The Revolution nonetheless did produce an improvement in status for many women. According to the ideology of “republican motherhood” that emerged as a result of independence, women played an indispensable role by training future citizens. The “foundation of national morality,” wrote John Adams, “must be laid in private families.” Even though republican motherhood ruled out direct female involvement in politics, it encouraged the expansion of educational opportunities for women, so that they could impart political wisdom to their children. Women, wrote Benjamin Rush, needed to have a “suitable education,” to enable them to “instruct their sons in the principles of liberty and government.”
Portrait of John and Elizabeth Lloyd Cadwalader and Their Daughter Anne. This 1772 portrait of a prominent Philadelphia businessman and his family by the American artist Charles Willson Peale illustrates the emerging ideal of the “companionate” marriage, which is based on affection rather than male authority.
The idea of republican motherhood reinforced the trend, already evident in the eighteenth century, toward the idea of “companionate” marriage, a voluntary union held together by affection and mutual dependency rather than male authority. In her letter to John Adams quoted above, Abigail Adams recommended that men should willingly give up “the harsh title of Master for the more tender and endearing one of Friend.”
The structure of family life itself was altered by the Revolution. In colonial America, those living within the household often included indentured servants, apprentices, and slaves. After independence, southern slaves remained, rhetorically at least, members of the owner’s “family.” In the North, however, with the rapid decline of various forms of indentured servitude and apprenticeship, a more modem definition of the household as consisting of parents and their children took hold. Hired workers, whether domestic servants or farm laborers, were not considered part of the family.
Like slaves, some free women adapted the rhetoric of the Revolution to their own situation. Ann Baker Carson later recalled how she became estranged from the tyrannical husband she had married at age sixteen. “I was an American,” she wrote. “A land of liberty had given me birth. I felt myself his equal.” She left the marriage rather than continue as a “female slave.” But unlike the case of actual slaves, the subordination of women did not become a major source of public debate until long after American independence.