Did the great experiment in constitutional self-government of 1776 liberate women as well as men?1 In the short term, it didn’t look good. The inhumane practices of slavery and the oppression of indigenous women continued and in some ways were exacerbated by Revolutionary pressures (Lewis 2008). Even supposedly free women were denied basic legal, economic, and political rights, disenfranchised from politics, largely excluded from intellectual life, and limited to socially acceptable domestic roles in their economic activity. The early state governments may have even further embedded married women’s lack of political and economic freedom, encroaching on what casual autonomy had slipped in under the rule of a distant colonial power (Russell 2010). These and other “remnants of coercion were not only inconsistent with the general principles that fueled the American revolution but were also ultimately to prove the causes of most of the nation’s problems—and shame— since” (Lavoie [1985] 2016, 238).

The Founding Fathers could not even be persuaded by the women who shared hearth and home with them that women deserved the same rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Abigail Adams was not taken seriously when she asked her husband and future President John Adams to “Remember the ladies.” John Adams found it humorous—“I cannot but laugh”—that men should subject themselves to the “Despotism of the Petticoat” as part of this new free society, and suggested that women’s discontent with their lot is an even more surprising and unpleasant side effect of freedom than “that Indians slighted their guardians and Negroes grew insolent to their Masters.”

Even 30 years later, Thomas Jefferson made his views on including women in public life clear: “The appointment of a woman to office is an innovation for which the public is not prepared, nor am I.”3 This statement was not even about a woman serving as an elected official, but referred to a widow taking over her deceased husband’s responsibilities as a lighthouse keeper (Paterson 2015).

Yet, despite the fact that the American Founders did not declare women to be free—and perhaps did not even value women’s independence—women became free anyway. Within the first 150 years of American Independence, white women gained the right to vote, run for office, maintain their own finances, own property, divorce for cause (in most states), work a wide variety of jobs (though not all), and attend institutions of higher education. Slavery was abolished, and although there would still be great battles ahead, many Black and indigenous women had won at least a partial measure of these freedoms as well. Woman business owners were finding early success as entrepreneurs, and others had begun to work in the esteemed professions of medicine, law, and (some denominations of) clergy. In 1872, Victoria Woodhull became the first woman to run for President, only two generations after Jefferson’s pronouncement that even appointing a woman to keep a lighthouse was beyond the pale. Both women’s rights and freedom of action had greatly improved, to put it mildly

This suggests that whether or not the Founding Fathers had any interest in nurturing women’s freedom, the soil they cultivated was fertile enough for radical liberatory forces of unexpected kinds to emerge. And the changes that took place were indeed radical—all but overturning thousands of years of patriarchal dominance within the law. The critical question for assessing the result of 250 years of liberal democracy on women’s rights is: did this transformative revolution in women’s rights happen because or in spite of the liberal democratic project?

The answer offered here is that the American Revolution did not directly emancipate women, but it did successfully change the rules and requirements for becoming emancipated in ways that facilitated the progress of women’s rights. In Section 2, I elaborate on this claim as well as the counter-argument that women’s freedom emerged in the U.S. despite its founding institutions. In Sections 3–5, I elaborate on three specific changes in the rules for becoming emancipated and the impact of these changes on the extension of liberal democratic rights and freedoms to women. First, liberal values and the rhetoric of American Independence created new arguments and new opportunities to argue for freedom. 19th century women were able to use these ideas and opportunities as springboards to their own rights. Second, the American Revolution led to expansions in women’s “liberty of doing things” (Hayek [1960] 2011, 85) in markets, civil society organizations, and other public spaces. These liberties both allowed women to take new steps into public life and to develop the entrepreneurial and organizational skills necessary to take further steps. Third, the deliberately designed constitutional limits on the exercise of political power developed at the American Founding changed the character of legal experimentation and reform. These constitutional limits were sometimes a great aid in the cause of women’s rights, when they were not overwhelmed by political opportunism and patriarchal special interests. Section 6 concludes.

KEYWORDS: Women’s Rights, Democracy, Liberalism, Institutional Analysis