The Daughters of Liberty

If you picture the American Revolution as a rowdy collection of powdered wigs and musket smoke, you are only getting half the story. The other half is in the kitchens that smelled like boiling wool and burned herbs, in parlor rooms where young women bent over spinning wheels, and in the hands of women who refused to pour tea. The Daughters of Liberty lived in that half of the story. Sometimes they were an actual organized group, as in Rhode Island and other towns where women met under that name. Often they were a shorthand phrase for any woman who put her household, her hands, and sometimes her body between British policy and American liberty.

The name itself first comes into view during the Stamp Act crisis of 1765. The law slapped a tax on almost anything recorded on paper, from newspapers and court documents to marriage licenses and wills, and it set off a colonial firestorm. Men formed the Sons of Liberty and took to the streets. Women, formally barred from politics, did not have that option. So they started looking around their homes and asking a dangerous question: What if the spinning wheel and the tea table could be tools of resistance instead of symbols of obedience. In Providence, Rhode Island, a group of young women gathered at the home of Dr. Ephraim Bowen to spin cloth, drink anything but tea, and declare the Stamp Act unconstitutional. They called them Daughters of Liberty right there in the newspaper.

From that point on, the label spread. Sometimes it referred to specific chapters, especially in New England and Rhode Island, where newspapers reported women’s spinning gatherings and boycotts under that name. Sometimes it was a loose description for any woman who joined the resistance. Either way, patriots understood that the cause suddenly had a new kind of recruit. Samuel Adams supposedly remarked that with the ladies on their side they could make every Tory tremble. Whether those are his exact words or not, the sentiment tells you something. The revolution had discovered its most unexpected allies, and they were the people who kept the households running.

To see what the Daughters of Liberty did, you have to understand the world they were pushing against. Eighteenth century English culture had very clear expectations for respectable women, especially among the middling and gentry classes. Their sphere was meant to be the home and the family, not the street or the town meeting. Popular essayists like Addison and Steele told readers that a proper woman concerned herself with manners, morals, and domestic order, not with elections and imperial policy. Politics, in theory, belonged to men. Women could read about debates in the Spectator. They were not supposed to take part in them.

That attitude carried into the early protests against British taxation. When the first riots broke out over the Stamp Act, the people hanging effigies or threatening stamp distributors were men. Women watched from doorways and upper windows. They were portrayed as onlookers, sometimes literally described as female spectators. It would have been easy to leave them there, clucking approval or horror while the men took care of business in the streets. Instead, the nature of British policy practically dragged women into the political arena.

Once Parliament moved from a stamp tax to the Townshend duties, the battleground shifted from the courthouse to the household. The new taxes landed on imported goods like glass, paper, paint, lead, and tea. Those were exactly the sort of things that passed through a woman’s hands every day. If the colonies were going to answer with a boycott, as many town meetings vowed to do, that promise lived or died in the place where purchases were made and food and drink were prepared. That was the women’s world. As one historian put it, the Townshend Acts handed women an unprecedented chance to show female patriotism, because any woman could join the cause simply by refusing to buy or serve British goods.

The result was a quiet revolution in the pantry and the parlor. Non consumption agreements were only as strong as the people who did the shopping. Wives, daughters, and widows were the ones who had to tell a local merchant they would not buy his imported cloth, no matter how fashionable the pattern. They were the ones who had to explain to a husband or a guest that there would be no tea on the table, not because they could not afford it, but because they would not support it. Some women made that stance personal and blunt. Newspapers carried stories about young women who swore they would rather remain unmarried than accept a suitor who purchased a stamped marriage license or ignored the boycott. It sounds theatrical, but the message was clear. Patriotism had slipped into the realm of courtship and respectability.

Boycotts alone would have mattered. What made them truly powerful was the way women turned tedious domestic work into public political theater. This is where the Homespun movement comes into the picture. If American colonists refused to buy British textiles, they had to wear something. The answer was cloth spun and woven at home. Women had always spun thread and yarn, but they usually did it in the corner of a kitchen or near the hearth, an invisible chore like so many others. In the late 1760s, they hauled the spinning wheels out into the open and made a spectacle of it.

Spinning bees began cropping up in towns across New England and beyond. These were organized gatherings where groups of women, often described as young ladies of good reputation, met to spin yarn and linen while the community watched. Ministers and local elites sometimes hosted them in their homes. Clergymen preached sermons on the virtue of home manufacture. In 1769 alone newspapers reported dozens of such meetings, praising women who showed that it was no disgrace to sit at a wheel and do work normally left to servants. Homespun clothing, once a sign of rustic poverty, suddenly became a badge of political honor, the acceptable fashion of patriots.

