Abstract: Placing women at the center of the early republic recasts war and nation-building as struggles over household power, property, and authority. Building from Susan Sleeper-Smith’s account of the 1791 Ohio Valley campaign, where Kentucky militiamen, unable to capture Miami, Shawnee, and Delaware women, attacking their wealth instead—plundering jewelry and cloth and burning orchards and fields—violence that galvanized Indigenous alliances and produced Harmar’s Defeat. The essays argue that such conflicts arose when settlers confronted societies where women held political power and when households served as the infrastructure of labor, credit, and governance. They also trace how post-Revolutionary reforms rebranded domesticity as republican order while tightening coverture and erasing legal pluralism that had enabled women’s agency. Case studies of frontier property holders and Black women’s networks reveal uneven openings that systematically closed to secure elite white men’s dominance. From the edges, revolutionary change looks contingent
Abstract: This article explores the lasting influence of the Revolution on the field of women’s history and the place of women in scholarship on the new republic. It argues that narratives of post-Revolutionary change, particularly those penned by nineteenth-century women’s rights activists, have blunted the impact of innovative work on women from reshaping scholarship in the post-Revolutionary period more generally.
Abstract: Racism, anti-Black terror, labor exploitation, sexual violence, and the expansion of slavery in the early republic made it necessary for Black women—Northern and Southern, free and enslaved—to forge a distinct political culture. Black feminist historical analysis recasts Republican motherhood as a racialized construct rooted in the exploitation of Black women during the long 19th century. Scholars have fruitfully reconstructed and analyzed the social and cultural implications of Black women’s networks within Black communities in the Antebellum South. This essay calls attention to the political dimensions of women's social networks, where they nurtured ideas about legal culture, fugitivity, and protection in the decades leading up to the Civil War. Expanding the political sphere by prioritizing the concerns of enslaved and free Black women and girls enriches the conceptual categories we explore to analyze politics and political culture in the early republic—and it helps us see the political implications of women’s actions and bodies in ways not available from within the most prominent paradigms for studying women’s history.
Abstract: This article asserts that the Burned-over District was important to Blacks, both fugitive and free, before the Civil War. It was a place that was more open and welcoming than other spaces in the United States. The free thinking of groups like the Shakers, the Millerites, the Mormons, and the Oneida Society, as well as the abolitionists and woman’s suffrage advocates, helped to usher in a space friendly to Blacks. Also, the Burned-over District offered access to British Canada, which was a haven for fugitive Blacks and was part of an Atlantic world experience due to the international zone it inhabited.
