Beginning in the summer of 1767, the British government, still struggling with war debt, would win passage of 5 new laws--the Townshend Acts.

One of them especially angered colonists.

It imposed new taxes on 4 items manufactured in England-- glass, lead, paper, and painter's colors-- and on a fifth item, tea, grown in China but re-exported from Britain and loved by the colonists, rich and poor alike.

Newspaper editors and pamphleteers denounced the new taxes.

A revived and more militant Sons of Liberty called for a new boycott of British goods.

Women, who normally played a subordinate role in public life and had almost no legal rights, joined the resistance by the thousands as "Daughters of Liberty."

Woman: Crisis changes people.

And it gave women different ideas about what they should be doing.

DuVal: Women were the main consumers in colonial society and they were the ones who made sure the boycotts worked.

Women stopped drinking tea.

Women started making their own fabric.

Women started making toys for their children.

And they didn't just stop buying British things and start making their own things; they publicized it.

Taylor: One of the key forms of political theater during the Resistance Movement would be for a local minister to invite the women of the community to come down to the church and to spend the day spinning and weaving cloth.

And it would be a competition to see which community could produce the most homespun.

It would be published in the newspaper.

And these women would be praised as great American Patriots for having produced so much homespun cloth.

DuVal: And reporters would report, "The ladies of Boston, "The ladies of New York "are the most patriotic.

They are at the forefront of this protest movement."

If women hadn't done that, the protest movement and eventually the Revolution would have gone nowhere.

Voice: Let the Daughters of Liberty nobly arise, And though we've no voice but a negative here, Stand firmly resolved and bid them to see, That rather than freedom, we'll part with our tea.

Hannah Griffitts.

Voice: I wish to see America boast of Empire-- of Empire not established in the thralldom of nations but on a more equitable base.

Though such a happy state, such an equal government, may be considered by some as a Utopian dream; yet, you and I can easily conceive of nations and states under more liberal plans.

Mercy Otis Warren.