Comment: Women at the Center

Abstract: Placing women at the center of the early republic recasts war and nation-building as struggles over household power, property, and authority. Building from Susan Sleeper-Smith’s account of the 1791 Ohio Valley campaign, where Kentucky militiamen, unable to capture Miami, Shawnee, and Delaware women, attacking their wealth instead—plundering jewelry and cloth and burning orchards and fields—violence that galvanized Indigenous alliances and produced Harmar’s Defeat. The essays argue that such conflicts arose when settlers confronted societies where women held political power and when households served as the infrastructure of labor, credit, and governance. They also trace how post-Revolutionary reforms rebranded domesticity as republican order while tightening coverture and erasing legal pluralism that had enabled women’s agency. Case studies of frontier property holders and Black women’s networks reveal uneven openings that systematically closed to secure elite white men’s dominance. From the edges, revolutionary change looks contingent