LILY RESLINK
Staff Writer
Beyond the right to vote or hold public office, Rosemarie Zagarri said she looks at how women’s roles have transformed in ways less commonly documented in history books.
At 2 p.m. today in the Hall of Philosophy, the George Mason University Distinguished University Professor said she will deliver her lecture on cultural shifts that have shaped women’s expression of patriotism and emergence as political
actors during the American Revolution.
Zagarri, a specialist in early American political and women’s history, said she hopes a takeaway from her debut lecture at Chautauqua Institution will be that revolutions have unintended consequences.
“The American Revolution was not intended to be a revolution that changed women’s roles, or the roles of Black people, for that matter, enslaved people. But it did,” she said. “And I think it’s important to recognize that.”
She said her lecture will discuss how the experience changed both men and women and made them recognize the potential women had for political contributions — including new ideas about how “even in their roles
as wives and mothers, women had a lot to contribute to the success of the new republic.”
Zagarri will talk about how, though women were not voting members of the polity, this era marked a distinct difference in the ways women have been asked to participate in war.
“It kind of politicized women and made them feel more part of the emerging new nation, feel that they were patriotic members of the community. And they did that in a way that was with a kind of patriotism ‘suitable to their sex.’ ”
This revolution, she said, sparked a widespread transatlantic debate about women’s rights and roles.
Zagarri said her lecture is “not directly religious,” but she will focus on a few women in U.S. history whose faith informed their respective forms of cultural influence, such as Phillis Wheatley.
According to Zagarri, her career as a historian is rooted in endless curiosity. “I want to know why and how things got to be the way they are.”
