As education lay at the core of Enlightenment principles for improving society and creating rational citizens capable of shouldering the burdens of democracy, many Enlightenment philosophes – or 18th-century thinkers – addressed the importance of education. Few, however, valued formal education for women. Thinkers on this side of the Atlantic were no different. William Livingston, in Philosophic Solitude expressed revulsion simultaneously for over educated women and frivolous uneducated women. Founder Benjamin Rush, in his Thoughts upon Female Education, argued for education suitable to the “situation, appointments, and duties of women in America which require a peculiar mode of education.” For example, he explained that, “From the numerous allocations to which a professional life exposes gentlemen in America from their families, a principal share of the instruction of children naturally devolves upon the women. It becomes us therefore to prepare them, by a suitable education, for the discharge of this most important duty of mothers.” “If men believe that ignorance is favorable to the government of the female sex,” he warned, “they are certainly deceived, for a weak and ignorant woman will always be governed with the greatest difficulty.” ¹

Without the existence of public schools, however, providing an education was an expensive proposition, and families were seldom willing to expend the money without reasonable expectation of return on investment. So frequently, families would invest in the education of their sons, who could be expected to use a formal education in pursuing a professional career, but not provide a formal education for their daughters.

The sources contained here reveal the women of the Kean and Livingston families to be highly literate and well educated, most likely due to the efforts of either private tutors or their parents. Unlike the sons of the Livingston family, who studied at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University), there were no higher educational opportunities for women.

¹ http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/rbannis1/AIH19th/female.html

In the 18th and early 19th centuries, it was expected that all women would marry. Tthere was, however, also growing resistance to matches made in the name of family and financial alliance. William Livingston described his ideal life in his poem, Philosophic Solitude. When William Livingston formed a love match with Susannah French, his parents withheld permission for them to marry citing her family’s insufficient rank. Livingston, however, refused to break his engagement with Susannah, and they married anyway. Livingston’s daughter Sarah married John Jay in what letters reveal to be a highly companionate love match, as suggested by his affectionate letters to her. Not all marriages were successful. William Livingston’s daughter, Mary Livingston, found herself in a highly unsatisfactory and possibly abusive marriage to James Linn. She had to request permission to return home. Her father initially refused, but eventually agreed to allow her to come back to Liberty Hall.

High mortality rates meant that second marriages and blended families were not uncommon. Catherine Livingston (Kitty) and Susan Livingston Kean Nemciewicz were both widowed at an early age, and both remarried.

When women married, they passed from being legally bound to their fathers, to being legally bound to their husbands. Widowhood, however, or separation by great distance as in the case of Susan Livingston Kean Nemciewicz, offered freedom for women to act with greater independence with regard to financial matters – freedom that Susan Livingston Kean Nemciewicz exercised with enthusiasm. And yet, when she purchased Liberty Hall, Susan’s son Peter Kean had to purchase the property in trust for her.

In the years following the American Revolution, efforts to inscribe the war’s history with patriotic language and symbols, heroes and heroines, resulted in a largely mythologized view of women’s contributions to the war for independence. The roles of Betsy Ross and the largely fictionalized Molly Pitcher were embroidered to celebrate women’s contributions in what were deemed appropriate roles for women to play: the seamstress who put her skills to work on behalf of the patriotic cause, or the wife, who stepped in for her husband at a crucial moment to ensure the ability of patriot soldiers to win the day.

