An actual nonfiction book!  Someone on Tumblr recommended it, and coincidentally the library had a copy for sale for 50 cents.  So now I’m reading The Radicalism of the American Revolution by Gordon Wood.  It’s actually really fascinating.  And I keep having the urge to take notes, which is why I’m telling y’all about it.

The first section is about class and “unfreedom”, which is an awfully clunky word, but the author’s point is that in the 1700s there weren’t just free people and slaves.  There were all sorts of degrees of “dependence” (their word) and “unfreedom” (the author’s word).  I guess this use of “dependent” is why we use it on tax forms today– it means being part of someone else’s household, having someone else responsible for taking care of you.  And in the 1700s it also meant obeying that person in all things.  The current idea then was that families and monarchies were essentially the same thing–a father in his household has absolute authority like a king, and kings take care of their subjects as if they’re family, and citizens relate to each other as brothers and sisters.

This has the interesting effect that if you live in your parents’ house, even if you’re an adult, you don’t get to vote.  You live in your father’s house, so you’re his dependent, so you have to do whatever he says, so you’d just vote however he told you to, so what’s the point?  People who are working in apprenticeships also can’t vote, because they’re dependent on their teacher.  And slaves can’t vote, and neither can indentured servants (basically temporary slaves, who get something big in advance in exchange for working for free for a certain number of years.)  And neither can some farmers who rent their land, because they’re considered to be part of the landowner’s household.  And no women can vote.

The effect of all this is that only fairly well-off older men can vote.  But the thing is, if we take for granted that heads of household actually do have absolute power over their dependents, this is the only thing that makes sense.  If they’d let the dependents vote, each head of household would basically get more votes in proportion to how many dependents he has.  This way, everyone else gets nothing, but all the middle-class-and-up older men are equal to each other in the eyes of the law.

I think I’d been told before that only rich white men could vote in the early days of the colonies, but I’d assumed it was directly about money, like the “poll taxes” and such that they had in the south during Jim Crow.  This is way more interesting.