Description
Book SynopsisExamines the role of the American Revolution in the everyday lives of women
Patriarchal 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 depende
Trade Review
A fascinating and affirming portrait of how women negotiated power by leaning into their dependent status. In Dependence is cogently argued and well written. -- Kelly A. Ryan, author of Regulating Passion: Sexuality and Patriarchal Rule in Massachusetts, 1700–1830
A powerful book whose assertions transform our understanding of women’s agency in early America. Beatty masterfully teases out meaning from an exhaustive range of sources to demonstrate how women’s dependent status, rather than independent status, enabled them to achieve financial and legal protections. -- Susan Branson, author of Dangerous to Know: Women, Crime, and Notoriety in the Early Republic
Impressive and comprehensive. Beatty skillfully utilizes a range of sources in a novel manner to illuminate the plight of women in an era when husbands who did not provide adequate support for wives and children, or even resorted to cruelty and abuse, were rarely held accountable. Yet, as Beatty demonstrates, women found ways to use the patriarchal system to their advantage to succeed in achieving redress. In Dependence is a well-researched and important addition to the scholarly literature on the role of women in early America. -- Jeanne E. Abrams, University of Denver
