2009 Chapter 2 Vocabulary Mothers and Daughters of the ...



2009 Chapter 2 Vocabulary Mothers and Daughters of the Revolution, 1750-1800

Identification Terms

1. French and Indian War—A war fought from 1754–1763 between the French and British over North American land holdings. Native Americans were drawn into the conflict and sided mainly with the French, who had encroached less upon their lands and seemed more likely to continue to honor their land claims. British soldiers and colonial militiamen conquered New France which, in the 1763 Treaty of Paris, ceded its vast lands in North America to the British. Now claiming all territory east of the Mississippi River and hoping to avoid further clashes between settlers and Native Americans, the British closed to settlement the land west of the Appalachians via the Proclamation of 1763, causing resentment among the colonists. From this point on Britain attempted to exert more fiscal and administrative control over the American colonies.

2. Townshend Act—A 1767 law passed by the British Parliament that imposed duties on common household items such as tea, coffee, and cloth. This act, along with an ever-larger British bureaucracy in the colonies, heightened British colonial women’s political awareness

3. homespun—A coarse cloth manufactured by colonial women out of materials grown and processed at home. Producing homespun cloth was one of the ways women aided the colonial boycott of British goods in the period leading up to the Revolutionary War. The British had the largest textile monopoly in the Atlantic community at this time.  “Spinning bees” became popular among northern white women were members of the Daughters of Liberty, whereas slave women produced most of the homespun cloth in the southern colonies.

4. Liberty’s Daughters—The female equivalent to the Sons of Liberty, these revolutionary organizations opposed British policies. For women, the most important efforts focused on nonconsumption—or a boycott of British goods. Women’s actions in the pre-war years demonstrate women’s contributions to the growing rebellion.

5. Molly Brant—A Mohawk woman from the Iroquois Confederacy who had been the common-law wife of British diplomat William Johnson, Brant was active in revolutionary-era diplomacy, siding with the British.

6. Deborah Sampson—A white woman who joined the Revolutionary as a cross-dressing enlistee with the name Robert Shurtleff. She served for eighteen months between 1782 and 1783 and was wounded twice before her gender was uncovered

7. camp follower—An auxiliary role women played historically in warfare, in the case of the American Revolution by attaching themselves to Washington’s Continental Army. Most were the wives of poor soldiers who could not function on their own financially, though officers’ wives and prostitutes were also present. Camp followers hoped to attend to their husbands’ welfare in camp, living there with their children and facing challenges such as disease, injury, and even death. Camp followers also provided valuable services as laundresses, cooks, and nurses.

8. Sarah Osborn—A camp follower who, after her husband’s death, sought to obtain his pension for service as a commissary guard in the Revolutionary War. Her deposition document, in which she describes cooking for soldiers, talking with General Washington, withstanding British cannon fire at Yorktown and, finally, witnessing the British surrender, reveals the important and active role camp followers often played in the Revolutionary War.

9. Elizabeth Freeman (Mum Bett)—A slave who petitioned a Massachusetts county court for her freedom in 1781. Freeman’s suit caused the state Supreme Court to rule that slavery was invalid in Massachusetts, and she won her freedom. Historians are not certain what led her to sue, but possibilities include cruelty inflicted by her master, hearing the Declaration of Independence, or being recruited as a test case in the struggle to abolish slavery. Following her emancipation, Freeman spent the rest of her life as a paid domestic servant for her attorney’s family. Her experience shows that African Americans were active participants in the emancipation process in the northern states during the Revolutionary Era.

10. Abigail Adams—The wife of future president of the United States John Adams and advocate for women’s protection in law, famously asked her husband to “remember the ladies” in the work of drawing up a new government and constitution. Her letters from the Revolutionary Era reveal her ability to manage the family farm in Massachusetts while her husband attended to politics in Boston and Philadelphia. Hindered by her own lack of formal education, Adams advocated that the improved education of women would help adhere to the goals of Republican Motherhood.

11. Mercy Otis Warren—A Massachusetts woman whose writings reflect her commitment to the revolutionary cause and her hope for America’s future as a repository of republican virtue. With close ties to the revolutionary leadership through her husband and brother Warren was famous for her pamphlets, poems, and plays, which often functioned as social satires or political commentaries. Her writings lambasted local pro-British officials and loyalists, celebrated revolutionary exploits, and encouraged women to keep up the boycotts against British goods. After the war, she published a book of poems and a three-volume work on the revolutionary era.

12. Republican Motherhood—A Revolutionary era ideology that women played a vital role both in educating their children for their duties as citizens and in virtuously influencing their husbands to contribute to civic culture and order. Americans believed that the new republic needed an educated, enlightened citizenry. For many women, the interest in educational reform was linked to civic good, but the new ideology also improved female education and began a long process of expanded opportunities for women. Along with evangelical religion, Republican Motherhood formed an important rationale for women’s expanding roles in a wide range of benevolent and reform associations in the nineteenth century.

13. Great Awakening—A wave of religious revivalism that began in the colonies in the first half of the eighteenth century and peaked at mid-century, especially in the South. This evangelical fervor touched both blacks and whites, validating the religious experiences of ordinary people. The essential ingredient was conversion—an immediate and ecstatic religious experience. The movement challenged the Puritan emphasis on salvation and promoted a new egalitarianism that appealed across gender, class, and racial lines.

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