l.) Stand firmly resolved and bid Grenville to see That rather than Freedom, we’ll part with our tea And well as we love the dear Draught when adry, As American Patriots, -our Taste we deny. Women made agreements among themselves to boycott goods, and they circulated petitions addressing the issue of nonimportation. The boycott provided a bridge between the private world of the household and public realm of politics. Kerber demonstrated that even though some women were emerging into politics, there was still ways in which older traditions of coverture presisted. Married women were seen as automatically partaking in their husbands’ political choices rather than being capable of independent choice. While the new state governments in general held woman capable of treason, thus granting them wills of their own in this regard, even patriots who were ardent revolutionaries shrank from suggesting that women married to loyalists should rebel against the will of their husbands and join the revolutionary cause. The revolutionary period was a time in which changing circumstances for women clashed with older traditions of woman’s invisibility. Women of the southern states had increased status during the early seventeenth century not because they were viewed as equal or deserving but rather because they were needed. By the eighteenth century southern women reverted to the “old way” when they were no longer vital to sustaining the population. New England women were ruled by their husbands and by the church allotting them no rights but many duties. The loving families of the eighteenth century might have been more emotionally pleasing but still the women remained distant from the outside public realm. The Quakers shared in an exceptional amount of equally that was never adopted or accepted by the dominant classes in the colonies. The last years of the colonial era did allow for increased rights and autonomy for w...
