Remember the Ladies

In listing the causes that impelled the Colonies to declare independence last week, the Continental Congress charged King George III with inciting "domestic insurrections amongst us." It meant Britain's encouragement of Indian attacks upon colonists, but Massachusetts Delegate John Adams says that "another tribe more numerous and powerful than all the rest were grown discontented." The warning in fact came from his spirited wife Abigail, who recently surprised her husband by addressing him in terms less than dutiful: "In the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would remember the ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. If particular care and attention is not paid [us], we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice."

A basic reform of the common-law system--which regards married women as legal nonentities with virtually no property rights--is not likely to come from John Adams, however. He responded to his mutinous wife's "saucy" request with characteristic firmness: "As to your extraordinary code of laws, I cannot but laugh." The delegates, he added, "know better than to repeal our masculine systems" and would fight the "despotism of the petticoat."

By excluding women from direct representation in government, the Congress may be safeguarding the last bastion of exclusively male control in the Colonies. Partly because of widespread labor shortages, American women have by now made inroads into virtually every occupation. A survey of local newspapers reveals advertisements by women blacksmiths, gunsmiths, shoemakers, shipwrights, tinworkers, barbers and butchers. The Virginia Gazette recently carried a notice of an arrest of a runaway slave signed by "Mary Lindsey, gaoler" of Henrico County.

Women's presence in the newspapers is not restricted to the advertisements. At least ten American newspapers have been published by women. From 1767 until her death last year at age 55, Anne Catherine Green, widow of Printer Jonas Green, by whom she bore 14 children, served as printer to the province of Maryland and publisher of its first newspaper, the Maryland Gazette. The province's second newspaper, the Maryland Journal, is also published by a woman: Mary Katherine Goddard. In addition to her editorial work, the indefatigable Miss Goddard, 38, manages Baltimore's busiest printing firm, owns a bookstore, and became city postmaster last year. In her career, Miss Goddard is following the example of her mother, Sarah Updike Goddard, former publisher of the Providence Gazette.

Publishing is by no means the only field in which American women have made significant contributions. Agriculture, for example, has profited immensely by women's innovations. Elinor Laurens of Ansonborough, South Carolina, became the first colonist to cultivate a wide variety of exotic fruits and vegetables--including olives, capers, limes, ginger, guinea grass and Alpine strawberries. The most exceptional female planter, however, is Mrs. Eliza Lucas Pinckney, 53, also of South Carolina. When only a girl, managing her absent father's large plantation with what one friend called "a fertile brain for scheming," Eliza decided to start cultivating West Indian indigo. At first she suffered setbacks from frost and insect blight, but within seven years, she was able to produce an indigo dye of sufficient quality to export to England. Thanks to Eliza's pioneering, indigo was one of the southern colonies' greatest exports last year. South Carolina alone produced a crop worth about -L- 260,000.

Even the ministry, perhaps the most steadfastly male profession in the Colonies, has felt the impact of women. In most denominations, women's place is still in the pew rather than the pulpit, but there are a few notable exceptions. The most remarkable is Mother Ann Lee. "Ann the Word," as she is called, left England with a small band of followers in 1774 and is now establishing a religious community at Nistegaone, New York. The American Shakers--so named because of the tumultuous singing, dancing, shaking and shouting at their services--regard Mother Ann, who reportedly can be inspired to speak in as many as 72 tongues, as the female manifestation of God.

As long as the war continues to aggravate an already acute labor shortage, women will undoubtedly work in an increasingly broad range of occupations, but there are signs that this trend may eventually be reversed. The growing demand for closer regulation of the medical profession, particularly the new emphasis upon credentials from training schools, attended only by men, has already begun to reduce the practice of female doctors and midwives. In England, where guild pressure to regulate the crafts has been strong for over a century, almost no skilled trades remain open to women.

Perhaps the greatest danger to working women, however, is the new cult of sensibility, the maudlin literary fashion that American magazines have recently imported from England. The Royal American Magazine has repeatedly warned women of the dangers they court by taxing their brains with too much learning. Similarly, a sentimentalist writing for the Pennsylvania Magazine advises women not to be too active, too witty or too cheerful. Praise is reserved for the young lady whose "gentle bosom burns,/ Like lamps plac'd near sepulchral urns,/ Or like the glowworm in the night,/ It gleams with melancholy light." Although John Adams is not an avowed adherent of this ethic, its influence is apparent in his recent explanation of why women should be denied the vote: "Their delicacy renders them unfit for practice and experience in the great businesses of life."

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