Jacqueline Beatty

Dr. Jacqueline Beatty is an Associate Professor of History at York College of Pennsylvania, where she teaches courses in Early American, Women’s and Gender, and Public History. Her book, In Dependence: Women and the Patriarchal State in Revolutionary America explores the ways in which women in Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston manipulated their legal, social, and economic positions of dependence and turned these constraints into vehicles of female empowerment. Although the law and social custom established restrictions on women’s rights and behavior, early American women were not completely powerless in their dependent state. By using legislative petitions, divorce cases, marriage settlements, equity cases, probate records, manumission deeds, freedom suits, almshouse records, and charitable institutional files, In Dependence demonstrates that women defined their relationship with the patriarchal state—the colonial, revolutionary, and early national governments and organizations helmed by elite men—in terms of their multifaceted dependencies. Beatty argues that many women in this period were able to achieve a more empowered role not in spite of their dependent status but because of it. They thus exposed the paradoxes of their legal and social subordination by using the very terms of their dependence to undermine the system that was meant to keep them in submission. Beatty’s dissertation, on which this project is based, was a finalist for the 2017 SHEAR Manuscript Prize.