Isabelle Roughol: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to Broad History, a podcast about the history you think you know with women in it this time. I'm your host, Isabelle Roughol.

All good things must come to an end, and we are closing the curtain on the Women of the American Revolution series today. We are back with Carol Berkin, who opened the series with us seven weeks ago.

Remember, she told us that the most radical thing about the Revolution was the sudden politicization of American women, who got involved in leading boycotts of British goods, weaving homespun cloth, raising funds, and sewing shirts for continental troops, cooking, washing, and nursing for the army, sometimes even picking up a musket or taking up their fallen husband's place at the cannon.

Women ran farms and businesses by themselves. They served as spies and couriers, some disguised as men in order to enlist. They wrote political pamphlets and plays, even a whole history of the Revolution. I wanted to know what became of all [00:01:00] that after 1783, the end of the war, or 1787, the Constitution.

What space was carved out for women in the new United States? To answer that question, here is again Dr. Carol Berkin.

[00:01:14] Start of interview

Isabelle Roughol: Dr. Carol Berkin. Hello and welcome back.

Carol Berkin: Hello, yes.

Isabelle Roughol: We had you on the first episode of the series sort of raising the curtain on the American independence, and we are closing that curtain today.

[00:01:28] The French won the American Revolution

Isabelle Roughol: So we've come to the end of the Revolutionary War. The Patriots win the decisive victory at Yorktown in 1781, and then the British Army of General Cornwallis surrenders and then Parliament kind of loses the will to continue.

And we have the Treaty of Paris in 1783 that seals American independence.

Funny enough, I'm a French woman who also went to school in America. And in America, when you take a history class, America starts in 1776.

Carol Berkin: [00:02:00] Yes.

Isabelle Roughol: And when you take a history class in France, America starts in 1783.

Carol Berkin: And also, by the way, the Americans did not win the American Revolution. The French won the American Revolution

Isabelle Roughol: Thank you for this. I appreciate

it

Carol Berkin: If the French Navy had not blockaded Cornwallis, I, just love it, my students are so stunned to hear that French money, Spanish money,Dutch money financed the war, and the French Navy won the war.

They go, wow, I never learned that in high school.

Isabelle Roughol: Well, it doesn't quite fit with the national narrative, does it? but yeah, it's, it, I mean, we talked in our first conversation about how the Revolutionary War is so interesting in being a revolution and, a war of independence and a civil war. It is also a great state sort of war, a global war in the same way that World War I and World War ii were for sure.

[00:02:54] The rise of girls' education

Isabelle Roughol: So men come home, 1781, 82, [00:03:00] 83, and it's been years and women haven't just, sat around waiting. And as we see in every war, there is the question of what happens next? Do we, do people crave a return to normal? What does normal even mean? Women have been running farms, running shops, running businesses, running families. What happens when the men come home?

Carol Berkin: It's complicated. In many cases, maybe the majority of cases? People do want to return to the pre-war life. There's yearning to get back to what was familiar. The war was so disruptive and so, so, chaotic that people, men and women? Just wanted to go home and be what they were before the war.

For some people that wasn't the case. For some, certainly for some women, [00:04:00] there were thoughts that, let's think about what the war taught us about women. Most of the women who felt that way were members of the elite. That is, they were articulate about what is the role of women, white women is who they meant, white women in a republic.

And this question was raised among what today we would call the intelligentsia. That is some men and many women sat down and thought. The revolution had decimated the old notion of women's capacity.

Women can't think rationally and make moral judgements? Here, they've done that in the American Revolution.

Women can't be brave? Here, they've done that in the American Revolution.

So the question was what function do they have in a republic, which is very different from a [00:05:00] world with a tradition of kingship. And they concluded that women needed to have a civic role. Now notice, not really a political role, but a civic role.

And after they had long discussions, the first thing that the women radicals wanted was an acknowledgement that they were intellectual equals to men, and that the reason they did not seem to be was that they were uneducated. Over and over again, they write, if women were schooled as men were schooled, you would see that they are as capable of high-minded thinking as men.

And so one of the things that they pushed for and that they achieved was the rise of young ladies academies. In every single state from Maine to [00:06:00] Georgia... well, Maine wasn't the state yet. From Massachusetts to Georgia, they set up these academies. It was for elite and upper middle class girls. And since they, I always say, since their administrators were as lazy as administrators everywhere, instead of creating a brand new curriculum, they took the curriculum from boys' prep schools, preps for college? and put them in the girls schools.

