Stripped and Script

Female loyalists occupied a nearly impossible position during the American Revolution. Unlike their male counterparts, loyalist women were effectively silenced—unable to officially align themselves with either side or avoid being persecuted for their family ties. In this talk, Dr. Kacy Dowd Tillman explains how women's letters and journals are the key to recovering these voices, as these private writings were used as vehicles for public engagement.

Through a literary analysis of extensive correspondence by statesmen's wives, Quakers, merchants, and spies, Stripped and Script offers a new definition of loyalism that accounts for disaffection, pacifism, neutralism, and loyalism-by-association and thus offers a new perspective on patriotism and the American Revolution.