Bonus Quote of the Day (Ben Franklin’s Sis Jane, on Obstacles to Women’s Equality)

“Very few is able to beat thro all Impedements and Arive to any Grat Degre of superiority in Understanding.”—Benjamin Franklin’s youngest, favorite sister Jane, July 4, 1786, quoted in Jill Lepore, “Poor Jane’s Almanac,” The New York Times, April 24, 2011

The climax of one of the great comic quarrels of the classic sitcom All in the Family occurs when Mike Stivic tells wife Gloria that the Declaration of Independence doesn’t quite mean what she thinks it does: “It says all men are created equal,” he helpfully corrects her.

Arch-liberal Mike, meet your later brother under the skin, original-intent advocate Antonin Scalia.

The struggle over women’s rights, fought in a thousand different ways over the last century, is a reminder of the vitality of the Declaration of Independence that Pauline Maier discussed in today’s “Quote of the Day.” Mike Stivic’s comment shows that humility and civility are required in all our contemporary debates about that document’s meaning, since even the most tolerant and progressive among us will sometimes exhibit benighted attitudes later regretted.

In the same vein, we might want to consider the case of Benjamin Franklin. It turns out that even that colonial epitome of the Enlightenment, the man dubbed by historian H.W. Brands as “The First American,” could be limited in his understanding of women.

Harvard history professor Jill Lepore’s brief treatment of the life of Franklin’s sister Jane (including the excerpt quoted above from a letter to her brother, 10 years to the day after adoption of the Declaration of Independence), printed several months ago in The New York Times, got me thinking more about what he thought about women. I mean by that a lot more than simply his feelings about sex, something that it’s fun to investigate and irresistible to exaggerate. (It was true that he wrote a letter once in which he told a female admirer that he’d discovered two new commandments: “That ye love one another” and “go forth and multiply”; it was not true, as a history teacher told my high-school class, that Ben was afflicted with syphilis. Try gout!)

Specifically, what about Franklin’s thinking about education? In certain ways, he was what Norman Mailer might have called a prisoner of sex. He contracted a common-law marriage with Deborah Read while still a printer in his early twenties. Whatever physical attraction might have existed between them at the start seems to have faded, as, over time, with domestic duties providing little opportunity for her self-improvement, Deborah and her fanatically self-improving husband became increasingly distant.

But it was possible for Franklin to change, at least somewhat. Like George Washington—and rather unlike Thomas Jefferson—he was a realist prepared to change his mind when presented with how something worked out in practice. (Ironically, it was the unlettered Deborah who, by convincing her husband to visit a school for black children in Philadelphia, made him rethink first his belief that these blacks’ intellectual capacities were no match for whites, then his entire acceptance of slavery.)

Similarly, encounters with a particularly intelligent woman made him raise, at least somewhat, his estimation of how far the sex as a whole could progress. In his autobiography, he recounted his working relationship with Elizabeth Timothee, widow of a partner of his.

Mr. Timothee had his good points, Franklin explained, but they were limited in the business world: “He was a Man of Learning and honest, but ignorant in Matters of Account; and tho’ he sometimes made me Remittances, I could get no Account from him, nor any satisfactory State of our Partnership while he lived.”

In contrast, Elizabeth “not only sent me as clear a State as she could find of the Transactions past, but continu’d to account with the greatest Regularity and Exactitude every Quarter afterwards.”

By the end of his life, Franklin was still not prepared to see woman as potential scientists, but he advocated that they learn accounting. It was an extension of his thinking that women’s destiny was for marriage and the home, where skill with ledger books would enable them not only to be excellent helpmates to their husbands but, like Mrs. Timothee, enable the family business to be passed along to sons.

Our understanding of American women of the Revolutionary War era is limited to the extraordinarily articulate Abigail Adams. But the cases of Deborah Read Franklin, Mrs. Timothee, and Jane Franklin Mecon (who endured the loss of 11 of her 12 children—including a few fallen victim, it seems to mental illness—before she herself died at age 82) show that, no matter what their level of education, these women could be, in their own way, every bit as stalwart as men, even if, as Jane lamented, “Impedements” might get in the way of their “superiority in Understanding.”

They were full partners to the men who either pledged lives, fortunes and sacred honor or who died for it, and the American experiment gained in legitimacy by opening itself up to their aspirations and those of other groups marginalized at the dawn of the republic.