Women's Role in the Boston Tea Party and Revolution
This paper examines the often-overlooked contributions of women to the Boston Tea Party and the broader American Revolutionary movement. Drawing on historical sources, it traces how colonial women used economic boycotts, anonymous political writing, and direct action to resist British taxation. The paper highlights the Daughters of Liberty, the Edenton Proclamation, and the role of Sarah Bradlee Fulton in planning the Boston Tea Party. Despite their significant contributions, women were excluded from formal political bodies such as the Continental Congress, yet their activism proved indispensable to the patriot cause.
- Women and Colonial Political Resistance: Women's overlooked entry into revolutionary activism
- The Daughters of Liberty and Economic Boycotts: Boycotts, homespun cloth, and Edenton Proclamation
- Liberty Tea and Everyday Acts of Defiance: Substituting local plants for British tea
- Women's Role in the Boston Tea Party Itself: Sarah Bradlee Fulton and the Tea Party plot
- Recognition Without Political Power: Women praised but excluded from formal politics
- Conclusion: Women's Legacy in the Revolutionary Era: Marshall's tribute and women's enduring revolutionary legacy
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What makes this paper effective
- Uses primary-source quotations — including Abigail Adams's firsthand account and Chief Justice John Marshall's tribute — to ground historical claims in period voices.
- Incorporates an original period poem (American Daughters of Liberty) to illustrate women's self-awareness as political actors, adding literary texture to historical argument.
- Balances broad patterns (boycotts, spinning bees) with memorable specific examples (nine-year-old Susan Boudinot tossing tea out a window) to make the argument vivid and memorable.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper employs the technique of recovery history — systematically surfacing evidence of a group whose contributions have been marginalized in standard accounts. Rather than arguing abstractly that women "mattered," it builds a cumulative case through specific actors, documented actions, and period testimony, letting the evidence speak before drawing its conclusions.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens by framing women's exclusion from formal politics, then moves through escalating forms of female resistance: written protest, economic boycotts, the Edenton Proclamation, everyday substitution of liberty tea, and finally direct physical involvement in the Tea Party plot itself. It closes by acknowledging the paradox that male patriots praised women's contributions while denying them any formal political role, reinforced by Marshall's 1804 tribute.
Women and Colonial Political Resistance
When John Adams was participating in the Continental Congress and helping to form a new government that would exclude women, his wife Abigail wrote to him about a new American phenomenon: the female mob. Women, although expected to stay out of the affairs of men — especially those concerning a possible revolution — were doing their share of breaking away from mother England and declaring independence. In fact, although they receive little recognition, women were directly involved with the Boston Tea Party. This historic event might have gone differently had the "fairer sex" not participated.
Women were not permitted to vote or fight before or during the American Revolutionary War for Independence. Yet they found other ways to lend their support to the colonial fight for freedom. To resist the British, these women used the primary power available to their gender: they had the right to choose what products they would buy and what items they would boycott. In addition, many women became politically involved by writing opinionated letters, essays, and poems and sending them anonymously to local newspapers. One anonymous poem in the 1768 Pennsylvania Gazette declared, "Let the Daughters of Liberty nobly arise." It is believed to have been written by a Quaker woman from Philadelphia. Women were calling on one another to stand up and participate.
The first several stanzas of that poem, reproduced below, criticized colonial men for not doing more to oppose unfair British laws:
American Daughters of Liberty
If the sons, so degenerate! The blessings despise,
Let the Daughters of Liberty nobly arise;
And though we've no voice but a negative here,
The use of the taxables, let us forbear:
Then merchants import till your stores are all full,
May the buyers be few, and your traffic be dull!
Stand firmly resolv'd, and bid Grenville to see,
That rather than freedom we part with our tea,
And well as we love the dear draught when a-dry,
As American Patriots our taste we deny.
