Rogue History

- On a hot July day in 1777, about 100 women gathered outside the warehouse of a Boston merchant to confront him about his coffee and sugar prices.

Many American merchants were unable to resist the price gouging opportunities created by the revolution, but these ladies weren't having it.

As a crowd of men watched in awe, the women grabbed the merchant by the throat, threw him into a wagon, and took the coffee he refused to sell.

You see, this was no mere protest, it was a riot, and it wouldn't be the last where the ladies took charge.

I'm Joel Cook, and this is "Rogue History."

So how did we get to the point in the revolution where women were leading riots against their fellow Americans?

Well, it all started over a decade earlier with the British taxes and American boycotts most of us learned about in school.

But what you may not have realized is that women who managed households and sometimes businesses played a big part in making the boycotts happen.

The Boston-based Daughters of Liberty got the party started in 1765 by popularizing the idea of boycotting paper goods like newspapers and pamphlets.

That might not seem like a big deal to you or me, but it would be the equivalent of us boycotting smartphones and social media today.

The boycotts forced the British to repeal the Stamp Act after less than a year, but the British just didn't know when to quit.

They immediately passed the Declaratory Act, which stated that they had absolute authority to make laws in the colonies, and followed that up with the Townshend Acts in 1767.

These new acts included a tax on various important goods, including textiles.

Want a fancy silk shirt or a new pair of trousers?

Got to pay a tax on it.

But Americans were able to boycott British clothing because so many American women sustained the homespun movement, a collective effort to produce homemade fabric instead of purchasing it from importers.

The British were once again forced to cancel a tax thanks to the ladies.

But on March 5th, 1770, the same day Parliament repealed the Townshend Acts, Crispus Attucks and four others were killed in the Boston Massacre.

Things were heating up in the colonies.

It would be three years before Parliament once again tried a financial move in America.

The Tea Act undercut domestic tea sellers and smugglers, and the Daughters of Liberty inspired the Boston Tea Party in response.

Meanwhile, in Edenton, North Carolina, a different group of women also took a swing at British authority.

In October of 1774, 51 women signed their names to a boycott of British goods.

And just to make sure the point got across, they mailed the document that would come to be known as the Edenton Resolves directly to the London papers.

Of course, most of them had the same names, so the British were probably a little confused about who to target.

But the bravery of two Margarets, five Annes, seven Sarahs, nine Marys, and 12 Elizabeths, plus the other 16 signers, put the British on notice that the revolution would include the ladies.

That's kind of the catch though.

All of those Sarahs and Marys and Elizabeths were ladies.

At this stage, there were no Maeves, no Onatas, and definitely no Folashades at those revolutionary tea parties.

The early phases of the revolution were led by upper-class men and women who proved in the end that they weren't all that excited about extending those rights and respect to working-class people.

When the war began in 1775, people quickly realized that they were fighting for their independence from upper-class patriots just as much as the British.

And the women of the working class weren't about to stop at just boycotts and declarations.

The thing about a boycott is that prolonged, it can start hurting the people doing the boycotting.

And in the American colonies, that's exactly what happened.

Take salt, for example.

Though unseasoned food is a valid enough reason for wanting to fight, access to salt in the 18th century was essential to life.

It was needed for baking bread, keeping livestock healthy, and preserving the food the colonies depended on for survival.

So when a 1774 nationwide boycott of British goods limited access to salt from Great Britain and Ireland, a salt faminebroke out the following year in several colonies, and things started to get a little touchy.

In parts of the South, the Continental Army tried to confiscate the remaining salt for their soldiers and animals, but people weren't having it.

North Carolinians were so outraged by the confiscations that a military leader and his volunteers had to stop a riot in what's now Fayetteville, North Carolina, by handing out small supplies of salt.

Now, if you're from North Carolina, you're not at all surprised that my hometown would be the one that set it off.

But similar incidents occurred in Maryland around the same time.

By mid-1776, American crowds were fully immersed in what we could describe collectively as food riots.

When American merchants tried to argue that food shortages dictated higher prices on what was available, the crowds threatened them with outright violence and sometimes followed through on those threats.