So here you have, political science, astronomy, math,history, everything that boys were learning, these girls learned. And it was life changing for these young women.

That's quite uniquely American, isn't it? Because I looked a bit at, at, girls education in Europe and it's very, it's extremely gendered. It's a little bit of English and math, but quite basic. And then it's drawing and music and sewing Well that, [00:07:00] that was in the girls school too. But the basic intellectual curriculum was vigorous. And the girls lived at the school. And if you remember college days, most of your learning was in conversation with other people. What's the meaning of life? Are men and women the same?

All those weighty questions, they had an opportunity to explore. And they were encouraged, in many cases.

[00:07:34] What Abigail Adams did not mean

Carol Berkin: A new idea of marriage had begun to emerge, called companion among the upper classes called companionate marriage, where you not only got married 'cause your wife could do household chores, because these women didn't have to do household chores, they had servants or slaves. But they should be your a male's companion. You should share a lot of ideas in [00:08:00] common. You should share tastes in common.

What we would today call romantic love had been emerging, and the revolution really hothoused that idea. And so women being educated seemed important to these upper classes.

But then what else were they gonna do with that education? They were still just gonna get married and they were still going to be domestic. No changes in the legal system took place.

When Abigail Adams said to her husband, and every school textbook has this, "remember the ladies" and nine out of 10 people in America think she was asking for the vote?

No, she wasn't asking for the vote. She was asking for reform of the laws that were imposed on married women. She wanted [00:09:00] women to have a legal identity. That was one of the principles that these women were after. And they didn't get it. Because if you read the exchange of letters between John Adams and Abigail Adams, there are four of them.

She says, remember the ladies? And he says, oh, how cute. we're not gonna be ruled by the Peco. And she writes back, John, I'm serious. And he, I'm paraphrasing. He writes back, shut up.

So women did not get those kinds of legal rights, but they did get this chance to be educated because of this idea of companion marriage.

[00:09:42] Republican or civic motherhood

Carol Berkin: And also because what was the role of women in Republic? They decided that the role of women was to raise up patriotic children. The next generation had to be [00:10:00] patriotic so that they would be willing to sacrifice their life, their wealth, their sacred honour, if they had to, to save America. That is, they weren't sure America was gonna last.

France was still around on one border. Spain and Indians on the other. England was still north of them. So what if they were invaded? What if there was another threat to the republic? The only thing that would save it was that the next generation rose up and defended America. And they decided that the person in the family, for the first time ever, who would socialise children to their political and social duties, civic duties, would not be the father, which it had always been in the days when they thought women didn't have the brains to do it, and the moral sense to do it. Now, it would be the [00:11:00] mother.

So women would stay in the house, they would remain domestic, but they would have civic duty to raise patriotic sons and daughters. And that's why I prefer to call it civic motherhood, because what they were saying was: " you have... the whole future of the republic is in your hands. You have the most important job there is, and that is to raise the next generation."

And some people call it Republican motherhood. They don't mean the current Republican party, they mean the Republic. Republican motherhood. Some people call it Republican wife hood. Some call it Republican womanhood. I call it civic motherhood.

But the idea was that women had weighty responsibilities to the society as a whole, but it [00:12:00] did not require them to come out of the household. And it did not require them to have legal autonomy, which meant it also didn't require that they have political, formal political power.

[00:12:15] Separate sphere ideology is coming back in the radical right

Isabelle Roughol: It hurts me to say this sounds incredibly current because it's exactly the discourse that we're hearing from the current crop ofparticular part of the American right who seem to think women don't need the right to vote anymore because their power and their influence is exercised in other ways, within their own separate sphere, right? Which...

Carol Berkin: The difference is also dramatic. The women in the early days of the republic were raising their sons and daughters to have a civic responsibility. Today it's to have a familial responsibility. And as you don't hear the [00:13:00] radical right saying, "raise up children who have a sense of responsibility to their community." You hear them saying, "to carry on the traditions of the family religion, to carry on the intensity of family contact."

It's much narrower than what Republican motherhood or civic motherhood ever was. But it entails taking away from women the disruptive political and economic rights that make them independent. You know, this is what leads to divorce. This is what leads to, you know, gay and lesbian life. This is what leads to women, saying, I can be an independent person."

