The ideals of the American Revolution—popular sovereignty, a free press and resistance to imposed morality—created the political tools later used to challenge gender and sexual hierarchies.
This essay is part of the FEMINIST 250: Founding Feminists series, marking the 250th anniversary of America by reclaiming the revolution through the women and gender-expansive people whose ideas, labor and resistance shaped U.S. democracy. Taking the form of essays, audio, poetry and original art, historians and scholars revisit the nation’s origins to center those written out of the founding documents and reimagine what a truly inclusive democracy requires.
The American Revolution can feel like a legacy that belongs to a select few. It has often been told as the story of wealthy white men—many of them enslavers, many of them beneficiaries of Indigenous dispossession—who rebelled in the name of liberty while denying it to most of the people around them. From this perspective, those who are most marginalized—including women, LGBTQ people and communities of color—may feel as if they are reinforcing political amnesia, or worse, complicity, in patriotic celebrations of 1776.
But history is not a morality play with a fixed cast of heroes and villains. It is a struggle over ideas, institutions and power—and the American Revolution produced the political tools that made feminism, racial justice, labor organizing and queer inclusion achievable. The question is not whether the Revolution was pure. The question is whether we are willing to understand how its radical logic extended beyond the goals of those most associated with it—and how gender and sexuality were part of that process from the very beginning.
To see those things clearly, we have to start earlier, and in darker territory: with slavery.
The Atlantic system of slavery that developed in the Americas was not merely an extension of older forms of human bondage. It was slavery transformed by capitalism. In sugar-producing colonies, enslaved people were routinely worked to death in a decade or so and then replaced. Human lives were treated as disposable inputs in an expanding economic machine that generated immense profits. Those profits built empires and financed the near-constant wars between European powers in the 17th and 18th centuries. The system was extraordinarily lucrative—and extraordinarily brutal.
The question is not whether the Revolution was pure. The question is whether we are willing to understand how its radical logic extended beyond the goals of those most associated with it.
History suggests that highly profitable systems do not end simply because they are immoral. The historian Seymour Drescher observed that slavery was abolished without war only in societies that possessed two things: a functioning public sphere, where ideas could circulate and be debated, and a political system capable of responding, however imperfectly, to popular pressure. Neither of these conditions emerged from altruism. They emerged from conflict among the rich and powerful.
In Britain, a free press began to take shape in the late 17th century not because the state valued free expression, but because it valued commerce. Trade generated taxes; taxes funded war; war secured empire. Print culture flourished because it served capital and state power, circulating the commercial news necessary for expanding commerce.
Likewise, the rise of parliamentary supremacy over monarchy was not motivated by democratic ideals. It was the result of Whig oligarchs maneuvering during and after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when a coalition of powerful men sidelined a king they disliked, then rewrote the rules to justify what they had done.
That justification built from Enlightenment political theory—most famously that articulated by John Locke. Locke argued that sovereignty did not reside in kings chosen by God, but in the people themselves, who entered into a social contract and delegated limited authority to the state for mutual benefit. In practice, these ideas largely served as ideological cover for an oligarchy that taxed the population heavily and waged decades of imperial war.
But ideas, once released into the world, do not stay obedient.
The same public sphere in which Whig oligarchs justified their power also made it possible for others to challenge it. One of the first groups to do so in a sustained way were feminists. If the government rested on consent, early women writers asked, why were women excluded from most forms of politics? Throughout the 18th century, women—often writing under pseudonyms to avoid vicious personal attacks—used pamphlets, essays and letters to argue that the logic of Enlightenment politics applied to them as well, and that the laws that denied them education, property rights and political voice were indefensible.
As Mary Astell asked in 1706, in Some Reflections on Marriage, why, “[i]f all Men are born Free, how is it that all Women are born Slaves?”
At the same time, other writers used the public sphere to confront the moral horror of Atlantic slavery. Initially these were isolated voices, often grounded in religious belief, insisting that every human being possessed a soul of equal worth. Over time, those arguments gained traction—not because those with political and economic power suddenly developed consciences, but because publicity created pressure.
In 1772, that pressure produced a remarkable victory. James Somerset, an enslaved man brought to England, escaped but was recaptured. With the help of his Methodist congregation, his case was publicized, funds were raised, and the courts were forced to rule. The lord chief justice declared that slavery did not exist in England, and that Somerset was free. It was a landmark moment—not because it ended slavery, but because it demonstrated the power of ordinary people operating in the public sphere to challenge entrenched economic interests.
Gender and sexuality were never far from these debates. Throughout the 18th century, laws criminalizing sex between men were openly discussed and contested in print. Enlightenment principles led some writers to argue that consensual acts between adults should not be punished by the state.
Sex between women and forms of gender nonconformity were also visible in public discourse, as scholars such as Emma Donoghue, Jen Manion and Martha Vicinus have shown, even if the topics were often sensationalized or treated as scandal. This was not liberation—but it was presence.
That presence, however, was frequently coded. People relied on fashion, gesture and style to signal identity and belonging. The flamboyant “macaroni” style—associated with young men returning from the Grand Tour—could signify refinement, excess or sexual ambiguity, depending on context. Satirical prints and prose exaggerated clothing and comportments to critique certain upper-class demeanors as decadent and corrupt. Sexual innuendo became a form of political argument, allowing artists and writers to imply what they could not safely say outright.
