers, whose sensibilities may have been overtaxed by the horrors of our own time, that that conflict was also a brutal war, neither tame nor quaint.She evokes the terrifying unpredictability of a conflict that divided communities and pitted families and friends against each other.

It left large numbers of women isolated in the countryside to fend for themselves and their children, or to share in the dangers of army life, often without its protections. She also reminds us that rape has been integral to war for millennia, even if it has achieved only now

its dubious recognition as a war crime.Berkin's short, peppery chapters persuade us that women were essential and powerful forces for both sides. Women's boycotts of British goods, their collection of money for the troops and pewter for bullets, their work as unofficial quartermasters for the Continental Army, their domestic and sexual work in the army camps, their resistance in defending their homes, and their experiences in fighting all come alive in these pages.

African American and Native American women found themselves with few if any good options.Both the British and the Americans wooed the Indians, but neither side rewarded them with anything but danger and sacrifice, and when the war ended, the Americans further reduced the Indians' land holdings. The new nation imposed its Christian-inspired gender roles on the Indians, limiting Indian women's traditional autonomy and wide-ranging political and economic participation. However, Berkin does not discuss what I believe was a central ingredient in the mixed legacy of the Revolution: religion, a strong force before the Revolution and arguably even stronger afterwards.Long before Wright's pronouncement, Puritans had believed in the spiritual equality of the sexes, and had achieved, by the late eighteenth century in New England, a remarkably high literacy rate, not for secular reasons but so that everyone could read the Bible. In the post-Revolutionary period, evangelical Christianity mortared together the political bricks structuring the new nation.

Educational opportunities for women largely followed the spread of evangelical Christianity into the South and West. But so did an increasingly restrictive definition of women's duties and comportment.Women's lives, more than men's, were shaped by religion both before and after the Revolution. The secular politics of the

revolutionary era reflected the dominance of a minority of educated men steeped in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but those politics had a limited effect on most women's everyday lives. The Revolution may have provided the rhetoric for the 1848 Seneca Falls women's rights convention's Declaration of Sentiments, but Christianity fueled women's participation in other reform movements that were far more popular in the nineteenth century, such as abolition and, after the Civil War, temperance.The Revolution's ambiguous legacy for women, I think, comes better into focus seen through the lens of Protestantism.

A very important thing to be noted about this book is that Berkin has restored "much that is missing in the tales we tell" about the Revolution. She tells a story that deserves to be known, and her book is a good read. One can quibble with some of her conclusions. For instance, there is no evidence that the patriotic efforts of Martha Wayles Jefferson to raise money to support the troops shocked her husband, Thomas, despite his later hostility toward politically active women.And the "gender amnesia" surrounding women's participation in the Revolution, whose origins Berkin finds in the late nineteenth century, was already evident in the immediate post-Revolutionary era (p. xi).

In conclusion, Berkin's interpretation of the scope and wider significance of women's Revolutionary experience is generally evenhanded and persuasive. Throughout America, women were active participants in a revolution that lent legitimacy to new ideas about their roles and abilities without disrupting their society's basic gender ideologies. This ambiguous legacy subsequently inspired both feminism and conservative domesticity.