Content area
Full Text
Reviewed by Elizabeth Thompson University College University of Toronto Toronto, Ontario
In recent years, historians have revised certain longstanding notions of the ori gins of the United Empire Loyalists and the role they played in the American Revolution. Janice Po tter - MacKinnon draws on this revisioning of history in her While the Women Only Wept and focusses largely on the Loyalist women who settled in Eastern Ontario. Her main thesis is that after their relocation in Canada, Loyalists rewrote their own history, changing and distorting events for a pragmatic purpose -- to wring more aid from British officials. She also posits that women, who played a substantial role in the Revolution, were excluded from post - war rhetoric.
Because of its dual purpose, the book often seems to focus more than it sho uld on male activities while continuing to define Loyalist women in terms of the men around them. Like the Loyalist men she describes, Potter - MacKinnon has not found a rhetoric which wi ll satisfactorily tell the women's story.
The problem of focus (and rhetorical stance) is compounded by the lack of p rimary source material. As Potter - MacKinnon points out, many of the Loyalist women were ill iterate. And the majority of the documents available to the historian -- official military an d court records, petitions, and the like -- come from male - dominated spheres of activity and us e male, patriarchal constructs and rhetoric. Moreover, of the few letters, most are bet ween wife and husband. Except for Dothe Stone's diary, the material cited by Potter - MacKinn on records women as they were perceived by men and as they were measured by preconceived so cial standards. Aware of bias, Potter - MacKinnon says: "Loyalist women cannot be s tudied in isolation. They lived in a world in which men made...