June 30, 2025: Models of Critical Patriotism: Hannah Griffitts

[As the author of a book on the contested history of American patriotism, every day of 2025 feels strikingly relevant. So for this year’s July 4^th series, I wanted to share & expand on excerpts from that book that feature models of critical patriotism from across our history, leading up to a weekend request for further conversations!]

On a Revolutionary poem that models multiple patriotic perspectives.

First, the book excerpt: “[Annis Boudinot] Stockton’s Mid-Atlantic Writing Circle colleague Hannah Griffitts (1727– 1817), a Philadelphia Quaker who contributed dozens of poems to her cousin Milcah Martha Moore’s voluminous commonplace book, linked feminism to incipient revolutionary patriotism even more clearly in her 1768 poem “The Female Patriots.” Griffitts opens with a complaint about the lack of patriotic activism from her community’s men, who, “supinely asleep, & deprived of their Sight/Are stripped of their Freedom, and robbed of their Right.” She then argues for the need for her titular female patriots to take up that cause: “If the Sons (so degenerate) the Blessing despise,/Let the Daughters of Liberty, nobly arise.” She admits that in traditional political terms “we’ve no Voice,” but makes the case for the boycotting of English goods as a key way these female patriots can nonetheless take action: “As American Patriots, our Taste we deny”; and so “rather than Freedom, we’ll part with our Tea.” And she ends by highlighting the broader revolutionary effects of not only such boycotts, but also her own poem and writing: “a motive more worthy our patriot Pen,/Thus acting—we point out their Duty to Men.” By expressing and enacting their female patriotism, then, Griffitts and her peers likewise offer a feminist critical patriotic perspective on the frustrating, counter-productive absence of women from these public debates.”

That last point is without doubt my favorite thing about Griffitts’s unique and engaging poem. I’ve written a good bit, in this space and elsewhere, about Abigail Adams’s request to her husband John that he and his fellow Framers “Remember the Ladies,” lest those ladies “foment a Rebellion” of their own. I like Adams’s letter a lot, and especially love that idea of a potential further revolution from American women (something I focus on a good bit in the section of my book from which the above excerpt is drawn). But in truth, Adams kept her perspective more or less private, and so it’s really published, public writers from the period like Griffitts, Annis Stockton, and others (including one of my favorite Americans, Judith Sargent Murray) who modeled female patriotism in both their words and deeds. One of the most important effects of broadening our definition of American patriotism—perhaps my book’s most central goal—is that it can allow us to better remember impressive and inspiring figures, texts, communities, and events beyond the familiar refrains, and I don’t think that’s more true of any American moment than these Revolutionary women writers.

Griffitts’s poem also models a second form of American patriotism from my book’s four categories: active patriotism. I define active patriotism as service and sacrifice in order to push the nation closer to its ideals, and I don’t know of any single line that sums up that concept better than Griffitts’s “rather than Freedom, we’ll part with our tea.” I know the line, like the poem overall, is a bit tongue-in-cheek (and delightfully so); but at the same time, there’s no doubt that giving up comforts is one of the more challenging sacrifices we can make, especially during difficult times when we need those comforts more than ever. I’ve been inspired by many such collective sacrifices during this fraught first half of 2025, illustrated nicely by the Target boycott (in which my wife and I took part) among many others. This form of active patriotism can be easily overlooked but is one of the most genuinely collective things we can do as a community, and one potently modeled by Hannah Griffitts’s “The Female Patriots.”

Next patriotic model tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Models of patriotism you’d share?