Excerpt
We the Women
PART IThe First Fifty Years: The Women Behind America’s Fight for Independence, 1776–18261.Mary Katherine Goddard: The PrinterTwo days before Christmas in 1789, Mary Katherine Goddard was seething with anger—and for good reason. She was not a member of the nascent country’s elite, but she knew that she had done enough to justify taking her case straight to the top. In a letter to the newly elected president, George Washington, she decried an “extraordinary Act of oppression towards her.”
At age fifty-one, she had earned her position as the first female postmaster in the United States. Yet after fourteen years of service, she was suddenly dismissed due to political cronyism, cast aside so that a powerful man could return a political favor.
What stung even more was that she had risked everything for her country—including her life. A dedicated patriot, Mary Katherine Goddard was the woman Congress had trusted in the early days of the Republic to complete one of the country’s most important jobs: printing and distributing its founding documents.
On January 18, 1777, the Second Continental Congress ordered the printing of an authentic copy of the Declaration of Independence, with the names of the signers, so that each of the states could put the founding document into its archives. It was the first time that the country would learn the names of almost every signer of the Declaration. America was at war, and they needed to know the men leading the charge.
The lawmakers were meeting in Baltimore because British troops were in New Jersey, and getting close to Philadelphia, “the seat of war” and the nation’s then capital. Baltimore was the home of Mary Katherine Goddard, and the printing shop she had inherited from her family was just a few blocks away from the new Congress. Since the move south, Mary Katherine had printed a number of resolutions and notices for Congress, so when it was time to quickly print the country’s most important document, they called on her.
In just two weeks, she gathered the names, printed copies, and sent them to the thirteen colonies. Earlier versions of the Declaration had circulated without all the signatories’ names to avoid British detection. Printing the version with nearly all the signers’ names was an act of defiance and extraordinary bravery.
And that’s not all. There under the large signature of John Hancock, clearly printed, is the name Mary Katherine Goddard. Mary Katherine stood alongside the nation’s founders, taking a tremendous risk at a time when the outcome of the American Revolution was uncertain.
Today her work is known as the Goddard Broadside, and only a handful of copies still exist, including ones at the New York Public Library and at the Library of Congress. It was the first printed version of the Declaration of Independence specifically intended for preservation.
How ironic that Mary Katherine’s work was meant to be remembered forever, yet she herself has largely been forgotten.
The broadside was the first to use the title “The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America.” It is also the first version to contain almost every signer’s name, fifty-five of them—all men, including John Hancock, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson. And then at the bottom, in bold type, is the only woman’s name on the nation’s founding documents: Mary Katherine Goddard.
It’s significant that she used her full name. She could have left it blank or used her initials, as she had done earlier when signing her newspapers as “MK Goddard.” Including her full name opened her up to the risk of being imprisoned by the British. That’s not an overstatement, as Richard Stockton, one of the signers from New Jersey, was captured and imprisoned “under harsh conditions” for adding his name to the Declaration.
In 1777, many women could neither read nor write; they often signed documents with an X because they were not literate. Even decades later, French political observer Alexis de Tocqueville noted that American society confined women to domestic roles, writing that “inexorable public opinion carefully keeps woman within the little sphere of domestic interests and duties and will not let her go beyond them.”
Mary Katherine defied those expectations, becoming one of the most prominent publishers during the nation’s founding. Even before the statement of freedom from the king of England, Mary Katherine’s newspaper, the Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser, published editorials and documents that challenged unpopular taxation and control of the colonies by the British monarch. She devoted pages of her newspaper to Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense”—the Revolutionary pamphlet that galvanized support for independence and rebuked the tyrannical rule of the king.
Furthermore, she wrote editorials herself. Following the battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775, considered the beginning of the Revolutionary War, she wrote, “What think ye of Congress now? That day . . . evidenced that Americans would rather die than live [as] slaves!” As a wartime printer, she brought the front lines of the battlefield to the front pages, telling the colonies about the “savage barbarity” of the British soldiers. Printing these words was clearly dangerous. Yet she persisted.
An established printer and publisher, she was appointed the postmaster of Baltimore in 1775 just as the revolution started, serving under the leadership of Postmaster General Benjamin Franklin. That alone was a tremendous accomplishment for anyone at the time. Her duties were critical: ensuring the timely delivery of mail, often at her own expense, frequently using her own money to pay the people who were delivering letters and packages. Writing letters was the only form of long-distance communication, and it allowed for the coordination of resistance during the war.
Despite her service, in 1789, the new postmaster general replaced her with a man who, in her words, “never had a Day’s previous knowledge of the duties he undertakes.” The reason given for her dismissal? Postmaster General Samuel Osgood claimed that in the role, “more travelling might be necessary than a Woman could undertake.” A woman can’t travel? It makes my blood boil.
Baltimore citizens were outraged. Over 230 businessmen, including Maryland governor John Eager Howard, signed a petition demanding her reinstatement.
Mary Katherine’s own letter to President Washington in 1789 was a plea for justice. She protested not only her removal but the humiliating way she had been treated as “an unfriendly delinquent, unworthy of common Civility, as well as common Justice.” When she called her dismissal an “extraordinary Act of oppression towards her,” she was making it clear to Washington that she expected better from the republic she had helped to create.
It might very well have been the first time that a woman used the word oppression in a political context. Her words still resonate today, echoing in the demands for equal pay, workplace equity, and recognition of women’s contributions.
Sadly, President Washington’s response on January 6, 1790, was dismissive: “I have uniformly avoided interfering with any appointments which do not require my official agency.” But Mary Katherine did not stop advocating for herself; she asked the U.S. Senate to reinstate her, but they never responded.
She never got her job back. She never married or had children, but let us remember, she helped birth a nation. Her life was devoted to her work. Though no portraits of her survive today, her name is set in all caps on the Goddard Broadside, an indelible mark on the history of the United States. For those who look hard enough, she is still there—forged in ink on parchment, a founding mother of America.
