Fireside Chat- Reclaiming Women's Power in the American Revolution

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. Join us this March for a “Fireside Chat” that 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 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. In 2015, she was awarded a Davida Tenenbaum Deutsch Program in Women’s History short-term fellowship at the Library Company for her research. Her first book, In Dependence: Women and the Patriarchal State in Revolutionary America, was published with New York University Press in 2023. She has bylines in The Washington Post, Time and Salon.

Sponsored by the Davida Tenenbaum Deutsch Program in Women’s History at the Library Company of Philadelphia