These critiques fed directly into the politics of the American Revolution. British elites mocked colonists as crude, impulsive and insufficiently refined to govern themselves. The lyrics of the song “Yankee Doodle” were meant as an insult: A rural colonial sticks a feather in his cap and calls it “macaroni,” revealing his ignorance of true sophistication. The joke rested on assumptions about class, masculinity and sexual self-control.
What the colonists did next was audacious: They embraced the insult. What British elites framed as vulgarity, Americans reframed as virtue. They argued that self-government did not require aristocratic breeding—only education, discipline and commitment to the common good. Enlightenment thinkers had already supplied the theoretical foundation: People are not born fit to rule; they become fit to rule.
Here, sexual politics and political freedom fully converged. The same era that produced the ideal of the self-governing citizen also produced intense anxiety about masturbation. As Thomas Laqueur has argued, the masturbator became a symbol of freedom gone wrong: solitary, undisciplined, consumed by pleasure. The fear was not sex itself, but autonomy without restraint. Republican citizenship required self-regulation—not repression imposed by church or state, but discipline adopted by the individual.
The American Revolution embedded this logic into law, unevenly and incompletely. By rejecting hereditary authority and refusing to establish a national morality, the new republic created space—albeit contested, unequal and fragile—for challenges to the then-current system of gender and sexual hierarchy.
The lesson for our own moment is not one of reverence, but of responsibility. The American Revolution is an unfinished project.
And many propertied men in the 1760s and 1770s were also willing to follow the ideals they professed to their logical conclusion, even when doing so went against their economic interests. In the 20 years of debate that preceded the American Revolution, colonists argued in pamphlets and newspapers over who had the right to tax them, and what was fundamental to a just government. Within this debate, the idea that to submit to unjust and tyrannical government reduced free men to the status of slaves became a recurring theme.
There were individuals who argued, in the public sphere, that it was hypocrisy for the colonists to talk about themselves as if they might be enslaved, when so much of the wealth of the colonies was built on slavery. As Bernard Bailyn demonstrated, it was a line of argument that was not a part of the original tax revolt in 1764, but it was an increasingly common theme of the pamphlets and newspaper reports that circulated in the colonies.
It is worth remembering that in October 1774, the Continental Congress voted to stop American involvement in the slave trade. And while the realization of this goal was delayed until the early 19th century, it still—perhaps—shows the power of a free and open debate in helping individuals to recognize, and attempt to address, injustice.
The lesson for our own moment is not one of reverence, but of responsibility. The American Revolution is an unfinished project. Its tools—a free press, popular sovereignty, resistance to imposed morality—do not belong exclusively to any particular group. They belong to anyone willing to fight over their meaning and consequences.
The American flag is already a pride flag—not because justice has been delivered, but because the promise was always there. Claiming that legacy does not mean ignoring violence or hypocrisy. It means insisting that the radical ideals at the heart of the American Revolution be carried to their logical conclusion.
Explore the entire FEMINIST 250: Founding Feminists essay collection:
- The main Founding Feminists page contains original art and a historical timeline and invites readers to submit original poetry.
- America’s Founding Feminists: Rewriting America’s Origin Story, by Janell Hobson, professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies at the University at Albany.
- Haudenosaunee Governance: The Matrilineal Democracy That Shaped America, by Michelle Schenandoah, founder of Rematriation, a Haudenosaunee women-led nonprofit organization.
- ‘This Is Our Country Too!’: The Enduring Legacy of Spanish-Speaking Women in Early America, by Allyson M. Poska, professor of history emerita at the University of Mary Washington, translated by Antonia Delgado-Poust, associate professor of Spanish at the University of Mary Washington. Lea este artículo en español aquí.
- Claiming the Revolution: Gender, Sexuality and the Radical Promise of 1776, by Charles Upchurch, professor of British history at Florida State University.
- Reclaiming Phillis Wheatley (Peters): Imagination as a Feminist Founding Project, by Dana Elle Murphy, assistant professor of Black studies and English at Caltech.
- The Radical Potential of Traditional Femininity, by Jacqueline Beatty, associate professor of history at York College of Pennsylvania.
- Queer Possibilities in Revolutionary America, Jen Manion, Winkley professor of history at Amherst College.
- She Wanted to Be Free: Black Women’s Revolutionary Resistance, Dr. Vanessa M. Holden, associate professor of history, director of African American and Africana studies at the University of Kentucky, and director of the Central Kentucky Slavery Initiative.
- Sally Hemings and the Making of Democracy, Jessina Emmert, doctoral candidate in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Kansas.
- The Abolitionist Origins of American Feminism, Manisha Sinha, Draper chair in American history at the University of Connecticut.
- The Curious Case of Afong Moy: Asian Womanhood and National Belonging in the U.S., Anne Anlin Cheng, Louis W. Fairchild class of ’24 professor of English at Princeton University
- Making Disability Visible in History: A Conversation With Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Janell Hobson, professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies at the University at Albany
- Educating Women: A History of Access, Exclusion and Backlash, Nimisha Barton, lecturer at Cal State Long Beach and a DEI consultant in higher education
