The Other American Revolution – Part 1 – Education of Women

Our Founding Fathers often get credit for inspiring the French Revolution, as well as those in Central and South America and Haiti. Domestically, the “Shot Heard Around the World” also began other revolutions for which our Founding Fathers do not get credit.

The American Revolution began a societal change that was the beginning of the Emancipation of the American Woman. Here’s why.

In 1775, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated that about 2.5 million men and women lived in the Thirteen Colonies. Of these, about 460,000 were enslaved, and about 40,000 were freed slaves.

While I do not at all want to minimize the issue of slavery, scope/space is going to limit the content of this post to the white population. Note that if one uses 25 years to define a “generation,” the struggle to abolish slavery took about 3.3 generations (82 years) before the 13th Amendment was passed. I’ll get to why this is relevant later in this post.

Back to numbers. Roughly 55% of the population were men, and before the American Revolution, the average household had 5.7 people. Subtract 460,000 from 2.5 million equals 2,040,000 divided by 5.7 equals 357,895 households.

The first official U.S. Census, taken in 1790, showed that 35.8% of U.S. households in the 13 original states plus Kentucky and Vermont (which weren’t states yet) had 7 or more living together, 13.2% had six, 13.9% had five, and 13.8% had four. Big families were the norm because 76.7% of all the households had four or more people: a man, a woman, and two children.

When the American Revolution began, about 20% of the men were Loyalists in the British Army or joined the Continental Army or Navy. Enlistments in the Continental Army started at one year and by 1777, were three years. This suggests that ~71,579 households were without the father for a year or more.

So, if a couple ran a store or had a farm, who ran it while Dad was off fighting for a year or more? Or worse, died from disease or wounds? Mom.

What one begins to see during the American Revolution is that women realized they were capable of doing “men’s” work, and many wanted careers of their own outside the home. They wanted to become doctors, lawyers, accountants, professors, etc. What was holding them back was formal education.

Since the country’s law schools were off limits to women, to become a lawyer, a young woman had to apprentice herself to a law firm. After years, she would stand before a group of lawyers and judges and answer questions to prove she had the knowledge to represent clients in court. Many of those who sat in judgment were opposed to women becoming attorneys, which, pardon the analogy, raised the bar to entry to the profession.

In 1870 (87 years or ~3.88 generations after independence), Ida Kepley became the first woman to graduate from the Chicago School of Law (now the Northwestern School of Law).

In the medical field, to become a doctor, one had to graduate from medical school.  To practice medicine, young women would apprentice themselves to an MD and, after a few years, become midwives or physicians, which didn’t require a degree. Until Elizabeth Blackwell graduated from Geneva Medical College in 1849 (66 years and 2.6 generations after independence), no woman was allowed to use the title MD.

Conventional wisdom holds that few schools awarded college degrees to women. It is simply not true. What follows is a short list of institutions of higher learning founded before 1820 that admitted only women. Some still exist today.

Ursuline Academy in New Orleans started teaching women in 1727.

Moravian University was founded as Bethlehem Female Seminary in 1742.

Salem College was formed as The Little Girls School in 1772.

The Young Ladies Academy of Philadelphia started holding classes in 1787.

Bradford College began teaching women in 1803.

Elizabeth Female Academy opened its doors in 1818.

By 1850, 11 more institutions of higher learned solely for female students opened. However, 13 years earlier, in 1836, the dam preventing women from attending schools for men began to crack when Wesleyan College in Georgia admitted is first female students. In 1837, Oberlin College followed suit.

Sadly, Ivy League schools didn’t open their doors to women until the 1960s and preferred to hide behind their all-women schools like Radcliffe (Harvard) and Barnard (Columbia). The good news is that today, women have the same educational opportunities as men. In 2025, more women earned four-year degrees than men.

Part 2 of the Other American Revolution – the Change in Property Rights for Women will be posted.

Chart taken from the InfoPlease website, using data from the U.S. Census.