To circumvent archival silences surrounding women in colonial North America, this project adopts a genealogical approach, tracing women within the historian’s own maternal lineage as a focused entry point into wider historical inquiry. The poster highlights multiple generations from the same family, examining how three seventeenth-century women exercised authority, negotiated power, and asserted influence in both domestic and public spheres. Through landholding, legal participation, and community leadership, they shaped their social and political environments in ways that had lasting impact but have gone largely unrecognized. However, by investigating fragmentary sources from their lives—surviving material culture, legal records, property transactions, petitions, and community accounts—in this manner, it reveals a far richer account of the past than previously acknowledged.
This poster demonstrates that despite the constraints of English common law in New England, which limited women’s property rights, independent female landownership did exist in North America. It further shows that women in the province of New Hampshire participated in public political demonstrations and, in at least one instance, organized strategic and violent resistance to British colonial taxation before the eighteenth century. More than ninety years before the American Revolution, women in New Hampshire engaged in civil disobedience and protest. In collaboration with like-minded men, their actions positioned New Hampshire colonists within the broader currents of the seventeenth-century English Revolution and the eighteenth-century American Revolution. Fundamentally, this resistance set important precedents for later revolutionary movements, but it has not been previously widely recognized in historical scholarship.
Overall, by bringing three generations of women out of obscurity, this poster underscores that the path toward American independence was neither sudden nor exclusively male. Liberty from colonial rule emerged through a gradual and collective process in which women played vital, if understated, roles. Recovering their stories expands the chronology of American political consciousness and invites reconsideration of what constitutes revolutionary action. By approaching historical analysis through a genealogical framework and by visually examining surviving material culture, this work reconstructs lives that traditional archives render faint. Ultimately, this poster illustrates that though muted by time, the voices of ordinary women expand historical knowledge about the past and remain discernible when historians listen closely.