The Revolutionary Homefront: New England Families and Women’s Lives in Turmoil

Protests over British taxes and policies split neighbors, towns, and families across New England. With the onset of war in April 1775, patriots and loyalists alike launched vigilante actions against local nemeses.  Sometimes, women and children were the intended targets; at other times they suffered collateral damage. Many families felt the necessity to leave their homes under difficult and uncertain conditions.

This talk highlights New England women on the home front whose lives were suddenly or violently disrupted and who wrote about it. Their stories help us grapple with the emotional toll exacted by political strife and war. They foreground the “intimate bodily experience” of much revolutionary-era conflict. And they can divulge the intimate ways in which courtships and marriages were tested or ended amid revolutionary discord.

Cornelia Dayton is the author of books such as Women Before the Bar, Robert Love’s Warnings, and Women’s America: Refocusing the Past, 10th ed (with Linda Kerber et al.).  Her research has uncovered new findings about the life and marriage of poet Phillis Wheatley Peters, as featured in the documentary by Askew Productions, In Search of Phillis Wheatley Peters.  She attended Harvard-Radcliffe and received a PhD from Princeton University.  She teaches courses on ‘vast’ early America, law in US society, women and gender, and Revolutionary Boston at the University of Connecticut.

Funded in part by the Massachusetts Office of Travel and Tourism.