Some historians dismiss the Sheffield Resolves; others call them the first American Declaration of Independence. In either case, in just seven days, who wrote this impressive document?
Premarital sex was sanctioned and encouraged when two people were engaged to be married so the couple could determine beforehand if the marriage would be fruitful. What the women in the fornication trials were actually being punished for was not the act but failing to marry the man afterward.
"If one minute's freedom had been offered to me, and I had been told I must die at the end of that minute, I would have taken it — just to stand one minute on God's Earth a free woman."
-- Mum Bett, in Jesse Waldinger's "Mum Bett's Minute"
