Stripped and script : loyalist women writers of the American Revolution /

Tillman (English, Univ. of Tampa) explores the writings of women who were considered loyalists during the American Revolution. As a category, loyalist women included not only avowed supporters of Britain but also Quaker pacifists and wives abandoned by their loyalist husbands. Whereas coverture ostensibly rendered women legally invisible, charges of loyalism often brought these women unwelcome political visibility and left them vulnerable to eviction, seizure of property or assets, or worse. In response to such "intimate intrusion" (as Tillman terms it) of their bodies and property and to their constrained physical and political circumstances, the women Tillman studies crafted multivocal and generically fluid texts, transforming purportedly private forms like the personal letter or journal into strategic rhetorical performances directed at multiple audiences. These hybrid letter/journals provided space in which women "stripped" of their economic, legal, and social positions could "script" their identities, articulate their own loyalties, and engage deliberately with the public and political forces that dictated their fates. Tillman's deft and sympathetic readings foreground the women's fascinating individual stories. In illuminating the political perspicacity and generic ingenuity of these women, Tillman's book reminds one of how easily the voices of dissent can be obscured in the push to craft a unifying national story. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. --Alison Tracy Hale, University of Puget Sound