Fifty-One Women in Edenton — Penelope Barker

The teapot is on the sideboard. It is empty. The women in this parlor have brought their own substitute, mulberry leaves steeped in water, and no one mentions the tea they are no longer drinking. The sheet of paper moves down the long table. Each woman takes the quill, finds the next open line, and writes her name in iron gall ink that will not come out. Fifty-one names. The document is going to London on the next ship. London has opinions about what women should be doing.

It is 1774.

She does not just refuse to buy British tea. She convenes fifty-one women of Edenton on October 25, 1774, presents a resolution pledging to refuse not only British tea but British cloth, and asks each one to sign her name to a document that will travel to Parliament and be read by people with power over all of them.

She does not just organize a gathering. She organizes the first collective political action by women in American history to be signed with real names, published in a newspaper, and sent to the enemy as a matter of public record — no harbor, no disguise, no cover of darkness.

She does not just attract ridicule. When Philip Dawe publishes his London satirical engraving mocking the Edenton women in January 1775, he draws them grotesque and unfeminine, which is exactly the measure of how seriously they have been taken.

She does not just manage her household while her husband sits three thousand miles away in London serving as the colony’s agent. She runs substantial estates through three marriages, organizes the most documented act of colonial women’s political resistance in the pre-Revolutionary period, and signs her own name to it.

Her Spark of Liberty was the public record made in the open.

Not a harbor. Not a midnight action. Fifty-one names, written in daylight, on a document bound for the people who made the laws they were refusing to obey.

Now, “Where History Comes to Life.”

Born in Edenton, North Carolina, on June 17, 1728, she outlived three husbands and managed estates across each widowhood. On October 25, 1774, she organized a gathering of fifty-one women at the Edenton home of Elizabeth King, where they signed a formal resolution pledging to refuse British tea and British-made cloth in support of the provincial non-importation agreement. The resolution was published in the Virginia Gazette on November 3, 1774, and reprinted in London. A satirical engraving by Philip Dawe, published in London in January 1775, mocked the signers but spread knowledge of their action across the British Empire. Her husband Thomas Barker, the colony’s London agent since 1761, did not return until 1778, stranded by the war he had watched begin from the wrong side of the Atlantic. She died in Edenton in 1796.

Her name was Penelope Barker.

Now We Know Em
by Christopher B. Gordon

Some names keep the watch while the world sleeps.

Night Watch is a wordsearch collection built for quiet hands and long evenings.

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