Those things are bad today in to the radical right.

[00:13:52] "Femme couverte"

Carol Berkin: And one of the symbols of that is to go back to the idea that you are under the [00:14:00] protection of your husband, "femme couverte" in effect. That's what trad wife is, femme couverte. And this is a such a step backward for American women, should it come to pass for the majority. Should it become law, people like me... Yes, I agreed. Agreed.

Isabelle Roughol: We, we should mention, just for context really briefly, for people who don't know this, "femme seule", it's from the French, is the sort of the legal status of a single woman. "Femme couverte" is covered. She is covered by her husband essentially and she becomes the legal responsibilityof her husband,

essentially instead of of being her own entity.

Carol Berkin: Right. She loses all autonomy.? It's absolute. Blackstone, I think is the one who wrote, oh, men write about this with such lyric, uh, he says, oh, woman is like a [00:15:00] tiny stream that when merged with a mighty river, loses its identity, but becomes part of the mighty river. In other words, once you get married,

Isabelle Roughol: your husband takes over everything.

Funny how they never have any interest in being the tiny stream themselves.

Carol Berkin: Yes, yes. I did a very early piece on this ideology and I would read ministers and legal experts and everyone saying the same thing. Women don't need to be autonomous. They need to be under the protection and care of their, and I would go into the college library and see male graduate students, and I'd wanna beat all of them up.

I was so angry at, and people and friends of mine would say, "it's not us. It's not us." This was 17th and 18th century. and sadly, shades of it are coming back today. It worries me a [00:16:00] lot.

[00:16:00] From the Revolution to Seneca Falls

Carol Berkin: But this civic authority dies out after the war of 1812 when Americans. Men breathe a sigh of relief. And they say the republic is gonna last, which is ironic since the Civil War comes up just a few decades later.

But, you know, they couldn't, they can't read the future.

But the education of women remains, and it is the radicalising experience of the 19th century. Women not only go to school, some go to women's colleges. But they also become teachers in the primary schools. And so you see a kind of lasting impact of women able to think for themselves.

And in 1848, you have the Seneca [00:17:00] Falls Convention. And my students think, oh, so many years later, I said, you know, in the course of history, it's just a blip. It's a

Isabelle Roughol: just, yeah, it's just grandmother to granddaughter.

Carol Berkin: Yeah. Yeah.

And, and so what the revolution set in motion by acknowledging women's capacity to make moral and rational judgements takes hold in an, in the later era.

So people should not despair at the end of the revolution. Don't be so pessimistic because something is gonna happen later on.

[00:17:44] The exile of loyalist women

Isabelle Roughol: We'll, we'll get to that in a moment. I wanna go slightly back in time, to really just the end of the, of the revolution because, so we talked about what happened to, patriots and the newly minted American women. What happened to loyalists, to women who still thought of themselves as [00:18:00] British? And that would be white loyalists, and also, maybe Black or indigenous women who sought refuge, behind British lines.

Carol Berkin: yeah. The biggest block of loyalists went to Nova Scotia, went to Canada. The loyalists themselves called it Nova Scarcity. I mean, they, it, they had gone to a really, very alien, especially the Southern loyalists, a very, a alien environment. And most of them had gone, though they were given land there, they couldn't farm extensively, the way the growing season was different....

And I mean, the French who had controlled Canada took one look at it and said, fur trapping, fur trading is better than trying to plant. And so they experienced a kind of decline in their economic, positions.

Secondly, the homesickness [00:19:00] was just extraordinary. I wrote my first book about a Massachusetts loyalist who was a powerful attorney general in Massachusetts. And he wound up first taking his family to England, where he discovered that though he was a big fish in Massachusetts, he was a tiny, tiny fish in England. And it was so expensive, and they were so not part of the social elite in England that eventually he went to Nova Scotia.

And he writes so, so longingly of Massachusetts apples, you know, apple trees, and the things that he loved to eat in his native land. And most of the loyalists had that, that generation of loyalists had that longing to go home and those who [00:20:00] could did. The man I wrote about, Jonathan Sewell? Actually went insane and locked himself in his room for 18 months. And when he came out, he blamed the revolution on his wife, poor Esther Sewell. And she endured this abuse, not physical abuse, but this verbal abuse until he died. She was a Quincy. And as soon as he was buried, she went back to Massachusetts into the bosom of her family. And she was lived happily ever after.

