Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women 1750-1800

By: Mary Norton

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Synopsis: While the men were making the history you read in school, this is what the women were doing and thinking during the 1760s 70s 80s and 90s. Norton's] first concern ... is to trace the decline of patriarchy; the growth of free choice of a spouse; the rise of marital equality; . . . the greater equality in educational attainments; the more intense concern of parents for the proper education of children; the greater permissiveness in child- rearing; and the increased cooperation between spouses in birth control. . . . [Her] fascinating documentation, drawn from a vast range of manuscript sources, establishes the facts beyond any reasonable doubt. . . . Norton suggests that the change resulted from . . . two factors. The first was the practical experience of women during the long years of revolutionary upheaval. .. . The second . . . was the impact of egalitarian and republican ideology."-Lawrence Stone, New York Times Book Review "Liberty's Daughters represents social history on a grand scale, imaginatively conceived and massively researched. Norton brilliantly portrays a dramatic transformation of women's private lives in the wake of the Revolution. This is a fascinating human story; Norton tells it marvelously well, with lively anecdotes and revealing details from the personal papers of some 450 eighteenth-century families." - Robert A. Gross, William and Mary Quarterly