More than Republican Motherhood: How Education Helped Women Find Agency in Revolutionary America

This thesis is a case study examining the lives of three women who lived in the early American republic: Theodosia Bartow-Burr, Margaret Shippen-Arnold, and Angelica Schuyler-Church, within the context of republican motherhood. While republican motherhood remains a vital concept in the field of early American women’s history, the role was more expansive than historians originally thought. Though all three of these women would remain republican mothers, they would also become “intellectual friends”, “deputy husbands,” and “female politicians,” respectively. By understanding the lives that these women lived within the construct of republican motherhood we gain a fuller and more diverse picture of how women of the early American republic lived