The Daughters of Liberty and Economic Boycotts
Women fought the British Stamp Act, which stipulated that colonial citizens had to pay a tax on all printed paper, including newspapers, marriage licenses, and playing cards. When the Stamp Act was repealed, the British began taxing new items such as paint, shoes, and clothes. Once again, the Daughters of Liberty boycotted the goods. Those who had previously purchased British fabric began to raise sheep, spin their own thread, and weave cloth, proudly wearing these homespun clothes as a symbol of their strength. A leader of the Daughters of Liberty from Massachusetts wrote of this new clothing: "I hope there are none of us but would sooner wrap ourselves in wool and goatskin than buy English goods of a people who have insulted us in such a scandalous way."
In Edenton, North Carolina, a group of fifty-one women signed a document now known as the Edenton Proclamation, announcing a ban on British tea and cloth. The female signers stated that they had the right and duty to take part in the political events of the day. Since English political history provided no guidelines on how women could exercise political rights, the Edenton activists simply declared that they had such rights and intended to use them. Some historians argue that the decisions these women made as consumers may have been as consequential as those men made when they picked up their guns.
Liberty Tea and Everyday Acts of Defiance
When the Tea Act was established in 1773 — allowing British merchants to sell tea in the colonies for less money than other vendors — many women refused to buy tea at all. Since English tea could not be grown in America, they turned to local plants such as raspberry and mint leaves, verbena, lemon balm, roses, violets, and goldenrod to brew what they called "liberty tea." Another popular hot drink was made from a New Jersey plant aptly named Ceanothus americanus.
Even the daughters of the Daughters of Liberty followed their mothers' example. Nine-year-old Susan Boudinot was offered a cup of tea while visiting the royal governor of New Jersey. She accepted the cup, raised it to her lips, and — upon realizing it was British tea — curtsied politely and tossed it out the window.
Most importantly, the Daughters of Liberty acted as both role models and enforcers of the patriotic message, ensuring that their fellow women would also observe the import ban. As they joined the Sons of Liberty in meetings and marches, these patriotic women often engaged in physical confrontations with Loyalists. Writing to her husband after the Revolutionary War had begun, Abigail Adams described the siege of storeowner Thomas Boylston, who had been charging exorbitant prices:
Number of Females some say a hundred, some say more assembled with a cart and trucks, marchd down to the Ware House and demanded the keys, which he refused to deliver, upon which one of them seazd him by his Neck and tossd him into the cart. Upon his finding no Quarter he deliverd the keys, when they tipd up the cart and discharged him, then opend the Warehouse, Hoisted out the Coffe themselves, put it into the trucks and drove off.
Conclusion: Women's Legacy in the Revolutionary Era
Male patriots acknowledged the importance of the actions of the Daughters of Liberty, but they made no effort to share political power with women. No women attended the state congresses or the Continental Congress to consider the next actions to be taken against the British. However, women continued to make their mark and were just as involved with the Revolutionary War itself as they had been in the events preceding it. Chief Justice John Marshall captured their contributions in 1804:
Revolutionary women... shared with cheerfulness and gaiety privations and sufferings to which the situation of their country exposed them. In every stage of this severe trial, they displayed virtues that have not always been attributed to their sex. With a ready acquiescence, with a firmness always cheerful, and a constancy that never lamented all the sacrifices... they yielded up the conveniences furnished by wealth and commerce, consenting to share the produce of their labour. They even gave up without regret a considerable portion of the covering designed for their own families, to supply the wants of a distressed soldiery; and heroically suppressed the involuntary sigh which the departure of their brothers, sons and husbands for camp, rendered from their bosoms.
Works Cited
Berkin, Carol. Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America's Independence. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005.
Errikkila, Betsy. "Revolutionary Women." Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 6 (1987): 189–223.
Hennessey, Gail. "Have a Cup of Tea?" Appleseeds 8 (2005): 21.
Hymowitz, Carol, and Michaele Weissman. The History of Women in America. 21 Sept. 2007.
Levin, Phyllis Lee. Abigail Adams: A Biography. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987.
Spatz, Virginia. "Out the Window: Female Activism During the Revolution." Cobblestone 14 (1993).
"Stamp Act." Encyclopedia Britannica Online. 21 Sept. 2007.
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