ABSTRACT
Both colonial America and the new nation presented societies in flux. Traditional institutions backed by law had defined a very narrow sphere of action and responsibility for women. Independence brought new challenges to these customary arrangements, and slowly the patriarchal world changed to one in which women had a great scope of action. When they succeeded in acting in a larger public realm, they became living proof of the injustices of unequal treatment.
All people’s lives are partially defined bythe laws under which they live. Obvi-ously, the extent to which those laws shaped the lives of girls and women in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries depended to a large degree on whether or not they were enforced and who enforced them. The fact that men-usually elite men-were in charge of the judicial and legislative systems meant that those who were making and enforcing the laws were not necessarily sympathetic to women’s issues. On the other hand, men’s lives were interconnected with those of their wives and mothers and daughters. So female relations of men who had power usually had their interests better looked after. If one had no illustrious connections and were female, she was doubly distant. If she were also black or Indian she had little in