The history however, is more complicated than these myths

Primary sources reveal women very keenly aware of the military and domestic challenges posed by the war. Women’s letters like those written by William Livingston’s daughters, reveal them to be aware of military matters, and eager to share the latest developments regarding the fighting through their correspondence. Their letters also reveal the struggles experienced by those who lived along the crossroads of the American Revolution. For example, the letters of Livingston’s daughters describe their efforts to protect Liberty Hall, their struggle to remain safe, and – even for the governor’s wife – struggle to ensure sufficient supplies of food. Their responsibilities on the “home front” included not only protecting the home, but also protecting valuable papers of Gov. Livingston. William Livingston wrote to his wife, Susanna French Livingston, about the importance of protecting his papers and the need to possibly remove them from Liberty Hall, as he expected British soldiers to not only raid the property, but also very likely destroy it. The British did indeed raid the home, and his daughters are credited with preventing the British from taking those papers in what has become part of Livingston family lore. In the telling of this history, a Livingston daughter is credited with using her feminine modesty to prevent British soldiers from taking those papers by persuading the soldiers that the papers in question were her own and that the private papers of a respectable young woman were off-limits to the British soldiers. In another version of the story, a Livingston daughter appeared at the top of the stairs in Liberty Hall clad in her white nightgown, appearing to the British soldiers to be a ghost whom they assumed to be the ghost of a woman named Hannah Caldwell, the wife of Rev. James Caldwell, who had been accidentally shot and killed weeks earlier. The frightened soldiers left without destroying the home or taking the Governor’s papers. In yet another story, Susan Livingston is credited with having flirted with a British soldier, Cosmo Gordon, even presenting him with a rose from Gov. Livingston’s garden, to either save Liberty Hall or prevent him from joining his troops in battle. It is difficult to know how closely the lore of these family stories adheres to the true instances of exchanges between Livingston daughters and British soldiers, but historical memorialization insured that the actions of the Livingston daughters were well within the bounds of what was regarded as appropriate behavior for young women, while still contributing to the Patriot cause.

In New Jersey’s Constitution of 1776 – written as the state had joined twelve other colonies in declaring independence from Great Britain – it was implied that propertied women were eligible to vote. A 1790 revision made clear with the inclusion of the phrase ‘he or she’, that women who met the property qualification, were able to cast a ballot in state and local elections.

Still, few women met this qualification until 1797 when an additional change which did not require a ‘clear estate’ was made in the law. This led to the dramatic increase in women voting, notably in a tightly contested 1797 state senate election in Elizabethtown. In this election, both the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans sought to turn out eligible women to vote.

Although Susan Livingston Kean would have met the property qualification needed to vote following the death of her husband in 1795, we unfortunately do not have any evidence that she participated in that 1797 election in Elizabethtown. Still, we do see her and other women engaged in politics in different ways. For example, John Kean – then in South Carolina – asked his wife in the spring of 1788 to send him any new Federalist letters that were published, showing that he expected her to be attuned to politics. And in several other letters to Susan, he provides details regarding the ratification of the new Constitution and other political concerns.

From 1797 forward, efforts were launched to restrict the franchise, and in 1807, a law was passed prohibiting all women and free people of color from casting ballots. And although black men were empowered to vote following the ratification of the 15th Amendment in 1870, women still could not participate until the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920 – whose passage was led by New Jersey’s suffragist leader, Alice Paul.

https://www.amrevmuseum.org/virtualexhibits/when-women-lost-the-vote-a-revolutionary-story/pages/how-did-the-vote-expand-new-jersey-s-revolutionary-decade

In the founding era, American society openly valued women for their domestic roles as wife, mother, and daughter. In other spheres, though, legal codes prevented women from acting as independent persons in legal and business transactions, and they were barred from participating in the professions. However, this should not lead one to conclude that women did not work or that women did not play a substantial role in the economy of the young republic. Rather, during the American Revolution, women were called upon to manage family businesses and estates while husbands and fathers were at war. Similarly, in peacetime, they were essential partners in the family economy. In poorer or working class families, women might work as domestic servants or wage laborers, or manage the shops of their artisan husbands.

While widowhood could leave women vulnerable to poverty, financially elite women could find widowhood a period of increased economic freedom. The example of Susan Livingston Kean Nemciewicz is instructive in this regard. Following the death of her husband John Kean in 1795, Susan Livingston Kean took on the management of their estate, including the plantations and enslaved persons in their South Carolina and Georgia properties. Prior to marrying Count Julian Ursyn Nemciewicz, Susan negotiated a prenuptial agreement to protect her financial holdings and the interests of her son, Peter Kean. When she purchased Liberty Hall in 1811, it was legally necessary for her son Peter to carry out the transaction. But the surviving archives demonstrate that it was she who managed the family estate, engaging in a wide range of financial transactions and innovative endeavors characteristic of the New Republic.

