Who are the feminist patriots and where did they come from? Covering US history since 1776, this book tackles women’s drive for equality, or at least access, to sixteen  different “rights” starting with education and ending with physical safety.  Cobbs calls the women who pursued this goal  “feminist patriots.”

 

Most chapters profile two women, a public figure and a private one who nonetheless wrote about her life. Even the public figure profiles have information that few of us knew.  For example, we’ve all read about Abigail Adams’ admonition to John to “Remember the Ladies” while he was in Philadelphia with the Continental Congress.  How many know John’s reply? Read to find out.

 

To appreciate the problems women faced during the revolutionary era, we need to remember that Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England was the legal textbook of the new county.  In it he described “coverture” by which “the husband and wife are as one, and that one is the husband.”  This gave the husband an absolute right over the wife, body and mind, including the right to discipline her as he pleased.  

 

Abigail Adams is paired with Abigail Bailey, a runaway wife who was “wedded to a rapist who took advantage of the tyranny that coverture allowed.”  Indeed, the first wave of the “woman movement” was to free married women from the restraints of coverture.  Suffrage was the second wave, or maybe the third, depending on what is counted.