And any loyalists who could after the war, you know, 10 years later, started trickling back to what was then the United States. And so there was a kind of disruption of their emotionalstate of mind and a disruption of their [00:21:00] economic opportunities. And so they were not a happy group of people.

Their children, for instance, Sewell had two sons, and they both became attorney generals in Canada. And they were happy to live in Canada. They never left. Their mother left, but they didn't leave.

But I think that you could in some ways think of the loyalists as a lost generation, as a just displaced people who, who did not enjoy their exile.

Isabelle Roughol: Yeah. Typical experience of political exiles and refugees of war. yeah.

yeah. The younger generations get used to the new country and, and the older don't.

Carol Berkin: Don't. Yes, it's true. Not to diminish the feeling of suffering, to say it was typical in all instances, but it is true that that's the feeling of [00:22:00] refugees in most cases.

[00:22:03] The betrayal of Black loyalists[00:22:03] Ad break

Isabelle Roughol: There is a group of women I wanna talk about, because their experience really stands out specifically and that's Black women, who were in most cases enslaved women at the time.

What was their experience of the revolution, which was clearly not about their emancipation, their freedom, but was there a door to freedom there, and how did they experience the war?

Carol Berkin: There's no such thing as all Black women, all enslaved Black women. But they were offered by the British Army from the very beginning, even before independence was declared, the Virginia Governor, Royal Governor, offered Black men their freedom if they would enlist in the British Army. And so those kinds of offers continued by the British Army. Everywhere it went, they said any African American, male or [00:23:00] female who made it to our camp, would be given their freedom. what they really got, and this is... This story has no good ending.

Here's what really happened. Black men who made it to the camp were given all the roughest, hardest. Manual labour jobs. They were under fed and under clothed, and many of them died. The women who made it were under fed, under clothed, and many of them died. Disease spread through their ranks.

So it wasn't that you got to the British army and everything was fine. Many of those who left the plantations never even made it to the encampment because British scouting troops would capture them, put them in irons and sell them to a ship captain who'd carry them to [00:24:00] the Caribbean and put them to work on the sugar plantations, which is automatic death.

Oh, the,

Isabelle Roughol: the treachery of, of asking them to flee and then.

Carol Berkin: Yes. And so, and in addition, and it's true, many women holding the hand of their children, with a baby in their arms, with an elderly mother, made the trek sometimes up 50 miles on foot to get to this promise of freedom.

But many women and Black men as well didn't leave the plantation. You know, there's an expression the devil you know is better than the devil you don't know. They didn't know what lay in store for them if they left. Their grandparents were buried on that plantation. Their elderly parents didn't wanna leave. They knew that world. Their friends were there, [00:25:00] so they stayed, stayed on the plantation.

They weren't cowards. They just didn't trust any white organisation or white man to keep their pledge. And it turned out they were pretty much right.

Isabelle Roughol: They were right. Mm-hmm.

Carol Berkin: When the war ended and the evacuation began of the loyalists, many of the loyalists were either free Black,a sizable proportion are free Blacks, or Blacks who had survived the experience of gaining their freedom.

What happened to them? Not a good story at all. The British didn't have enough naval ships to transport all these loyalists, 15,000 loyalists fromNew York, many from Charleston. And so they hired merchant marine, that is private ships, to take them. The private ships would load Black and white passengers [00:26:00] on, and as soon as they got three miles out into the ocean, the crew would clap the Black people in irons, put them below, deliver the white people, and then take the Black people to the Caribbean and sell them.

When Admiral Birch heard this, he was in charge of the evacuation. He's a very honourable man. The Black people who went to Canada called the main town, Birchtown in his honour. He said, this is dishonourable behaviour. He said, from now on, we are going to keep a record of every Black person who gets on a boat for evacuation. Their name, their description of them, what work they did, how old they were, and if they don't arrive, every one of them in Canada, in Nova Scotia is where they went, you will not be [00:27:00] paid.

As a result of this, ironically, we have something that is commonly known as the Book of Negroes, which is this record of every Black person who is a loyalist, who was evacuated.

And from this, we know more about what Black people did in slavery than practically from anything else. It's ironic that the war produced more, the aftermath of the war produced more information about slavery than practically anything else we have.