These displays were not merely symbolic. Boycotts put real pressure on British merchants. The value of certain imports dropped by almost half around 1769 as colonial non consumption took hold. Legislators back in London might not have cared who spun cloth in a minister’s parlor. They did care when their allies in the British trade houses started howling. The Stamp Act fell. Some of the Townshend duties were repealed. Part of the credit belongs to women who understood exactly what they controlled and used it.

Tea, of course, was the most explosive example. If there was one product that defined eighteenth century gentility, it was a nice cup of tea served in imported china. Parliament managed to turn that delicate ritual into an argument. The Townshend Acts taxed imported tea. The Tea Act of 1773 gave the British East India Company a monopoly and tried to sneak taxed tea into American markets at a lower price, daring colonists to put their money where their mouth was. Once again, women faced the issue every time they boiled water.

In Boston in 1770, more than three hundred mistresses of families signed a pledge to totally abstain from tea. Another group of young women signed a similar declaration. They promised not to drink it in their homes and to refuse it when offered in company. Tea had become a test, not of taste but of loyalty. In response, women experimented with substitutes, brewing what they called liberty tea out of raspberry leaves, mint, basil, and native plants like New Jersey tea. It was not the same as a chest of fine Chinese leaves. That was the point. Every sip was a reminder that being born for liberty, as one writer later put it, might require drinking something bitter.

By this stage, the Daughters of Liberty were no longer content to be anonymous helpers. They began to speak in the language of rights and politics. In Providence, women gathered to spin and explicitly resolved that the Stamp Act violated constitutional principles. Boston women, writing about their role in enforcing non consumption, insisted that they were persons of consequence in the present economic regulations. They aligned themselves with the town meetings and assemblies that were steering colonial resistance. A 1771 writer encouraged women to know their own importance and suggested that they were entitled to a sort of moral suffrage, a say in the affairs of the community, even if the law denied them a ballot.

The language was still cautious and framed in the terms of modesty and virtue. Women would fight for liberty while remaining dutiful wives and daughters. Yet the fact remains that women were beginning to imagine themselves as political actors and to say so in print. Once that genie is out of the bottle, it is hard to stuff back in.

For some, words were not enough. The most famous story of female direct action is probably the coffee riot Abigail Adams reported in 1777. According to her letter, about one hundred women marched to the home of a Boston merchant who had hoarded coffee and refused to sell it at a fair price. They seized him by the neck, forced him into a cart, and compelled him to hand over the keys to his warehouse. Then they took the coffee for themselves while nearby men stood, in Abigail’s words, as silent spectators. The scene flips the usual script of the Revolution. Instead of men rioting while women watch from the sidelines, the women act and the men gawk.

Elsewhere, women clashed with the machinery of patriot enforcement. In Charleston, merchant Ann Matthews fought with the local committee when they tried to crack down on her importation of luxury goods. She accused them of selective enforcement and of harassing her for personal reasons. It did not go well. Eventually a mob burned her in effigy, the only recorded instance of such a public symbolic punishment aimed at a woman in that period. She managed the trick of being too independent for patriots and too rebellious for loyalists, which is how you end up stuffed with straw and set on fire in the public square.

Other women pushed even closer to the military line. In Boston, Sarah Bradlee Fulton, a Medford patriot who frequently joined her brother in the city, gained the nickname Mother of the Tea Party. Later accounts credit her with helping to disguise the men who boarded the ships in Mohawk style dress and with restoring them to respectability afterward, washing off the paint and hiding the evidence when they returned. During the Battle of Bunker Hill, she rallied women to nurse the wounded in makeshift hospitals and even removed a musket ball from a soldier’s cheek. Not long after, she volunteered to carry dispatches through British lines on Washington’s behalf when her husband could not, proving that intelligence work did not require trousers.

She was far from alone. Prudence Cummings Wright organized a band of local women in Massachusetts to guard a river crossing. They intercepted two suspected loyalist couriers and captured them, along with their dispatches. Other women used their homes as listening posts. Lydia Darrah in Philadelphia overheard British officers plotting a surprise attack and quietly warned the Continental leadership, likely saving American troops from disaster. Emily Geiger swallowed a written message rather than let it fall into enemy hands, then reconstructed it from memory after her release so that it could still be delivered. These stories have picked up a patina of legend, and we should be honest about that. Not every detail stands up cleanly under modern scrutiny. But the pattern is clear. At the very least, contemporaries believed that women could and did act as informants, messengers, and saboteurs. That belief alone is a shift in what women were thought capable of doing.

