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Labor · Chapter 03, 1760–1789

The Daughters of Liberty

Women as the economic engine of colonial resistance.

"A Society of Patriotic Ladies, at Edenton in North Carolina"-a London satirist's mocking view of the fifty-one women who pledged on October 25, 1774 to refuse British tea and "any Manufacture from England." The caricature is itself evidence of how seriously Britain took the colonial boycott of its cloth.
"A Society of Patriotic Ladies, at Edenton in North Carolina"-a London satirist's mocking view of the fifty-one women who pledged on October 25, 1774 to refuse British tea and "any Manufacture from England." The caricature is itself evidence of how seriously Britain took the colonial boycott of its cloth.Attributed to Philip Dawe, "A Society of Patriotic Ladies, at Edenton in North Carolina," mezzotint published by R. Sayer and J. Bennett, London, March 25, 1775. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Public domain.

While men debated non-importation in taverns and assemblies, women supplied the cloth that made boycotts possible. In towns across New England—Newport, Providence, and dozens of smaller Massachusetts and Connecticut communities—groups of women, often numbering several dozen, gathered for daylong spinning meetings, usually hosted by the local minister, and newspapers printed their output as patriotic statistics. The name 'Daughters of Liberty' was applied loosely in the press rather than to a single organization. Their labor, rarely cited in older revolutionary histories, was what turned the political threat of a boycott into an economic reality, and household spinning remained essential when wartime disruption cut off imported cloth.

Sources

  1. ScholarshipLaurel Thatcher Ulrich. The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth. Alfred A. Knopf, 2001.
  2. ScholarshipT. H. Breen. The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence. Oxford University Press, 2004.
  3. ScholarshipTextiles and Independence.

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