When they got to Canada, they had been given land by the British government. The British government behaved honourably to all loyalists. What had, what happened to them? The Episcopal White Church joined with the white loyalists in stealing [00:28:00] that land away from the Black loyalists. Black loyalists were in these ghetto towns, and when they tried to find work in Halifax, they were beaten.

Basically pogroms happened against them. I mean, it's, it's just a terrible, terrible story of racism, partly because remember, many of the loyalists were southern whites. Right. So in 17, I think 97, 98, 1500 Black loyalists from Canada boarded ships and sailed to Africa where they had never been most of them, sailed to Africa, to Liberia, to establish a community.

[00:28:52] The fate of Black Americans who stayed

Carol Berkin: It's such a sad story of the impact of racism. [00:29:00] Equally, it's a sad story about Blacks on the plantations because much tighter rules were passed about slaves ever leaving a plantation. White men on horses rode, uh, policing. If they saw a Black person off a plantation, they immediately captured him, assuming he was trying to run away.

So slaves in the South were under tighter regimes than they had been before. Before the American Revolution, often if your son had been sold to a neighbouring plantation, after the day of work, you could go to that plantation to visit. It was laxer than it was after the revolution. It's just a sad story.

What a terrible, terrible story that is.

[00:29:56] Indigenous women had so much more autonomy and American women knew it

Carol Berkin: Native Americans. It was interesting, most of the [00:30:00] tribes, eastern woodland tribes, because they were agricultural. And because they were agricultural, women had an enormous amount of autonomy because women were the farmers and men were hunters.

And male role in terms of providing food for the family was sort of, "oh, great, you killed a deer, we'll have meat." But it was not, that was not their basic diet. And so women had a lot of autonomy and you can see it. They were matrilineal. That is traced. You traced your legitimacy through your mother, not through your father.

And they were matrilocal, which meant when a couple got married, they went to live in the longhouse or thehome of the mother,not of the husband. The wife went back to live with her family, with her mother. And this led to some [00:31:00] interesting differences with the American patriarchal white women.

If a woman got tired of her husband, native American woman, or didn't like his behaviour, she just put his belongings outside the longhouse and that meant you are done. That's a divorce. And, and, and he had to, he had to go home to his, his people. It's just such a wonderful image when you think about how many Western patriarchal communities made it almost impossible for women to get a divorce.

Isabelle Roughol: Yeah. They would lose their children. They would lose their livelihoods. They,

yeah,

Carol Berkin: Whereas for these women, it was, you know, "go away. I'm tired of you." And women had a strong role in political decision making because if the men decided that they wanted to make a [00:32:00] war or get revenge for something, and the women elders did not think it was a good idea, they said, ""fine, you can go, but we are not giving you any food to take with you."

Isabelle Roughol: Hmm.

Carol Berkin: I mean, you are not being supplied.

Isabelle Roughol: See, they understood, unlike Washington, the importance of women supplying the logistics of war.

Carol Berkin: Exactly. And the proof of the pudding is when white women were captured by, in Indian raids, we have a lot of captivity narratives, and some of them said "it was horrible. They were heathens. I hated it. Thank you for rescuing me."

But many of them found that life among the Indians was a lot better. First of all, you worked in the fields. Yeah. You

Isabelle Roughol: worked

Carol Berkin: in the fields in community with other women. You had autonomy.

And [00:33:00] so when they were redeemed, that is the white community paid the Indians to get the women back from this horrible, captivity, and they would be travelling through the woods to go back to "civilization", and they'd spend overnight in the woods, when they woke up, all the women had gone back to the tribe they came from. They didn't wanna have anything to do with patriarchal society.

[00:33:28] Molly Brandt

Carol Berkin: But in the war, the majority of the Native Americans sided with the British. Just as the loyalists in the South, the white loyalists had said, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend", that is, we hate the planters. They've oppressed us, so we want the British to win. So true too, the Native American said, the enemy of my enemy is my friends. And that their enemy was the [00:34:00] American colonists, who were land grabbers. I mean, that had been the whole history of the relationship right up until the Revolution and after of white people saying, we're taking your land and we'll kill you off. We'll massacre you. We'll cheat you, we'll do any. And Native Americans knew this, and they said to, you know, one another, we have to side with the British government because the British government honours treaties with us. The Americans are gonna steal our property blind. And they were right, of course.