Then there are the women who crossed the ultimate boundary and fought. Deborah Sampson, a Massachusetts woman, disguised herself as a man under the name Robert Shurtliff and enlisted in the Continental Army in 1781. She endured the same hunger, cold, and danger as the men around her until illness and injury revealed her identity. Later she toured as a sort of living curiosity, delivering lectures in part military uniform, part feminine dress, telling her story to paying audiences. The image of a woman in a soldier’s coat both shocked and fascinated the new republic.

The figure we remember as Molly Pitcher is more complicated. The name probably blends more than one real woman, including Mary Ludwig Hays, who is said to have carried water to her husband’s gun crew and then taken his place at the cannon when he fell. Whether you treat that story as strict fact or as battle folklore, the idea of a woman serving a field piece under fire became part of the Revolutionary imagination. It is another reminder that war does not respect tidy divisions between male and female spaces.

If the Daughters of Liberty had stopped at boycotts and a few daring episodes, their story would still be worth telling. What they did during the war years takes it further. They helped keep an underfunded, poorly supplied army from falling apart. Some chapters of Daughters of Liberty, and other women’s groups that shared their spirit, collected scrap metal, melted it down, and turned it into bullets. They gathered cloth, sewed shirts and uniforms, and organized neighborhood drives for blankets and bandages. When you picture a Continental camp in winter, the ragged soldiers wrapped in patched clothing owe some of those patches to women they would never meet.

Martha Washington’s name looms large in this part of the story. She spent long stretches of the war visiting her husband in camp, particularly during the winter encampments at Morristown and Valley Forge. There she helped coordinate efforts to provide comfort, clothing, and basic supplies. She visited the sick, organized social gatherings to keep up morale, and generally lent her presence and energy to a battered army. No one called her a Daughter of Liberty in a formal sense, but her work fits the pattern. She used her social position and domestic skills to support a very public, very political cause.

The most organized and visible expression of this female patriotism came in 1780, when morale and money were both collapsing. That is when Esther de Berdt Reed in Philadelphia stepped onto the stage. Reed was London born but thoroughly American in her loyalties. Watching the suffering of Washington’s men, she concluded that women had not yet done everything they could. So she wrote a broadside titled Sentiments of an American Woman and had it printed and distributed. In it she argued that women were animated by the purest patriotism, that they had been born for liberty, and that they could render themselves more really useful by active contributions to the war effort.

The broadside was not just rhetoric. It was the charter for the Ladies Association of Philadelphia. Reed and a group of elite women organized themselves into a fundraising machine. They divided the city into districts, appointed treasurers and collectors, and went door to door asking for donations for the Continental Army. They raised an astonishing sum, more than 300,000 Continental dollars, a figure that sounds more impressive than it spends, given inflation and depreciation, but still represented a vast outpouring of public generosity.

When the women proposed handing the money directly to the soldiers, Washington, ever practical, suggested a different plan. He asked them to buy cloth and have it sewn into shirts, so that each soldier would receive something tangible that came clearly from the women of America. They agreed, and the result was more than 2,200 shirts, each with the maker’s name stitched into it. Imagine being a half frozen private and opening a parcel stamped not with a bureaucratic seal, but with the handwriting of some woman you would never know, who had taken the time to sew for you. That is politics at its most personal.

Tragically, Reed did not live long enough to see the end of the war. She died in 1780, still in her thirties. Leadership of the Ladies Association passed to Sarah Franklin Bache, Benjamin Franklin’s daughter and a committed patriot in her own right, who had already been organizing clothing drives and relief work. Under her direction the association continued its work and provided a template for future female voluntary societies in the early republic.

When the guns finally fell silent in 1783, the question became what to do with all this female political energy. During the previous twenty years, women had made public statements about constitutional rights, signed petitions and pledges, enforced boycotts, raised funds, sewn for the army, acted as spies, and in a few cases fought in battle. They had stepped partially into an arena that the culture had long told them was off limits. For a moment, it looked as though that door might stay open.

Instead, it mostly swung shut again. After 1774, as the resistance movement turned toward formal structures like the Continental Congress and state legislatures, power shifted back into the hands of those who could vote. That meant white men with property. Women, along with free Black people and most poor men, were shunted aside. The language of the Revolution, with its talk of rights and liberty, remained thrilling. The practice of politics settled back into familiar grooves. Historians sometimes call the experiment in female public action during the Revolution stillborn. It had life, but it did not mature into stable, formal political participation for women.

