Question

Make a paragraph describing the changing roles of women following the American Revolution

Answer 1

In the Revolutionary War, women played many positions. Some of these positions were traditional, while others for the time being were unorthodox and even scandalous. Such Daughters of Liberty did more than their share to help secure America's freedom, ranging from supporting positions like doctors, cooks and maids to more specific roles like undercover soldiers and spies.

In the eighteenth century, the vast majority of white women spent their days doing many arduous activities during their rural homes and around them. But, by far the most dangerous work they did was to bear children. Such women gave birth to between five and eight children on average, often between extra pregnancies that ended in miscarriages. Approximately one in eight can expect to lose their birth lives, and many others went through the ordeal only to watch their babies die.

In colonial America, women had no political voice, and some were chafing under the restrictions placed on them. A campaign started to improve women's education and give them more resources. In the Revolutionary period, both male and female writers began calling for changes throughout female education, claiming that many significant gender differences relied on access to schooling.

But the new focus on justice brought many significant changes to the inheritance rights of women. Everywhere, state legislators abolished primogeniture and the practice of double shares in the property of a mother, inheritance traditions that benefited the eldest son. On the opposite, fair inheritance became the law for all children a huge gain for daughters.Women's real property rights— the lands and buildings that represented the most wealth in the early national period were greater than their personal property rights. Upon her permission, a husband could not sell or mortgage the property that his wife brought to their marriage. He could use it, but he could not move it on because the property of a mother, usually inherited from her husband, was meant to stay in the family and go down to her children through her.

Since women's identities were so influenced by their relations with their husbands and children, and because of the constraining forms of women's life forced upon them, women were far less ready to accept American freedom than men.
Independence was new to them after all. In addition, the political legal constraints on the lives of women; the time and physical demands of their reproductive activities; and their significant but restricted economic position in the household economy created an atmosphere in which few Americans, both female and male, could envisage an expanded role for women arising from the War of Independence. In reality, the opposite was prevailing.

American women were tasked with raising responsible and upright sons who, upon reaching adulthood, would be willing to fulfill the duties and obligations of citizenship. Mothering became a vocation for the first time in American history. This duty exacerbated the role of women as mothers, creating conditions in which many of them were more than ever confined to their homes.

Given the many political, cultural, and economic changes that the American Revolution brought about, after the revolution, most American women's daily lives and experiences remained surprisingly the same. Now, as before, women were mostly mothers and wives. The dependent essence of these positions stood in sharp contrast with their husbands ' autonomy.