Two hundred and fifty years ago, a new nation came into being. Amid the hard-fought war for independence against the British Crown, certain leading men residing in its 13 colonies came together to sign off on a document proclaiming, “All men are created equal.”
The document would be called the Declaration of Independence—authored by Thomas Jefferson and signed by 56 men now recognized as the nation’s founding fathers, immortalized in John Trumbull’s painting that hangs in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol.
They had exchanged ideas about liberty, justice, at the height of this Age of Reason; they even thought to add a statement to abolish slavery. However, they eventually decided against it, given the lucrative profits that came from the chattel institution as slaveholding individuals. And the comfort of their domestic abodes, which fell under the purview of their wives and servants, rarely induced a sense of reciprocity and full equality for the ones enabling their material surroundings.
One of the signees—John Adams (who would later serve as the nation’s vice president before succeeding George Washington, the first president of the United States)—had received admonition from his wife Abigail Adams to “remember the ladies” in their declarations for freedom and equality; however, one woman at least ensured that her name would be included on the document: Mary Katherine Goddard from Baltimore, the first woman postmaster in the colonies, printed the official documents and added her name at the bottom in typeset.
Interestingly, Goddard is rarely remembered (if at all) as founding mother in her own right—in contrast to, say, Betsy Ross, whose more feminine, domestic role in sewing the first flag of the new nation secured her position in national memory. However, Goddard’s bold addition of her name to the Declaration of Independence is a prime example of how women throughout history persist and insist on their inclusion. In families. In communities. Even in nation building. Sometimes she held a pen to write her inclusion into existence, even if she remained anonymous or hid under a man’s name (a gender transition of sorts).
When she did use her own name—“written by herself”—as the enslaved poet Phillis Wheatley did, some dared to question her skill and prowess to call herself, let alone nations and worlds, into being. Despite the restrictions of slavery, Wheatley found freedom first through the pen before her eventual manumission.