That does not mean nothing changed. Women’s literacy rose. Their sense of themselves as moral guardians of the republic expanded. The ideal of Republican Motherhood, which took hold in the early nineteenth century, argued that women had a duty to raise virtuous citizens. It is a limited vision, but it at least acknowledged that the health of the republic depended on women’s minds and character, not just their labor. Seeds had been planted, even if the soil remained rocky.

Over time, the memory of the Daughters of Liberty and their sisters was reshaped. Some became almost mythic figures, like Molly Pitcher. Others faded into footnotes. In the late nineteenth century, as Americans fell in love with commemorating the Revolution, groups like the Daughters of the American Revolution formed to preserve the memory of patriotic ancestors and to promote civic virtue in their own day. These modern organizations are not direct descendants of the colonial Daughters of Liberty. They are more like grandchildren who have inherited the family photo album and decided to keep the story going. They fund scholarships, maintain historic sites, and lobby for what they see as the health of the nation. They also remind us that the question of how women participate in public life did not end in 1783. It simply changed clothes.

If you strip away the sentimental portraits and the commemorative tea sets, the Daughters of Liberty confronted a very basic problem that has not gone away. What do you do when the official political system tells you that you have no voice, yet the policies that system produces shape your daily life. Their answer was to weaponize the ordinary. They spun cloth where people could see them. They refused sugar and tea. They poured their time and money into an army that did not fully acknowledge them. They wrote broadsides that began to say, in plain terms, that women were born for liberty too.

Were they radicals? In their own eyes, usually not. They spoke in the language of duty and virtue. They insisted that they were upholding order, not overturning it. That is part of why they succeeded as much as they did. They found ways to stretch the rules without completely shattering them. But if you look at the world they inherited and the world they left behind, there is a subtle but significant shift. After them, it was harder to argue that women should never appear in public life. Harder to say that the home was untouched by politics. Harder to pretend that the Revolution belonged only to men in coats and breeches.

The real measure of their work is not whether they were remembered properly in textbooks. It is the fact that boycotts, consumer activism, and voluntary associations led by women are still with us. Whenever someone calls for a boycott over a moral issue, they are walking in the path of those colonial women who locked away their tea caddies. Whenever a neighborhood group raises money for a cause the government is neglecting, they are echoing the Ladies Association that sewed shirts in the heat of a Philadelphia summer.

The Daughters of Liberty did not write the Declaration or serve in the Continental Congress. They did something more subversive. They took the daily grind that society handed them and turned it into a lever. It did not win them equal rights in their own time. That would take another century and more. But they showed that even in a world determined to keep women in their place, women could decide what that place meant. In the quiet war over what liberty would look like in America, they were on the front lines, armed with spinning wheels, teapots, and a stubborn refusal to be silent.

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Breen, T. H. The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence. Oxford University Press, 2004.

Brown, Richard D., and Irene Quenzler Brown. The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler: A Story of Rape, Incest, and Justice in Early America. Harvard University Press, 2003. (Relevant for discussions of women’s public roles and legal norms.)

Bushman, Richard. The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities. Vintage Books, 1993.

Cott, Nancy. The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835. Yale University Press, 1977.

Kerber, Linda. Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America. University of North Carolina Press, 1980.

Norton, Mary Beth. Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800. Cornell University Press, 1980.

Reed, Esther de Berdt. “Sentiments of an American Woman.” Broadside, Philadelphia, 1780.

Zagarri, Rosemarie. Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.

Young, Alfred F. The Shoemaker and the Tea Party. Beacon Press, 2000. (Useful for Sarah Bradlee Fulton and Tea Party connections.)

Adams, Abigail. Selected Letters. Various editions. (Primary source reference for the coffee riot.)

Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650–1750. Vintage, 1991. (Background on domestic labor culture that shaped spinning and household authority.)

Flexner, Eleanor. Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States. Harvard University Press, 1959. (Broad context connecting Revolutionary women to later memory.)

Brooke, John L. The Heart of the Commonwealth: Society and Political Culture in Worcester County, Massachusetts. Cambridge University Press, 1990. (Good context for Prudence Wright and local female militias.)

Donovan, Josephine. Women and the Rise of the Novel, 1405–1726. University of Wisconsin Press, 2013. (Useful for understanding Addison and Steele’s influence on gender ideology.)