What is this site?

This is a site for students to learn about history through discovery. The site includes a small online archive of women's poetry, letters, images, songs, speeches, and declarations. By examining these resources, and the "questions to ponder," students may gather information about the ways nineteenth-century women used "liberty rhetoric" to argue for changes in their worlds.

What is "Liberty Rhetoric"?

"Liberty Rhetoric" is a tradition of speaking about the relationship between the state and the citizen. You are probably already familiar with Liberty Rhetoric if you know such Americanisms as "Live Free or Die," or "Give me liberty or give me death," or "Don't Tread on Me," or "Land of the Free," or "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness."

Why is Liberty Rhetoric Significant?

For Americans during the Revolution, Liberty Rhetoric became a powerful way to identify oneself as a Citizen, separate from and better than any British subject.

Different groups in early American history used Liberty Rhetoric to assert their interests in different ways. Making the argument that you were carrying on the real tradition of the American Revolution became a very important bargaining point in American culture. Workers, African-Americans, immigrants, and women all used Liberty Rhetoric to demand equal citizenship.

The purpose of this website is to provide an introduction to the ways in which some American women used Liberty Rhetoric to argue for their rights as citizens of the United States long before they gained the vote. In this website, you will examine several examples of women's use of Liberty Rhetoric for a variety of goals.

This site focuses on three major topics:

The Origins of Liberty Rhetoric in the Revolutionary Tradition;

Uses of Liberty Rhetoric Among Lowell Mill Girls;

and The 1848 Declaration of Sentiments as an Expression of the Tradition of Liberty Rhetoric.

By tracing Liberty Rhetoric in two examples of important nineteenth-century women's collective actions--the Lowell Mill Strikes of the 1830s and the Seneca Falls Convention--you can begin to understand the sources for women's civic feminism in the period.

For a first-hand overview of the Lowell experience, see Harriet Hanson Robinson's account of her life in the mills, published as "Early Factory Labor in New England," in Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor, Fourteenth Annual Report (Boston: Wright & Potter, 1883), pp. 380-82, 387-88, 391-92. Robinson's account provided online by the Modern History Sourcebook (also mirrored locally).

For an idea of how these issues could be expanded to address African-American women, see: How did African-American Women define their citizenship at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893?, a site prepared by Erin Shaughnessy, State University of New York at Binghamton.


This site prepared by Professor Catherine Lavender, Department of History, The College of Staten Island/CUNY, <lavender@postbox.csi.cuny.edu>. Last updated: Monday, 19 April 1999.

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