They were absolutely right. The leader of the Mohawks, that is the, one of the major Iroquois groups, was a woman. It was Molly Brandt. Everybody knows about her brother, who was the leader of the Mohawksoldiers and warriors. And, but he didn't have anything to do with political decision, with [00:35:00] diplomacy.

It was Molly Brandt. The British negotiated, if you will keep, basically, the Iroquois group, either neutral or on our side, I will, the British government will promise you land in Canada. And she negotiated that treaty. And we have the accounts from British officers saying, oh, you wanna do X and Y? Don't ask him, ask Molly. She's the one who takes care of all of these things.

It was often also true with the, what Americans called the queens of the Choctaws or the queens of the Cherokees. The native tribes did not have queens or kings or even in most cases, chiefs. They had councils where men came to some kind of an agreement, or women came to some kind of an agreement.

[00:35:54] The Trail of Tears

Carol Berkin: But as soon as the Southern [00:36:00] white farmers could, they began to take Cherokee lands and Choctaw lands, just as the Native Americans knew they would. And it climaxed more or less in the Trail of Tears when the Native Americans in Georgia did everything to assimilate into white society. They men took over farming. The women were confined to the household. They developed a written language. They published a newspaper. And when the Georgia white population decided it wanted to take their land, took their land just like that, and sent them to reservations, a across the Mississippi River.

And so Native America, there were some Native Americans who sided, with the

Americans. But on the whole, native Americans knew that [00:37:00] white American victory in the war would be a disaster for them. And they were 100% right.

Isabelle Roughol: And so of course we know about, the loss of land and the forced migration and the disease and death and spoliation, all of it. within native and indigenous communities, the matrilineal and, and fairly equal in terms of gender role society that you describe, is that transformed by American Revolution? Do they become like very much impacted by white American culture? Yeah. Yeah.

Carol Berkin: Well, it's not that except for these Indians, for instance, in Georgia, who immediately complied with white gender roles, with white religion with, and you see what it got 'em, nothing. The Indians on the border were either massacred or driven farther west or cheated outta their land and [00:38:00] it disrupted Indian society completely.

Isabelle Roughol: So you get sort of that cultural destruction or cultural at the same time.

Carol Berkin: Thecultural destruction was pretty extensive.

[00:38:11] America's birth myth

Carol Berkin: And, and so you most people talk about something called the American Revolution, that's inaccurate. There were revolutions, it's like a Venn diagram. African Americans were fighting for exactly the same thing that white American... Liberty and freedom! African Americans were fighting for that often against the very people we call the Patriots, you know, slave owners, Patrick Henry, Thomas, Jefferson, James Madison, all owned slaves.

Isabelle Roughol: George Washington. Yeah.

Carol Berkin: George Washington.

You see that they're hoping for their liberty and freedom.

Native Americans are fighting to preserve [00:39:00] their culture for their liberty and their freedom and they're fighting against white Americans. And so you've got three... And loyalists who are white, are fighting for their liberty and their right to be loyal to the king.

So you've got four groups of people at odds with one another, all fighting for the same thing. That is the words,the principles, the ideology is the same. The outcome of it vastly different. And so it's such a complicated, complex episode in human history, and it defies the image of All the Americans fought for independence and freedom, and then they wrote a constitution and they lived happily ever after.

It defies reality and why that story [00:40:00] persists is just so surprising to me when the real story is so complicated and so rich and so filled with tragedy and with heroism and with blind luck and with international involvement. It's got everything.

Isabelle Roughol: You've got the history, I mean the, the history you're describing, and then you've got the national narrative that serves the purposes that it needs to serve.

Carol Berkin: I call it the birth myth. And I say every country has a birth myth. You know, Rome, Italy, twins raised by wolves, right? Romulus and Remus. Ireland has St. Patrick getting rid of all the rats. Germany has Frederick Barbarosa, I mean, all countries have them. But, this country is adamantly holding on to that birth myth that so, so [00:41:00] starves the American revolution of its complexity that, if I ruled the world, it would be different.

[00:41:09] The Revolution, 250 years on

Isabelle Roughol: Oh, if women ruled the world... well that's, a wonderful segue into sort of what I wanted to end this conversation on, because obviously, and that's the reason behind this series, we're celebrating the semi quincentennial, of the American Revolution in American Declaration of Independence this summer.

