Summary Of Liberty's Daughters By Mary Beth Norton

The revolutionary changes that took place in the 1970s lead to many new ways of thinking and new fields of study, one of which was women’s studies. After such a change, the academic world was flooded with new perspectives and studies on the positions of women throughout American history and how that position had changed over time. One such examination was done by Mary Beth Norton in her book Liberty’s Daughters, a detailed examination of the roles of women during colonial times and how their roles were to change due to the American Revolution. To get a full picture of the roles during this period, Norton turns to the women themselves, using their letters, diaries, memoirs, and other such materials in order to get a full grasp as to what their lives were like before and after the war. Norton contends that the lives of women should have been drastically changed after the
Koehler agrees that Norton uses enough evidence from many varying sources to show that the changes that took place were in fact private versus outwardly public, but he claims that she does not pay enough attention to the very diverse colonial populations in her searches for evidence, such as the Irish, Scottish, Germans, Jews, etc. Additionally, Koehler claims that Norton does not pay enough attention to classes and draws too broad a conclusion from the writings of the upper or middling classes of the time and if she had focused solely on those classes her book would have been better for it. In Norton’s defense, it was very likely that attaining written sources from the lower classes or other diverse populations would have been very hard to do considering the era and the lack of education in the lower