In Dependence: Women and the Patriarchal State in Revolutionary America

The book "In Dependence: Women, Law, and the American Revolution" explores how women in revolutionary America asserted their status as dependents and advocated for themselves, despite patriarchal forces that restricted their rights and agency. Jacqueline Beatty's close reading of legal pleas shows how women claimed aid and assistance, won divorce suits, and defended themselves against patriarchal assumptions. The revolution provided women with the language and opportunities to claim old rights in new ways, laying the groundwork for later generations of American feminists.

Format: Hardback
Length: 288 pages
Publication date: 25 April 2023
Publisher: New York University Press

The American Revolution played a significant role in the lives of women in revolutionary America, despite patriarchal forces that limited their rights and agency. Women in this period found ways to exploit these constraints, transforming them into vehicles of female empowerment. Jacqueline Beatty's research, which analyzed thousands of legislative, judicial, and institutional pleas across seventy years in three urban centers, sheds light on how women asserted their status as dependents and demanded the protections owed to them as the assumed subordinates of men. They sought various forms of aid and assistance, won divorce suits, and defended themselves and their female friends against patriarchal assumptions about their powerlessness.

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. However, their success in using these methods varied depending on their race, class, and socio-economic status, as well as the degree to which their language and behavior conformed to assumptions of Anglo-American femininity.

In Dependence, a book by Jacqueline Beatty, exposes the central paradoxes inherent in American women's social, legal, and economic positions of dependence in the Revolutionary era. It complicates binary understandings of power and weakness, agency and impotence, and independence and dependence. The American Revolution provided some women with the language and opportunities to claim old rights, such as the rights of dependents, in new ways. It also laid the groundwork for women's coming to consciousness as rights-bearing individuals, which had lasting implications for their social and political empowerment.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781479812127