From Edenton to Advocacy: How Military Wives Turn Visibility into Power

Revolutionary Era Wives Took Their Politics Public

Later generations called it a "tea party." The fifty-one women who signed the Edenton Resolves in 1774 understood it as something sharper: a public political declaration with their names attached. [Library of Congress]

If Revolutionary Women & Political Organizing showed how women learned to organize within the boundaries of domestic life, the Edenton Resolves (often called the Edenton Tea Party) show what happened when they stopped keeping it private.

In the first post of this series, we met women who spun cloth rather than buying imports, refused tea with pointed enthusiasm, organized boycotts, and turned everyday household labor into political pressure. Their activism was soft, quiet, strategic, and carefully shaped to fit social expectations. Easy to miss—if you weren’t looking for it. But it was never passive.

By the fall of 1774, some women were ready to make that work visible.

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Going Public

Letters had always circulated—between neighbors, to husbands at war, in Bible study groups. And appeals to local leaders formed the backbone of women’s political engagement long before anyone called it that. These writings coordinated resources, shaped opinions, and sustained resistance at the household level.

The 1770s changed where women's words appeared, not whether they had political awareness.

An expanding colonial print network, combined with organized non-importation agreements, created new ways to be heard. Broadsides, petitions, and newspaper notices allowed women to move from suggestion to declaration. Once printed, a woman’s political stance could travel far beyond her town. It could reach colonial leaders, other colonies, and even readers in Britain.

Print turned what might have been dismissed as “just sentiment” into permanent evidence of political participation.

Importantly, the shift didn’t reject traditional gender roles—it used them. Women framed resistance through morality, sacrifice, and civic responsibility, values already associated with female virtue. But once those arguments appeared in print, they became political claims. Patriotism was no longer limited to battlefields or legislatures. It lived on paper.

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Leverage, Not Permission

Revolutionary wives weren’t asking for the vote. They weren’t demanding seats in legislatures. British law and colonial custom made those paths impossible.

Instead, women worked with what they had.

Because they bore the economic, emotional, and practical burdens of war, they claimed the right to speak about its consequences. Print offered one of the few mechanisms available to translate domestic sacrifice into public pressure.

A broadside could be mocked. A petition could be criticized. But neither could be quietly ignored.

Once women signed their names and sent their words into circulation, they demanded a response—supportive or hostile. That tension comes into focus in Edenton, North Carolina.

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Edenton, 1774: Fifty-One Signatures

The Edenton Resolves did not appear out of nowhere. They were the most public expression of organizing practices women had already been refining for years.

Fifty-one signatures in the Virginia Gazette, November 3, 1774. The Edenton women knew that print made their boycott permanent, visible, and impossible to ignore. They signed anyway.

In October 1774, fifty-one women in Edenton gathered under the leadership of Penelope Barker. Together, they drafted and signed a declaration pledging to boycott British tea and imported goods in support of the colonial resistance and North Carolina’s Provincial Deputies.

Tea boycotts were already widespread across the colonies. What made Edenton different was the decision to go public—and to do so with names attached.

The Resolves appeared in the Virginia Gazette on November 3, 1774, and soon after in British newspapers, including London's Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser on January 16, 1775. The Resolves were also printed in other English newspapers throughout the remainder of January 1775. Their protest crossed the Atlantic, fully visible and unmistakable.

The risk was obvious: social backlash, economic consequences, accusations of disloyalty. Yet they chose visibility over safety. Historians now recognize the Edenton Resolves as one of the earliest documented examples of women acting collectively in political life in the American colonies.

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The Mockery That Proved the Point

Print shows satire of American women from Edenton, North Carolina, pledging to boycott English tea in response to the Continental Congress resolution in 1774 to boycott English goods. [Library of Congress]

British reactions were swift and dismissive. Newspapers ridiculed the women as unfeminine and foolish (no surprise there). A satirical cartoon portrayed them neglecting children and domestic duties, suggesting that women’s political engagement threatened social order itself.

And that reaction tells us everything (this still happens today)

The Edenton women were mocked because they mattered. Their declaration disrupted expectations, crossed borders, and forced a response.

Ridicule was not dismissal—it was acknowledgment.

The Edenton Resolves weren’t an anomaly. They marked the next step in a process already underway: women moving from private resistance to documented public action.

Before ballots and banners, Revolutionary wives wielded ink and paper. In doing so, they proved that political power did not begin with voting—but with the courage to be heard.

Print ensured that women’s participation could not be entirely erased, even when later histories tried to erase it or just ignore it. These documents show women acting not at the margins of the Revolution, but within it— making strategic choices with real political consequences.

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From Edenton to Today’s Military Spouses

The strategy outlasted the Revolution itself. Throughout American military history, spouses have repeatedly organized without rank, formal authority, or training. During the Civil War, women formed sanitary commissions that reshaped military medicine. In the twentieth century, home-front organizations influenced morale and resources (and so much more).

