American Revolution How Did the American Revolution

American Revolution How Did the American Revolution Impact Women Many issues are difficult to research in history because there is only a limited amount of documentation that is available. Much of historical documentation often focuses on the people with exceptional positions in society that have influenced the course of history. As a result there is a limited amount of material that focuses on the daily lives of ordinary people as well as those who have been marginalized in socioeconomic status.

Thus historians have to sometimes be creative to find records that can provide insights. The role of women in the American Revolution and its influence on women's suffrage are great examples of difficult topics to research. This paper will compare two different approaches to understanding issues that are difficult to research. One interesting historical fact is that New Jersey was one of the pioneers on the issue of women's suffrage as it did not specify gender as a basis for representation in the state's constitution.

While other state's made provisions that specified gender a prerequisite for voting and political participation, in 1776 New Jersey ignored any gender barriers in its suffrage clause in its constitution (Klinghoffer & Elkis, 1992). This led to a situation in which women were able to participate in the political system to a much greater extent than other states. However, this period was brief and ended in 1807 when the women were disenfranchised from the system and this participation is documented and can offer historical insights into the life of women in the period.

Another interesting approach to providing information on women and family life in the colonial era in the late eighteenth-century American family life has been gained by considering the records of the loyalist after the war. Among the 3,225 loyalists who presented claims to the British government after the war were 468 American refugee women and the documents contain many private letters and other evidence that offer verbatim records of different female perspectives (Norton, 1976).

These documents were primarily used to study opinions of loyalists, however their more indirect value to studying the female perspective in America was largely ignored until fairly recently. Many of the records that were produced by these means deal with the women's statement of family affairs such as record keeping and economic household duties. Many of the records that were presented to the commission illustrate that many women were ignorant of the family's financial affairs or what the value of a home was or the monies owed towards its value.

Despite this being the general trend in the records, there were some examples in which women could specifically cite a fair market value of the homes that they lost as well as detailed accounts of the family's finances. Therefore, the cases that were presented to the commission represent a detailed account of many different female perspectives in the period and can serve as a clever and indirect method of understanding family life after the war.

Another interesting study has looked at the etymology of the concept of virtue for both genders independent at the time of the revolution. For females, the concept of virtue generally was used to represent a women's pureness sexually and her loyalty her husband (Bloch, 1987). However, for men the word represented an entirely different concept altogether. For the men the term generally applied to their engagement in the political system as a means to fulfilling a "civic" virtue.

Thus by studying the use of various concepts of the period, one can use the discourse to provide various insights about the ideology of the period in addition to gender roles that were prevalent. Each of these cases represents something of an indirect way to provide insights into certain.