Introduction to the Women’s Reenactment

Today’s program is an intentional reimagining of the meeting that took place within these walls in March 1775—you will meet the same Founders, you will hear the same words, but things will be slightly....different. Because this program was inspired by the passing of the 19th amendment in August 1920, which gave women the right to vote--145 years after the events which you will witness here today.

Today, we’ve chosen to reimagine the 2nd Virginia Convention through a gender-reversed production to shine a light on Virginia’s long and continued march towards liberty for all. For 145 years after Patrick Henry demanded liberty or death, women took up that rallying cry of liberty, and fought for political suffrage, for representation, and for their voice—and their votes—to be heard. For generations after the American Revolution, women harnessed the promises of a new nation, and fought to make them theirs.

Even before the era of Revolution, women had a long road ahead to political suffrage. Colonial America denied women the active political participation granted to free, propertied white men. Men could run for office, serve on courts, and yes, men could vote. But this was a world in which women had few legal rights to begin with—and women who married lost most of their legal autonomy as their legal identity absorbed into her husband’s. So in matters of law and politics, women were denied their own, unique voice.

If you were within these walls in March 1775, you would not hear women’s voices in the debates of the Second Virginia Convention. Though women lacked the vote in this room, in the years during and after the American Revolution women used their voice in other ways to support the cause. They wrote letters in newspapers, they organized community protests, and they mobilized to make shirts, saltpetre, even rolled cartridges for ammunition. They raised money. Some even knitted their lives with Washington’s troops, following the army and enduring the same hardships as any patriot soldier. And it was a woman who wrote the first history of the American Revolution.

For all their support, all their sacrifices during the war, women were not rewarded with equality under the new government—instead of giving them the vote and a seat at new democratic tables, the Founders encouraged women to instead use their voices at home. They called upon women to turn from the activities of Daughters of Liberty, and grow into Republican Mothers. Instead of advancing social change the Founders wanted women to turn their energies towards raising patriotic sons. Women were to lead by example, instilling the values of the new republic into sons who would carry that torch.

But over the generations, women continued using their voice—they wanted to be heard. They wanted the promises of liberty to apply to them, too.

Women’s desire for suffrage wasn’t so different from what Patrick Henry and other colonists wanted from the British Parliament. The American Revolution, after all, had roots in cries for no taxation without representation, as colonists grew weary of taxes levied upon them by a government in which they felt they had no direct voice. Parliament had argued that the colonists were virtually represented—though not directly, in the way the colonists felt was their right as British subjects.

Soon demonstrations for representation turned violent. The Boston Massacre...the Tea Party...the erosion of the rights colonists inherited as British subjects. What happened in Boston could happen here, in Virginia, and already colonists could feel their voices being stifled as Lord Dunmore dissolved the House of Burgesses, leaving the colony with no effective government. What would be next? Violence? Insurrection? War?

Virginia’s leaders needed to act. Though the capital was still at Williamsburg they elected to meet here—at Henrico Parish Church—outside the earshot of the royal governor, to pave a path forward. For Patrick Henry and the members of the Assembly who met here, this was a time of imminent “danger and distress.” The question was what to do about it—and whether these men, representing Virginia, were up to the task. The men in this room had their voice, and their votes, to decide the fate of a colony....and a nation.

But there were many voices not heard in this room 250 years ago. At that time, membership in the House of Burgesses was limited to white males who owned land. We acknowledge that most of these men enslaved people, or profited from the practice. And colonists had a history of breaking promises to Indigenous inhabitants. And of course, women were excluded from the conversation. How would these men reconcile their struggle for liberty from Parliament, while denying liberty to others?

In many ways, the American Revolution was about voices being heard, and today, we will hear the events of the Second Virginia Convention through the voices of women.

–by Kate Egner, September 2025