Women: Political Participation

Once, an entry on women's political participation would have been absent from an encyclopedia such as this one, on the assumption that women had no political presence in this historical period because they lacked the vote. But scholars, in addition to uncovering rare and proscribed examples of voting by women, have shown that women were indeed active in a continuum of political activities ranging from acts of patriotism, to work with voluntary associations (which often involved personal dealings with governments), to appearances at partisan gatherings, to more publicly organized efforts to influence the distribution of power or resources in their communities, their states, and their nation.

Before the war, most colonies' laws allowed only propertied, often only white propertied, men to vote. Women were thus part of a large category of the excluded that also contained nontaxpayers, slaves, the poor, and, in some colonies, free blacks, Catholics, and Jews. In a few towns in Massachusetts and a few counties in New York, propertied widows voted in local elections.

The colonial protests that became the American Revolution, however, forced everyone to consider arguments regarding the government's legitimacy. Women with Revolutionary sympathies supported the boycott of British products; they drank herbal teas and made clothes from homespun cloth. In poems, plays, essays, letters, and diaries women on both sides of the war advocated for their political views. After the war, in 1788, Mercy Otis Warren, whose brother James Otis had been a leader in the tax rebellion, published a pamphlet opposing ratification of the new federal constitution, thus engaging directly in political advocacy, albeit anonymously.

The war's justification—no taxation without representation—supplied obvious arguments in favor of widening the suffrage to taxpaying men and single taxpaying women (married women were thought to be represented politically by their husbands). Nevertheless, only one state, New Jersey, did so: its 1776 state constitution specified that black and white unmarried and widowed women in possession of fifty pounds could vote.

In the opening decades of the nineteenth century, women found themselves under increasing pressure to redirect their political energies into raising their children to be good citizens. The distinction between public and private spheres established the banishment of women from the civic arena as a moral good. (In response, New Jersey ended single wealthy women's suffrage in 1807.) Organized benevolence, however, was considered a proper quasi-public endeavor for women. Working in partnership with men and on their own, black and white women founded orphanages and asylums and lobbied individuals and local governments for funds to maintain the new institutions. They also worked for temperance, antislavery, and education.

Women's engagement in organized benevolence drew them into policy arguments that only Congress could settle. The tool they chose to influence the federal legislature was the petition. This ancient method, originally intended to redress individual grievances, had become a political means as early as the 1780s, when men in Massachusetts petitioned their state legislature for tax relief and women seamstresses in Charleston petitioned the South Carolina legislature to impose a duty on imported ready-made clothing to protect their industry. The first women's petition to Congress was on behalf of the Indian tribes in Southern states. That two-year campaign began in 1829 when the educator Catharine Beecher wrote a pamphlet urging women to petition Congress not to remove the Indians from their lands and orchestrated its circulation among "benevolent" women. Beecher, aware of the controversial nature of these efforts, undertook them anonymously. But the deed spoke for itself. Women's use of the petition for political purposes expanded in the decades to come, as did their use of other soon-to-be-discovered methods of nonvoting political participation.

See alsoEducation: Education of Girls and Women; Marriage; Widowhood; Work: Women's Work .

bibliography

Portnoy, Alisse Theodore. "'Female Petitioners Can Lawfully Be Heard': Negotiating Female Decorum, United States Politics, and Political Agency, 1829–1831." Journal of the Early Republic 23, no. 4 (2003): 573–610.

Zagarri, Rosemarie. "Women and Party Conflict in the Early Republic." In Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic. Edited by Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, and David Waldstreicher. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

Louise W. Knight