And of course, those celebrations really encapsulate that birth myth, if ever I've seen it. You know, we're, were really, were so far from actual history in some of the stories that we're hearing and obviously the way that those celebrations are being used politicallyby the current administration.

And so I wonder, how you think about that and why putting women back in the story of the revolution feels so important right now and sort of what the summer's celebrations evoke for you?

Carol Berkin: How I feel about it, [00:42:00] it makes me cry. I mean, if you're a historian of the 18th century, they're ripping your heart out with every, you know, with every.But I think what we can do, I mean, I can't overthrow the government and have no inclination to try, that is violently, certainly in the voting booth I try.

But I think what historians can do, what our sacred duty is to keep telling the story properly. Keep writing, keep talking. that's why I do shows like this. That's why I wrote Revolutionary Mothers. That's why I go to speak anywhere, libraries, schools. I do my best. And I know most historians, women's historians do their best, to try to [00:43:00] interject that complexity into the story wherever they can.

And that complexity, the entry point for us is the role of women in the American Revolution. And so I often quote to audiences, Alice through the Looking glass, she's on a chessboard with the white knight and they're running and running and running and they're not getting anywhere. And she says to him, we're running and running and we are not moving.

And he says, yes, sometimes you have to run twice as fast just to stay in the same place. And I think that's sort of where we are at the moment. We have to run twice as fast to prevent anything worse from happening. [00:44:00]

Isabelle Roughol: Well,

Carol Berkin: I hate to end on a depressing note, but.

Isabelle Roughol: no, no. Not at all. I think, I think you make a great point about the importance of continuing to tell the story. It, it's something I, I say often is, um, not every battle can be won, but they still need to be fought because you only lose when you stop

Carol Berkin: good.

Isabelle Roughol: So, um, thank you so much for giving us two hours of your time to tell that story properly. I am so grateful for your time.

Carol Berkin: so, and thanks for this show that you're going to do because we, we really, we really need it. We need every voice that is available to tell the world what really happened and what can happen. So thank you.

Isabelle Roughol: Thank you so much.

[00:44:50] Outro

Isabelle Roughol: That was the great Carol Berkin. Her book, "Revolutionary Mothers," is available like all the other books in this series in the Broad History bookstore. Both [00:45:00] US and UK links are in the show notes and at broadhistory.com.

We have come to the end, my friends, of this series. I think we've talked about the American Revolution quite enough.

I want to thank Carol Berkin for carrying two of these seven episodes, as well as our other guests who shared their expertise with such generosity: Woody Holton, Amanda Vaill, Errin Haines, Vin Carretta, and Rosemarie Zagarri. Thank you so much. I had such a blast exploring the Revolution with you all. I learned a lot, and I hope you did, too.

If you're watching this in video, which by the way, you can do now on Apple Podcasts or on YouTube, soon on Spotify, and you think I look tired, well, yes. This has been fun. Let's never do it again. Seven hour-long episodes in seven weeks produced entirely by myself outside my day job, that was a lot. I need a holiday.

In fact, with the magic of scheduling, as you're watching this, my two weeks are up and I'm back at my desk on Monday, hopefully more rested, and I'll be working on the [00:46:00] autumn series. I'm not telling you what that is yet, but I'm so excited about the topic. I think it'll be the best one yet.

If you've enjoyed Broad History, if you want to support this work, maybe help me commission an editor so I get more sleep, you can become a member or make a small donation at broadhistory.com/membership. It really helps me so much, and members will receive word of the new series first. They will receive the whole series, in fact, first, early, and ad free.

Even if you can't support right now, make sure to sign up for the newsletter at broadhistory.com. It's completely free, and you can follow me on Instagram. That's where I'll announce the next series, and I'll keep you in the loop of my work over the next few weeks as the podcast goes on hiatus and I prepare the next series.

I wanna take you along to the research and producing work. The podcast does go on a short hiatus, but it is coming back, so make sure to hit follow in your podcasting app so you don't miss the next drop. There will be several one-off episodes that I'm already preparing and scheduling [00:47:00] before the next big series, so I won't be gone very long.

Until then, this has been Broad History, and I've been your host, Isabelle Roughol. Music by Aaron Kenny. I'll talk to you very soon.