The Origins of a Free Press in Prerevolutionary ... - Web Publishing

Chapter 5
Women, Print, and Discourse
133
The culture of deference in Virginia is believed to have relegated women to
very specific roles and severely limited their involvement in political discourse.
However, a remarkable poem published in the 1736 Virginia Gazette raises
questions about women’s roles in both public prints and in civic discourse in the
colony. “The Lady’s Complaint” pointed out that men and women had quite
unequal positions in society. It noted that custom was partial to men, and failed to
give women equal measure. This unknown poet wrote that even the laws were
unfair to women and the verse ended with a plea for equal treatment:
Then Equal Laws let Custom find,
And neither Sex oppress ;
More Freedom give to Womankind,
Or give to Mankind less. 1
Such an appeal for equality was quite remarkable in colonial America, where a
woman hardly existed under the law. Typically, she had no separate standing at all,
treated by the practice of coverture as part of either her husband or her father. For
such a poem—allegedly written by a woman—to appear in a public forum such as
this newspaper brings into question the ubiquitous acceptance of the notion that a
woman’s appropriate place was quietly shuttered in the home, rather than exposed
to the public eye. Publication of this verse is just one example of how women in
colonial Virginia had a greater role in the eighteenth-century world of print, public
1 Virginia Gazette (Williamsburg: Parks, October 22, 1736), 3. An anonymous writer
contributed this poem, claiming a lady had presented it to him. Several other newspapers
published this same poem later.