“Reclaiming Women’s Power in the American Revolution,” 3/14 Democracy Lab Invited Lecture with York College Prof. Jacqueline Beatty

For the fourth annual Kinder Institute Democracy Lab invited talk, our undergraduate lecture committee will bring York College of Pennsylvania Associate Professor of History Jacqueline Beatty to campus to present her research on the ways in which, and the success with which, Revolutionary-era women advocated for themselves by strategically utilizing a rhetoric of dependence and subordination. The talk will take place on March 14 at 3:30pm in Jesse Hall 410 and will be followed on March 15 by our second annual undergraduate conference.

Abstract

The American Revolution was a war for independence. Yet during this conflict, ordinary American women, in managing crises in their lives, claimed their dependence on husbands, on officials from local institutions, and on the state itself—all patriarchal forces that governed their lives. This presentation explores the experiences of women who submitted thousands of petitions in the Revolutionary era, demanding remuneration, clemency, property rights, and even divorces, all using language that parroted presumptions of their legal, economic, and social subordination to men. Yet this rhetoric belied the astute and purposeful strategy women employed in their petitions to patriarchal officials. 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.

Dr. Jacqueline Beatty is an Associate Professor of History at York College of Pennsylvania, where she teaches courses in early American, women’s and gender, and public history. She received her Ph.D. from George Mason University in 2016. Her first book, In Dependence: Women and the Patriarchal State in Revolutionary America, was published with NYU Press in 2023. She has bylines in The Washington Post, Time and Salon.