The Four Mothers Movement

The book Revolutionary Mothers, by Carol Berkin is a truth telling and eye opening experience for the reader that shows how the fight for America’s independence affected the role of women. The book reveals the unknown side of women during young America’s first major war, the Revolutionary War. It portrays the very important role women played during war despite the fact that war brought scarcity, bloodshed, and danger into their lives. Women’s lives changed drastically during this time period.

Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America’s Independence by Carol Berkin is a non-fictional expository book about changing women's roles before, during, and after the war. It surrounds various positions of not only White American women but, African American/slave women, distinguished, poor and Native American Women, as well as British women. It first covers pre-war norms, then looks at how the war affected women, and how women affected the war. It looks at various aspects of society, patriot and loyalist points of view, and the impact on slaves and Native Americans.

Revolutionary Mothers is a book written in 2005 by Carol Berkin about women during the struggle for America’s independence. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in women’s history or Revolutionary American history. This book is new in the sense that it has the perspective of the women during the war and not only white women but also Native American women and African American women. She also wrote about the perspective of loyalists and patriots. Revolutionary Mothers was written so that people could learn more about the role women played in the American Revolution.

LeAnne Howe made this book to tell the story of American Indians who fought for their freedom and land from the white men. She featured moments of her life in an effort to include an insight to show that all American Indians, even now, are affected by the allotment of the American Indians. LeAnne Howe even dedicated Miko Kings to “all the American Indians who’ve played the game.” Baseball was a sport that the Indians had been playing for years as a way to pass time and connect the tribes (48) (LeAnne Howe, Miko Kings, 112) in this story. Baseball intertwined with this story because baseball and the events that followed are emblematic of the struggles the American Indians faced in the early 1900s.

The entire Women’s Movement in the United States has been quite extensive. It can be traced back to 1848, when the first women’s rights convention was held in Seneca Falls, New York. After two days of discussions, 100 men and women signed the Declaration of Sentiments. Drafted by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, this document called for equal treatment of women and men under the law and voting rights for women. This gathering set the agenda for the rest of the Women’s Movement long ago (Imbornoni). Over the next 100 years, many women played a part in supporting equal treatment for women, most notably leading to the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, which allowed women the right to vote.

During the American Revolution, men were often thought to have been the only ones to fight and participate in the war. While men were the majority that fought in the actual war, women were left to tend to all of the duties left by men, as well as, their own duties. Women were the backbone of towns, farms, and other businesses during the war. The book, Revolutionary Mothers by Carol Berkin, shares the stories of what women went through during the Revolutionary War. Carol Berkin writes about what all the women, no matter what race or political beliefs, went through during the war, and how these women handled the war.

Throughout Revolutionary Mothers one is reminded of just how the war transformed the role of women transcending them through the limitations that had always defined them. From the first significant role women had in politics which was not in the colonial assemblies but was expressed with their power to say “no” which ensured the success of the boycotts that resulted from the American Revenue Act and the Stamp Act of

“Women were not passive observers, but rather partners with their husbands, brothers, fathers and sons.” Carol Berkin stated the gender roles portrayed throughout the revolutionary war were overly romanticized and usually watered down. While in reality women shared the same roles as the adult males. Revolutionary mothers focus on the roles women played throughout the war. Whether it was different social divisions or different ethnicities, each woman portrayed a real role throughout the war.

“Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America’s Independence” is neither a romantic tale nor an attempt to revise traditional history by making women the pivotal players in war for independence. It does not tell one woman’s story, but many, and not all of those stories end in victory or triumph. The book examines a revolution, or war, that is blurred between the battlefield and the home front. It views the struggle of war through the eyes of women who found themselves willingly and unwillingly, at the center of a prolonged violent conflict.

As the saying goes, “a woman’s work is never done,” but today’s women live a far different life than their predecessors. The women of the revolution were courageous and brave-hearted. The obstacles of their time were far more difficult to overcome than those faced by women in this day and age. Whether it was slavery, war, or racial prejudice, these women kept their heads held high and worked to break down these barriers and create change for the future. On top of having to deal with these hardships, the women of the revolution had families to take care of, mouths to feed, houses to clean, and wounds to heal. For many women of the revolution it was all about taking a stand for their rights and being

With the advancement of suffrage to equal pay, over the last century, women’s rights have progressed immensely. Through historic marches and demonstrations across the United States, women protested for their equal place in politics and social progress. Despite the fear-mongering components used in achieving these rights, women’s rights are still thoroughly debated within society today. Over the last century, incredible and unreachable goals have been fulfilled for women, such as the right to vote and a sense of equal state in the “Free World,” and can only improve in the years to come.

Over a hundred years ago, one event created chaos among gender roles and here are some of the initial factors of how rights for women started as a predicament which later began to evolve into a much larger problem that involved many people around the nations. Over the course of history, many issues had change the world to what it has become today. Many problems led to social, economic, and other changes. One small event is able to cause more obstacles, which eventually leads to larger complications. Even though society had tried to resolve these issues, they still encountered many hardships that were disruptive to their own perspectives as also for other people within the community. Thus, this was an important issue because it had changed

Carol Berkin’s "Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America's Independence" is an excellent book that I immensely enjoyed. When many people think of the Revolutionary War, they might imagine George Washington gallantly leading his men through the winters at Valley Forge or the like. Berkin begins her masterpiece by giving a general overview of the roll that women played in our countries war for independence. Now I, like many others come to think of the iconic role model women like Betsy Ross and the fabled Molly Pitcher, but this star of a book opened my eyes to the everyday

The women’s rights movement was a huge turning point for women because they had succeeded in the altering of their status as a group and changing their lives of countless men and women. Gender, Ideology, and Historical Change: Explaining the Women’s Movement was a great chapter because it explained and analyzed the change and causes of the women’s movement. Elaine Tyler May’s essay, Cold War Ideology and the Rise of Feminism and Women’s Liberation and Sixties Radicalism by Alice Echols both gave important but different opinions and ideas about the women’s movement. Also, the primary sources reflect a number of economic, cultural, political, and demographic influences on the women’s movement. This chapter

The women’s movement began in the nineteenth century when groups of women began to speak out against the feeling of separation, inequality, and limits that seemed to be placed on women because of their sex (Debois 18). By combining two aspects of the past, ante-bellum reform politics and the anti-slavery movement, women were able to gain knowledge of leadership on how to deal with the Women’s Right Movement and with this knowledge led the way to transform women’s social standing (Dubois 23). Similarly, the movement that made the largest impact on American societies of the 1960’s and 1970’s was the Civil Right Movement, which in turn affected the women’s movement (Freeman 513). According to