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with some of her Norris cousins at an estate known as
Fairhill. She stayed at Fairhill for over a decade, becoming especially close to Mary Norris, and the two corresponded regularly as adults. Griffitts never married, at one point writing, "everyone is not fitted for the single Life, nor was I ever moulded for the weded one." From the 1770s to the 1790s she took in and cared for several elderly relatives, among them her sister Mary.
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was one of the literary centers of
Philadelphia. Apparently, Griffitts used this pseudonym only when sending out clean copies of her poems; she signed her letters with her real name, and her own rough drafts often carry her initials. A small paperback volume of draft poems and working notes is still
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In this period, the
British and American literary establishments were largely hostile to the work of women poets. Perhaps in reaction to this situation, Griffitts did not attempt to publish her poems, instead circulating them among her largely female network of friends and acquaintances. A few found
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Despite her stirring rhetoric, Griffitts, like many other
Quakers of the period, was uneasy at the prospect of violence and supported a negotiated solution to overtaxation rather than outright revolution. After war broke out, she raged against radicals like Thomas Paine (calling him a "Snake beneath
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Griffitts knew early on that she wanted to be a poet, and when she was just 10 years old she made a promise to God that her poetry would include "no trifling themes". In 1751, with both her parents dead and her brother Isaac in disgrace because of financial misdeeds and alcoholism, she went to live
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the Grass" in one of her poems) whose views had prevailed over those of the moderates. She refused to leave
Philadelphia even after it was seized by the British, and she continued to maintain her antiwar stance. Although the neutralist American Quakers were sometimes seen as
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Griffitts is best known for a series of scathing satires that celebrate the
American colonists' opposition to Britain in the decades before the American Revolution. For example, she wrote several proto-feminist poems about the
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of 1767, which were measures intended to raise revenues in the colonies by taxing and controlling goods such as molasses and tea. In the poem, Griffitts also castigates male colonists who fail to stand up to the
British:
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Griffitts' writing throughout her life reflected empathy with people's suffering, and she wrote many elegies for parents who had lost their children, as well as for fellow
Quakers and friends like the poet
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Griffitts died in 1817, and her manuscripts (including several hundred poems and a large number of letters) are now held by the
Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
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Griffitts was born into a Quaker family in
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and lived in that city for the entirety of her long life. Her parents were
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that the British arranged in 1778 to honor General George Howe on his departure for England—as an example of the degeneracy of British culture.
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as a method of creating a private, informal historical record of their own era. Some 60 of Griffitts' poems are included in her second cousin
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meaning 'faithfulness' or 'loyalty'), Griffitts is one of the three dominant contributors to Moore's commonplace book, along with
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263:"Despise the mean Distinctions Times Have Made": The Complexity of Patriotism and Quaker Loyalism in One Pennsylvania Family"
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during the war, Griffitts was as quick to criticize the British as the Americans. For instance, she perceived the
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and Mary Norris Griffitts, and she had a sister, Mary, and a brother, Isaac. As a granddaughter of the merchant
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Authorship of this poem has in the past been mistakenly attributed to Milcah Martha Moore.
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who championed the resistance of American colonists to Britain during the run-up to the
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their way into print, probably without her authorization, in such publications as the
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Memory's Daughters: The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America
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Milcah Martha Moore's Book: A Commonplace Book from Revolutionary America
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Recent scholarship has shown how women of the period used
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Are stripped of their Freedom, and robbed of their Right.
342:. History of American Women website, Sept. 23, 2008.
356:American Poetry: The Puritans Through Walt Whitman
22:(1727–1817) was an 18th-century American poet and
436:People of Pennsylvania in the American Revolution
340:"Hannah Griffitts: Philadelphia Poet (1727-1817)"
295:Blecki, Catherine La Courreye, and A. Wulf, eds.
107:If the Sons (so degenerate) the Blessing despise,
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115:—from Hannah Griffitts, "The Female Patriot"
111:And tho' we've no Voice, but a negative here.
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299:. Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997.
358:. University of Massachusetts Press, 1990.
109:Let the Daughters of Liberty, nobly arise,
315:. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004.
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