In Dependence: Women and the Patriarchal State in Revolutionary America by Jacqueline Beatty (review)

Reviewed by: In Dependence: Women and the Patriarchal State in Revolutionary America by Jacqueline Beatty Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor In Dependence: Women and the Patriarchal State in Revolutionary America. By Jacqueline Beatty. Early American Places. New York: New York University Press, 2023. 271 pages. Cloth, ebook. The Declaration of Independence, according to Jacqueline Beatty, marked the end of dependence as a form of belonging and the rise of dependence as subordination. The consequences for political rhetoric are well-known: American revolutionaries asserted their rights as independent individuals who constituted an independent polity beholden to no empire. But the rhetoric of dependence, Beatty argues in In Dependence: Women and the Patriarchal State in Revolutionary America, was no less important, particularly for women navigating economic and social uncertainty in the decades surrounding the American Revolution. Her fascinating study explores the multiple ways Black and white women used and were used by the idea of dependence in the new independent nation. To investigate women's rhetoric, Beatty turns to their petitions to legislatures and county courts, and in this choice she builds on the work of generations of historians of women and gender who have examined petitions as expressions of the voice of the disenfranchised and as evidence of the many ways subordinate people engaged with public authorities.1 Petitions, as formulaic requests that situated the petitioner in a position of appealing to the powerful, were a common tool for diverse ends: a request by a free woman to join her loyalist husband in occupied wartime New York, a plea from an abused woman for legal divorce from her spouse, the entreaty of a poor mother to receive charitable support. Embedded within these petitions for money, mobility, or relief were, scholars have argued, expressions of subjectivity. Linda K. Kerber's influential analysis of the petition of Rachel Wells, End Page 431 a New Jersey widow who struggled to win repayment on her war bonds, proposed that Wells's petition is evidence of political consciousness otherwise seldom tracked in the words of women in the revolutionary era.2 Yet where Kerber identified the genre of the petition itself as pre-political and structured around subordinate status (designed for those who did not vote, legislate, or sue), Beatty finds enough assertive language in the (sometimes unsuccessful) petitions to argue that a variety of petitioning performances were possible, even within the strictures of the form. With insightful precision, her fine-grained analyses of these texts reveal canny strategies. She argues that women who deployed the familiar tropes of weakness in dependence were not unthinking victims of prescriptive literature; rather, they understood that using these tropes was the key to gaining power (however compromised) and whatever autonomy they could claim for themselves. She concludes that "petitions can be viewed as an expression of women's agency through the exploitation of their subordinate status in a way that inherently and ironically rejects this status" (11). The first half of the book explores the ubiquity of dependency language in women's petitions and the ways dependency became interwoven with ideas about white masculinity and femininity. Married women repeatedly professed ignorance and helplessness in seeking protection, if not from a spouse, then from patriot governments. Yet dependency cut both ways politically, and white women understood how to wield it while pursuing their material interests. In the case of wives of loyalists, for example, some portrayed themselves as dependent victims of the political decisions made by their husbands; others claimed that their own dependent needs had forced their husbands into reluctant loyalism. The only rescue from these webs of dependency, petitioning women insisted, would come from the state, in the form of property rights, abated fines, and remitted wages. Along the way, women sometimes embedded a critique of the system's cruelties and inconsistencies within their protestations of dependence. Divorce petitions used "declarations of dependence" (46) that claimed free women's own willing subordination and obedience while pointedly describing their husbands' failures to protect and provide financially. In two chapters that explore the different legal contexts for separate estates, marriage settlements, and divorce in the cities of Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston, Beatty uses the rhetoric of dependence to explore...