An early look at the women of the Revolutionary era; their political and social beliefs, aspirations and expectations and their place in society. Discusses the concept of "coverture," and women's education.

Published in 1980, Women of the Republic asserts itself within the historical scholarship of that time period as a rare attempt to tell the story of Revolutionary America from the perspective of its women as opposed to the conventional telling which relied heavily upon “accounts of battles or constitutional conventions—events from which women were necessarily absent” (xi). In order to do this Kerber effectively draws from a diversity of sources, including letters, diaries, court records, petitions to legislatures, books, pamphlets and broadsides, making the case that the politics of the Revolutionary War with its call for independence and freedom was instrumental in enabling women to gain some access to civic life without allowing them to identify as “political beings” (11). Subsequently, Kerber’s argument follows that women played a large role in developing the ideology that she names “Republican Motherhood.” Kerber writes, “They [women] devised their own interpretation of what the Revolution had meant to them as women, and they began to invent an ideology of citizenship that merged the domestic domain of the pre-industrial woman with the new public ideology of individual responsibility and civic virtue”(269). Republican Motherhood both justified and tempered women’s political behavior by placing it within the home, where as mothers, they would impart the republican civic virtues of freedom, liberty and equality to their sons who would then go on to patriotically participate within the political domain.
Kerber’s legal and social history demonstrates that the language of Revolutionary America, replete with the promise of liberty and justice for all ultimately excluded women from its vision. Kerber’s analysis moves through nine chapters, providing rich examples of women who found themselves acting politically and responding to the call of the Revolution at the same time that the dominant political and philosophical ideology of the Revolution rooted in Enlightenment thought excluded them. For example, during the war women participate in boycotts of English clothing and tea, patriotically spinning their own clothes at home. They collect rags for making paper and bandages, sew blankets and clothing for the soldiers and work as nurses in the army camps, even though they are underpaid and scorned. However, at the same time, women found their homes to be at the mercy of the troops, and were forced to provide the soldiers with food and lodging. Kerber is quick to point out that although women during wartime engaged in political acts, they did not shift their identities from domestic to political and most did not understand themselves to be politically conscious outside of their domestic domains. Women did have the right to petition the legislatures for preservation of property rights, and while Kerber acknowledges the fact that they did petition demonstrates an act of individual choice, usually the petitions were ineffective. For example when the wives of loyalists are asked to make political choices of allegiance many chose to stay rather than follow their husbands, simultaneously expressing allegiance to the republic and also supposedly protecting their rights to their husbands’ property. Upon this “civil death” of their Loyalist husbands, wives were supposed to be rewarded with their dower after the war, but according to individual women’s petitions for property, court cases and decisions, Kerber finds that these promises were not realized and that in fact, the post-revolutionary period saw the breakdown of a widow’s right to her dower. Also, Kerber spends a thorough chapter analyzing divorce petitions and laws, and cases, finding that a civil divorce, while easier to obtain on behalf of women in certain parts of New England, overall was not easily granted in the new republic.
The development of what Kerber calls Republican Motherhood becomes most explicit when she discusses the shift in improvements in female education from 1790 onward. Even though education for women continued to face opposition during this time, the shift from an agrarian to industrial society coupled with the political revolution necessitated improvements in education for women. This shift occurs, explains Kerber, due to the nature of republics, which are believed by its leaders to depend on a civic virtue handed down from generation to generation. Rather than officially assign this role to a fourth branch of government, the role fell to the mothers of the republic who would impart moral and religious training to their children. In order to accomplish this, these mothers would need to be properly educated in such a manner that her ties to her domestic duties were not threatened and her political activities were confined to the home. Ultimately Republican Motherhood left a woman in limbo. “She was a citizen but not really a constituent” (283). Kerber does an excellent job in this portion of the book in illuminating the paradoxes inherent within an ideology that empowered women to a degree but also kept them from truly acting as political beings.
However, the overall structure of the book appears disjointed at times. Occasionally it becomes difficult to see through the heavy details towards the larger theoretical framework. Indeed according to her Preface to the 1986 edition, Kerber claims that a deadline forced her to “impose structure on a confusion of materials”(v). Nevertheless, Kerber’s analysis offers great insight into the lives of women during the Revolutionary Era, allowing us to view them as active participants. Through the ideology of “Republican Motherhood” they attempted to forge a productive role for themselves within the confines of a political and legal system that spoke to them through the language of liberty yet actively excluded them. Kerber’s research contributes to the historical scholarship of the American Revolution with its thorough exploration of women’s experiences in the early Republic. Furthermore, Women of the Republic’s charting of the paradoxical nature of Republican Motherhood will prove crucial to students of nineteenth and twentieth-century women’s history. Kerber mentions that Republican Motherhood’s ideology would later be both absorbed and invoked in conservative and reformist ways to promote ideologies like the “cult of domesticity” and women’s Progressive reform movements. Her book will provide students and scholars of American women’s history an excellent framework for understanding the development of these later periods. ( )