The Livingston women, like many other New Jerseyans, directly benefited from the lives and labors of enslaved persons and the wealth they generated. And we know that William Livingston’s daughters and his niece persisted in owning slaves even after he had manumitted those persons enslaved to him.

As has been documented in the section of this website dedicated to Teaching the History of Slavery and the Enslaved, slavery was a part of everyday life at Liberty Hall. Although that separate section on slavery and the enslaved provides a broader range of sources related to these vital questions, it is important to recognize the intersectionality of race and gender and the unique challenges and horrors enslaved women experienced. Documentary evidence regarding these enslaved women emphasizes the children that they bore as well as their service to these families in traditional feminine gender roles such as nursing, child rearing, cooking, and other domestic labor. Although these archival materials help provide a better understanding of the lives of enslaved women, we must be mindful of the silences in these records – especially in areas in which those writing the records would not be likely to describe, such as the abuse or mistreatment of those entrusted under their care and supervision.

Within this collection, two enslaved women, Abbe and Celia are the best documented. Still, we have very little surviving evidence in their own voice. What can be discerned, is that both Abbe and Celia are examples of how enslaved women navigated their bondage and were ever focused on securing their freedom. Celia would be manumitted upon the death of her master, John Kean. Abbe would die from disease after she was imprisoned in Paris by John Jay and Sarah Livingston Jay for having run away from those who claimed ownership of her.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, childbirth remained extremely dangerous, resulting in both high maternal and infant mortality rates. Not long after witnessing her beloved sister die in childbirth, a pregnant Susan Livingston Kean expressed her own fears to her husband John Kean in advance of her pending labor and delivery, and dictated to John her instructions on how to raise their child should she not survive. A letter from Sarah Livingston Jay to her mother, written from Madrid, Spain, describes the heartbreaking loss of a child.

Traditional scholarship has held that high infant mortality rates from the Middle Ages into the 18th century meant that parents were less likely to develop meaningful and affectionate ties with their children. William Livingston and his wife Susanna French Livingston had 13 children, only eight of whom survived to adulthood. Four of those who died in infancy or young, were named Philip in honor of William Livingston’s father, a naming practice that seemingly encouraged the assumption that parents did not allow themselves to become emotionally attached to their children. In the later 20th century historians demonstrated that these assumptions were false.

The documents in this section, as well as those dedicated to childbirth, demonstrate that both men and women were affectionate and engaged parents who took the raising and education of their children very seriously. Furthermore, they remained engaged with their children as they became adults themselves. In addition, the Livingstons were doting grandparents. In many of these letters their grandson, Peter Augustus Jay takes center stage, particularly because Peter had remained with his grandparents in America while his parents were in Europe serving as diplomats during the Revolutionary War.

In preparation for their lives as wives and mothers, young girls were expected to excel at the domestic arts. While this meant that women were seldom provided with the instruction or opportunity to become accomplished artists or literary figures, women still found outlets for their creative minds and spirits. As surviving schoolgirl samplers demonstrate, young girls turned domestic needlework into opportunities to create art. The sharing of patterns and needlework projects highlights the creative and aesthetic thinking of women in this era.

Less common but not unprecedented were women who shared their literary skills with a public readership. Revolutionary New Jersey was home to Annis Boudinot Stockton, one of the first published female American poets, whose poetry took on a patriotic tone during the American Revolution. William Livingston’s granddaughter, Susan Anne Ridley Sedgwick, daughter of Catherine (Kitty) Livingston and Matthew Ridley, became an accomplished and popular writer of children’s books in the 1830s. Susan Anne Ridley Sedwick seemingly passed down her literary passions to her son, William Livingston’s great-grandson, Theodore Sedgwick III who went on to write the first published biography of William Livingston, A Memoir of the Life of William Livingston.

Surviving manuscript copies of girlhood poetry by Susan Livingston Kean Nemciewicz, delivered at a social gathering in 1780 – an 18th-century example of a poetry slam – demonstrates that informal outlets for literary talent and entertainment were part of 18th-century elite society for women.