In We the Women, Norah O’Donnell argues that America’s foundational promise of equality was hypocritical from its inception, systematically denying rights to women, enslaved people, and Indigenous populations. The book demonstrates that lasting change occurred only when these marginalized groups appropriated the language of liberty enshrined in documents like the Declaration of Independence to expose the nation’s contradictions and demand inclusion. By showing these acts of resistance, O’Donnell reframes US history as a continuous struggle to force the nation to live up to its own professed ideals. The narrative shows that progress was not a gift from the powerful, but rather an achievement won by those who used the founders’ own words as a weapon against injustice.

This strategy is most explicitly seen in the women’s suffrage movement, which framed its demands as a logical extension of the American Revolution. The 1848 Seneca Falls Convention produced the Declaration of Sentiments, a document that mirrored the Declaration of Independence by replacing grievances against King George III with a list of “repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman” (63). Decades later, at the nation’s centennial celebration in 1876, Susan B. Anthony and other suffragists stormed the stage at Independence Hall to present their Declaration of Rights of the Women of the United States. Anthony’s call for justice and equality was a direct challenge to the patriarchal power structure, invoking the nation’s founding principles to argue for the rights of its female citizens. In her words, they asked that “all the civil and political rights that belong to citizens of the United States, be guaranteed to [women] and [their] daughters forever” (5). By using the framework of the nation’s birth, these women argued that their exclusion wasn’t just unfair but also fundamentally un-American.

Similarly, enslaved and free Black Americans leveraged the rhetoric of freedom to dismantle the institution of slavery and fight for civil rights. The book presents the case of Elizabeth Freeman, an enslaved woman in Massachusetts who, upon hearing the newly ratified state constitution declare that “[a]ll men are born free and equal” (40), successfully sued for her freedom in 1781. Her legal victory, based on the literal interpretation of democratic ideals, effectively ended slavery in the state. Before Freeman’s lawsuit, the poet Phillis Wheatley used her art to draw a parallel between her own enslavement and the colonies’ fight against British tyranny. In a poem to a British official, she questioned how her love of freedom could be a surprise, given that she was “snatch’d from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat” (18). Her work challenged revolutionary leaders to recognize that a true fight for liberty must include the abolition of slavery. These actions underscore a central theme that the most powerful critiques of American hypocrisy came from those who took its promises of freedom most seriously.

Throughout the book, this pattern of using American ideals to demand inclusion repeats across different movements and eras. Mercy Otis Warren, an intellectual of the Revolutionary period, opposed the Constitution’s ratification without a Bill of Rights, insisting on explicit protections for all. Later, civil-rights leader Mary McLeod Bethune questioned what American democracy meant to Black Americans who fought and died for the nation but were still denied its full promise. Each of these figures, in their own way, exposed the gap between the nation’s celebrated ideals and its discriminatory reality. Their collective stories reveal that the expansion of American democracy was driven by the relentless insistence of its excluded populations that the words “We the People” must apply to all.