Virtual Lecture, The Traitor’s Wife: Peggy Shippen Arnold and Treason at West Point

Registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-traitors-wife-peggy-shippen-arnold-and-treason-at-west-point-tickets-330852949077 

Join Putnam History Museum and Dr. Charlene Boyer Lewis on an exploration of Peggy Shippen Arnold and her role in the Revolutionary War.

Peggy Shippen Arnold plotted with her husband Benedict to turn over West Point to the British in 1780 during the Revolutionary War. The Arnolds’ treason took place within a larger debate over the nature of a republican culture. As Americans grappled with the meanings of republicanism as well as fluctuating ideas about gender, the Arnolds’ treasonous plot brought to light many questions. Could women be as political as men? How should married women be viewed–as separate entities or as extensions of their husbands? How should women serve the Patriot cause? More crucially, could a wife be a Patriot and her husband a Loyalist or vice versa? Did Loyalist wives constitute a threat? Did gender beliefs about “ladies” trump political views about enemies to the Revolution? Peggy Shippen Arnold demonstrates the distinct ways in which women of this era, both Loyalist and Patriot, participated in public culture and contributed to the important political and social discussions of the day.

Charlene Boyer Lewis is a professor in the History Department and the director of American Studies at Kalamazoo College. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. She specializes in women’s history, family history, and American cultural and social history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Washington Library at Mount Vernon, International Center for Jefferson Studies, American Antiquarian Society, the Library Company, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, among others. She is the author of Ladies and Gentlemen on Display: Planter Society at the Virginia Springs, 1790-1860 and, most recently, Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte: An American Aristocrat in the Early Republic. Her next book project is an examination of Margaret Shippen Arnold, the wife of Benedict Arnold, and American culture in the Revolutionary Era.