In Dependence - (Early American Places) by Jacqueline Beatty

Book Synopsis

Examines the role of the American Revolution in the everyday lives of women

Patriarchal forces of law, finance, and social custom restricted women's rights and agency in revolutionary America. Yet women in this period exploited these confines, transforming constraints into vehicles of female empowerment. Through a close reading of thousands of legislative, judicial, and institutional pleas across seventy years of history in three urban centers, Jacqueline Beatty illustrates the ways in which women in the revolutionary era asserted their status as dependents, demanding the protections owed to them as the assumed subordinates of men. In so doing, they claimed various forms of aid and assistance, won divorce suits, and defended themselves and their female friends in the face of patriarchal assumptions about their powerlessness. 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.

Their varying degrees of success in using these methods, however, was contingent on their race, class, and socio-economic status, and the degree to which their language and behavior conformed to assumptions of Anglo-American femininity. In Dependence thus exposes the central paradoxes inherent in American women's social, legal, and economic positions of dependence in the Revolutionary era, complicating binary understandings of power and weakness, of agency and impotence, and of independence and dependence. Significantly, the American Revolution provided some women with the language and opportunities in which to claim old rights--the rights of dependents--in new ways. Most importantly, In Dependence shows how women's coming to consciousness as rights-bearing individuals laid the groundwork for the activism and collective petitioning efforts of later generations of American feminists.

Review Quotes

"[Beatty's] fascinating study explores the multiple ways Black and white women used and were used by the idea of dependence in the new independent nation."-- "William and Mary Quarterly"

"A fascinating and affirming portrait of how women negotiated power by leaning into their dependent status. In Dependence is cogently argued and well written."--Kelly A. Ryan, author of Regulating Passion: Sexuality and Patriarchal Rule in Massachusetts, 1700-1830

"A powerful book whose assertions transform our understanding of women's agency in early America. Beatty masterfully teases out meaning from an exhaustive range of sources to demonstrate how women's dependent status, rather than independent status, enabled them to achieve financial and legal protections."--Susan Branson, author of Dangerous to Know: Women, Crime, and Notoriety in the Early Republic

"Beatty highlights the agency of Revolutionary-era women who used the language of female dependence to claim property rights, financial support, divorce, and, in the case of Black women, self-ownership."--B. B. Pfleger, California State University Los Angeles "Choice Connect"

"Impressive and comprehensive. Beatty skillfully utilizes a range of sources in a novel manner to illuminate the plight of women in an era when husbands who did not provide adequate support for wives and children, or even resorted to cruelty and abuse, were rarely held accountable. Yet, as Beatty demonstrates, women found ways to use the patriarchal system to their advantage to succeed in achieving redress. In Dependence is a well-researched and important addition to the scholarly literature on the role of women in early America."--Jeanne E. Abrams, University of Denver

"The real contribution of this persuasive book is to show that the American Revolution did very little to weaken the pervasive power of the patriarchal state."-- "The Journal of Southern History"

About the Author

Jacqueline Beatty is Assistant Professor of History in the Department of History and Political Science at York College of Pennsylvania.