Who Were the Daughters of Liberty? 

The Daughters of Liberty mobilized colonial American women during the American Revolution by organizing boycotts of British goods and turning everyday household labor into political resistance. Formed in 1766 as the female counterparts to the better-known Sons of Liberty—the secret political organization using civil disobedience to champion “no taxation without representation”—the women promoted homespun production, economic self-sufficiency and collective action, transforming domestic labor into a powerful tool in the fight for independence.

The Daughters of Liberty emerged in the mid-1760s, as colonial women responded to British taxation following the passage of the Stamp Act of 1765 and the Townshend Acts of 1767, which imposed new duties on everyday consumer goods such tea, paper and textiles. They organized boycotts of British imports, replacing tea with substitutes like herbal “liberty tea,” rye-based coffee and New England rum, according to the New England Historical Society. Their efforts worked, cutting British imports roughly in half between 1768 and 1769.

In 1774, after Parliament passed the Coercive Acts, the Boston Committee of Correspondence circulated its Solemn League and Covenant, a pledge for colonists to boycott British goods. Women signed it alongside men. 

Ray Raphael, author of A People’s History of the American Revolution, highlights Betsy Foote, a Connecticut farm girl who wrote in her diary in October 1775 that after a day of mending, spinning, milking, studying and performing other chores, “she carded two pounds of wool and ‘felt Nationly.’”

Newspapers dubbed these activists the “Daughters of Liberty,” and sometimes the “Daughters of Industry.” Unlike the Sons of Liberty, who staged sometimes violent protests and demonstrations, the Daughters turned domestic labor into political action. 

“Male leaders recognized that they needed women’s cooperation to ensure that Americans would comply with the request to forgo the use of tea and luxury goods until the act was repealed,” writes Mary Beth Norton in Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800. “Never before had female Americans formally shouldered the responsibility of a public role, never before had they claimed a voice—even a compliant one—in public policy.”

By February 1770, more than 300 Daughters of Liberty were active in Boston alone, equating “political independence with economic independence,” according to the New England Historical Society.

Women’s political engagement grew directly out of their daily responsibilities, Raphael says. Because they controlled household consumption, the success of colonial boycotts depended on them—turning, spinning, weaving, brewing and even shopping into powerful political tools. 

Raphael points to Charity Clarke, a teenage girl in New York who wrote to an English cousin that although “heroines may not distinguish themselves at the head of an Army,” the women of America constituted “a fighting army of amazones… armed with spinning wheels.”

Spinning bees became the most visible form of women’s political action. Raphael contrasts male political gatherings—such as a 1769 celebration where men toasted, feasted and drank “45 patriotic toasts”—with women’s spinning bees, held at the homes of local ministers, which participants often worked from 5 a.m. to 7 p.m.

Newspapers praised the women, reporting on revived spinning schools, public contests and astonishing rates of cloth production. Homespun soon became a visible badge of resistance—”the politically correct fashion item,” according to the New England Historical Society. 

Norton captures the appeal of this movement for colonial women: “‘Equally share in the honor of it’: the idea must have been exceedingly attractive to any 18th-century American woman raised in an environment that had previously devalued both her and her domestic sphere.”

In 1780, Esther De Berdt Reed, wife of Pennsylvania Governor Joseph Reed, published Sentiments of an American Woman, urging women to adopt simpler dress and donate the savings to the Continental Army. Just three days after its release, 36 Philadelphia women canvassed the city door to door, raising more than $300,000 in Continental dollars for the war effort. 

Similar fundraising campaigns soon followed in New Jersey, Maryland and Virginia. Known collectively as the “Offering of the Ladies,” the movement is often regarded as “the culminating event in the political history of revolutionary women: a patriotic campaign conceived and executed exclusively by the women themselves,” Raphael writes.

Men generally expressed appreciation for women’s contributions, Raphael notes, both in elite circles—such as the “Offering of the Ladies”—and at the grassroots level in New England communities. “Not only did women spin and weave the clothes soldiers wore, but they also tended the family farms,” he says.

Yet, Norton observes that many men “dismissed the first stirrings of political awareness among American women as a joke,” even as they relied on it. Men sought to limit women’s activism, she argues, because “they did not expect, or approve, signs of feminine autonomy.”

Still, some revolutionary leaders openly acknowledged women’s importance to the cause. Sons of Liberty co-founder Sam Adams reportedly declared, “With ladies on our side, we can make every Tory tremble.”