Today, that work continues through organizations such as the Secure Families Initiative, the National Military Family Association, Blue Star Families, and the Military Spouse Advocacy Network. These groups rely on lived experience, not command authority—testifying before Congress, publishing research, and pushing policy changes on housing, healthcare, employment, and family readiness.

In 2009, sustained spouse advocacy helped expand career and education support through the Military Spouse Career Advancement Accounts program. In 2020, Blue Star Families' testimony helped shape reforms to the Exceptional Family Member Program.

Different century. Same strategy. The political and institutional environments of 1774 and the twenty-first century are not identical. Military structures, legal authority, and policy access have changed dramatically. What persists is not sameness, but a recurring pattern: when formal authority is limited, spouses use available public mechanisms to create institutional leverage. The medium has changed. The mechanics have not.

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Visibility Is Power

The Edenton Resolves weren't the end of anything—they were proof of concept.

Fifty-one women demonstrated that visibility creates leverage, that signatures force responses, and that political power doesn't require permission (or training).

Military spouses have been applying that lesson ever since.

For some Revolutionary women, though, public declarations were only the beginning. Esther de Berdt Reed didn't just put herself out there—she built an institution, raised funds, and took open responsibility for clothing the Continental Army.

Read next: Esther de Berdt Reed: The Revolutionary Woman Who Didn’t Wait for Permission

Documenting 250 Years of Military Spouse History.

 #HomefrontArchives #BehindTheUniforms  #WomenOfTheRevolution #EdentonTeaParty #RevolutionaryWomen #MilitarySpouseHistory #PoliticalActivism #InstitutionalLeverage

#HomefrontAsSystem #PrintAsPower

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Sources and Further Reading

If you're interested in diving deeper into the story of the Edenton Tea Party, here are some excellent resources to explore:

Start Here: Quick Reads

Online Articles & Overviews

• Richard Carney's "Edenton Tea Party" entry in the North Carolina History encyclopedia offers a solid introduction to the event.

• The 250th Anniversary of the Edenton Tea Party page from Visit Edenton provides historical context and celebrates this important moment in American history.

Learn About Penelope Barker

• Penelope Barker biography at NCpedia by Michael G. Martin, Jr.

• Penelope Barker profile at the National Women's History Museum by Debra Michals

See It for Yourself: Images & Documents

The Famous Satirical Cartoon

One of the most fascinating aspects of the Edenton Tea Party is how it was ridiculed in Britain. Check out Philip Dawe's 1775 satirical print A Society of Patriotic Ladies, at Edenton in North Carolina at the Library of Congress. This political cartoon mocked the American women's boycott pledge.

You can also view the print and learn more at the Library of Virginia.

Original Newspaper Coverage

Read the actual news coverage from 1774! The Virginia Gazette reported on the tea party in its November 3, 1774 edition. You can also find this reprinted at the New-York Historical Society.

Historic Photographs

See what the Edenton Tea Party House looked like in the early 20th century (photographed between 1908 and 1928).

Dig Deeper: Books & Academic Sources

For a Broader Context

• Gail Collins explores the political awakening of colonial women in her book America's Women: Four Hundred Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines (William Morrow, 2003), particularly in the chapter "What have I to do with politicks."

• Webb Garrison's Great Stories of the American Revolution (Rutledge Hill Press, 1993) includes the story "First Women's Movement Urged Cider, Buttermilk, and Water."

Focused Studies

• Maggie Mitchell wrote her master's thesis specifically on this topic: Treasonous Tea: The Edenton Tea Party of 1774 (Liberty University, 2015).

• Diane Silcox-Jarrett profiles Penelope Barker in Heroines of the American Revolution: America's Founding Mothers (Scholastic Inc., 2000).

• Carole Chandler Waldrup's More Colonial Women: 25 Pioneers of Early America (McFarland & Co., 2004) also features these remarkable women.

Historical Documents

Early Accounts

Richard Dillard documented the event in two publications:

• The Historic Tea-Party of Edenton, October 25th, 1774 (1898)

• The Historic Tea-Party of Edenton, October 25th (Burke & Gregory, 1907)

Both are available digitally through the Library of Congress.

Related Tea Party Events

Interested in other colonial tea protests? Check out these resources:

• Frank M. Etting's The Philadelphia Tea Party of 1773 (1873)

• Richard D. Fisher's The Arson of the "Peggy Stewart" and the Annapolis (1905)

• Frank De Witte Andrews' The Tea-Burners of Cumberland County (1908)

More Historical Context

Looking for visual representations of colonial resistance? Check out Henry Dawkins' engraving Liberty Triumphant; or the Downfall of Oppression (ca. 1774) at the Library of Congress.

**Note: Many of these sources are available online for free through the Library of Congress, state archives, and historical organizations. The Edenton Historical Commission also maintains resources about this important event in American history.