Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation

On December 16, 1773, American protesters gathered at Griffin’s Wharf in Boston to rally against Britain’s Tea Act. They took 342 chests of tea from the British East India Company and threw them into the sea in one of the first significant protests against British dominion. The protest served as a rallying point for patriots and contributed to the revolutionary fervor that produced the Continental Congress in 1774.

The American colonies had long been under British rule. However, Americans were growing frustrated with Britain’s increasingly harsh taxation and their lack of political representation, leading to talk of revolution and independence. In 1774, the first Continental Congress gathered, with delegates from the Thirteen Colonies discussing how to respond to imperial taxation. Although the Congress’s initial aim was to repair relations between the colonies and Britain, its focus on the rights of the colonists meant that it was in many respects the first step towards an independent America. Indeed, in 1776, the Second Continental Congress officially declared independence from British rule. 

The Constitution of the United States lay out the dictates of a new independent American government. The contents were agreed upon at the Constitutional Convention, and Gouverneur Morris drafted the document itself in 1787. Although some, including Mercy Warren, protested that the new government gave too much power to too few people, the Constitution was ratified in 1788.

Taking place in Philadelphia between May and September 1787, the Constitutional Convention was ostensibly organized to revise the Articles of Confederation, an early agreement between the Thirteen Colonies. However, many of the delegates actually intended to draw up a new form of government, and this was what the Convention eventually achieved: agreeing on all of the components that would go on to be written into the Constitution of the United States. 

Adopted by the Second Continental Congress in 1776, the United States Declaration of Independence asserted that the Thirteen Colonies were now independent of British rule. Although the Colonies initially presented themselves as separate states, the Declaration of Independence represented an initial effort towards forming a unified nation that would eventually become the United States of America. 

The notion of the domestic sphere comes from the ideology of “separate spheres,” which refers to a social phenomenon in which societies feature a separation between the domestic or private sphere and the public sphere. It is often associated with patriarchal social organization and an accompanying belief that women’s proper place is in the domestic sphere—that is, that women should remain in the home and concentrate on tasks like childcare and housekeeping, rather than moving into the public world of politics, business, or education, which were considered to be the domains of men. Colonial America held strongly to this belief, although the first signs that it was beginning to shift occurred during and immediately after the Revolutionary War.

The Founding Fathers is the name given to the group of political figures who led the struggle to establish America’s independence from British rule and built the new government of the United States. There are between seven and 12 men included in this group, according to the criteria of different historians. 

The Founding Mothers is the term Cokie Roberts uses to the describe the mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters of the Founding Fathers, as well as several other remarkable women of the period. She uses the term to highlight the vital but often unrecognized contributions women made to the birth of America.

During the American Revolution, citizens of the colonies who remained loyal to the British crown and believed that the colonies should remain under British rule were known as Loyalists, as well as Royalists and Tories. They opposed the American Revolution and sided with the British in the Revolutionary War. 

Colonists who believed that the colonies should break away from British rule and declare themselves independent, either as separate sovereign states or as a unified nation, were known as Patriots. They supported the American Revolution and opposed the British and the Loyalists in the Revolutionary War. 

The result of the Thirteen Colonies’ rejection of British taxation and, ultimately, British rule, the American Revolutionary War took place between 1775 and 1783. Fought between Patriots who wanted independence from Britain on one side and British forces and American Loyalists on the other, it officially ended with the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783. It is also known as the American War of Independence.

The 1765 Stamp Act was an act passed by the British government that imposed considerable taxes on the colonies and insisted that printed documents could only be produced on specific stamped paper produced in Britain. The Act was hugely unpopular in the colonies and resulted in a great resentment of the British government.