Hannah Griffitts

Hannah Griffitts (1727-1817) was an 18th-century American poet and Quaker who championed the resistance of American colonists to Britain during the run-up to the American Revolution.

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 Thomas and Mary Norris Griffitts, and she had a sister (Mary) and a brother (Isaac). As a granddaughter of the merchant Isaac Norris, Griffitts was a member of a prominent Pennsylvania Quaker family. One of Griffitts' second cousins was Mary Norris, who would marry Founding Father John Dickinson, and another cousin was Hannah Harrison, who later married leading Patriot Charles Thomson.

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 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 wed[d]ed one." From the 1770s to the 1790s she took in and cared for several elderly relatives, among them her sister Mary.

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 Daughters of Liberty, a group of women active in protesting British policies in the Thirteen Colonies. "The Female Patriots" (1768) contains references that are implicitly critical of the Sugar Act of 1765 and the Townsend Duties 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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