An Independently Minded Woman of the American Revolution

 

 Hannah Lee Corbin (1728–1782) is reputed to be the first Virginia woman to take a stand for women's rights. She was born Hannah Lee, a member of the wealthy and influential Lee family of Stratford Hall in Westmoreland County. Two of her brothers Francis Lightfoot Lee and Richard Henry Lee were to become prominent American patriots and signers of the Declaration of Independence.

 Hannah married her cousin Gawain Corbin in 1747 at the age of nineteen. They had one daughter. Gawain Corbin died in 1760, leaving the thirty-two-year-old Hannah a rich widow, and so she would remain unless, as stipulated in her late husband’s will, she re-married, in which case she would forfeit her inheritance. Being a woman of advanced thinking for the age, Hannah did not let this stipulation stand in her way. She began to co-habit with her lover, a physician named Richard Hall. They had two children which she gave the Corbin surname. Hannah’s private life scandalized her family. She further aggravated her siblings by leaving the Anglican Church in 1764 and joining the Baptist Church.

 The ever-independent thinking Hannah Corbin wrote to her brother Richard Henry Lee in 1778, echoing back the very sentiments of “no taxation without representation” that animated the Revolution. “Why,” she asked, “should widows pay taxes when they have no voice in making the laws or in choosing the men who made them?” She railed against male domination in law and politics and argued for women’s suffrage. Like many whose lives did not reflect the promise of the Declaration that “all (people) are created equal,” Hannah’s Corbin’s dream would have to wait. Women did not get the vote across America for almost one hundred and fifty years after the Declaration of Independence.

Love, Sex, and Marriage in Colonial America 1607-1800

Virginia in the American Revolution