They broke into tea and coffee warehouses, blocked food wagons, and snatched sugar stores intended for the army.

What stuck out about these riots though was the women who made up nearly 1/3 of the people leading the resistance.

And while hunger was definitely a driving factor in their actions, so too was the revolution itself.

After conducting a citizen's arrest of three men who refused to join them, a group of women in Fishkill, New York organized a price riot against a greedy merchant.

But the truly remarkable part of their actions was that they claimed to be operating in the name of the revolution.

Instead of paying the merchant, they set their own lower price and sent the proceeds to their local revolutionary committee, and they weren't the only ones.

Groups of women across the colonies repeated this behavior many times, either chasing off or physically subduing a greedy merchant, confiscating goods, and setting their own affordable prices for them.

For 18th century women who were almost all perceived as dependents who maintained the home and handled peaceful domestic work, this was radical behavior.

They couldn't officially vote, but they still made their voices heard.

Through these riots, women and Americans in general demonstrated that they had been radicalized by the revolution's principles, and they intended to force the upper-class Americans who promoted them to live up to what they had preached.

But despite their own Boston tea tossing, literal shots fired behavior against the British, revolutionary authorities now chastised the people instead of backing them up.

Some surely understood the cause and even sympathized with it, but they encouraged the rioters to go to the courts instead of taking matters into their own hands.

But the rioters were only upholding their rights within what British social historian E.P.

Thompson described as a moral economy, an economic system governed by fair, equitable, affordable relationships between the people and the market system.

More simply put, authorities shouldn't kick folks when they're down by raising prices when times are already hard.

No more high prices on coffee or eggs or toilet paper.

Wait, sorry.

Let me get back to the revolution.

The most immediate effect of the food riots was that merchants agreed to voluntary price limits, hoping that these limits would prevent any further negotiations about their wares.

Both the boycotts and the riots helped push America towards independence in the 1780s, but their contributions to the revolution didn't mean those women got the agency they wanted.

Higher class women, like the Daughters of Liberty and Edenton ladies, endured criticism from the British who described them as impolite, hypocritical, and even went so far as to call them bad mothers.

The famous image of the Edenton Tea Party, mocking title in itself, made those women out to be manly and somewhat unhinged.

By enduring this, their actions did earn them the respect of revolutionary men, but they were still expected to uphold feminine qualities.

The homespun movement and various boycotts fit within the social demands placed on both men and women during the revolutionary era.

But in the new American Republic of the 1780s and 1790s, White women in particular were idealized as the primary source of patriotism and morality.

They were forced even more so than before into the narrow idea that women could only be mothers and wives whose sole responsibility was to guide patriotic husbands and raise patriotic sons.

More direct actions like those of Boston's warehouse raiders didn't fall into any of those categories.

While Abigail Adams described them as a new set of mobility, her husband, future President John Adams, condescendingly noted that he was amused by female frolic.

Even worse, he literally pumpkin-spice-latte'd the movement by implying that the women rioted because they were addicted to coffee.

Imagine being one of the primary reasons for fair and affordable pricing in a brand new country, and some guy with a law degree claims you did it just for the small treat economy.

The food riots also motivated the mostly upper-class leadership of the new United States to discourage collective action.

They could understand the benefit when they themselves were rebelling against a foreign government, but now they were the government.

And it's never as fun being on the receiving end of a riot.

Voting was strongly encouraged instead and still remains a highly effective tool in our democracy today.

But in a society where women couldn't vote, these protests made their voices heard.

It would take generations of women of all classes and cultures fighting towards representation before the promise of the revolution fully arrived for them.

Like so many other people we've covered on this journey through the American Revolution, the stories of these patriotic women make one thing exceptionally clear: Our nation's founding story is both incredible and contradictory.

We owe our place as the first modern democracy in the world to a group of remarkable men, and yet we must reject so much of what they believe in order to fulfill their revolution's promise.

It is through the actions of people like these rebellious women, like Thomas Peters or King Philip or Herman Husband, that we have continued to march closer and closer towards completing the revolution that started all those years ago.

And it is through the good works of everyday people like you and me that we eventually will.

Till next time.

(dramatic music)