La Fayette is in prison at Magdebourg; and enclosed is the extract of a letter he has been so fortunate as to find means of conveying...General Washington’s interference is the only hope left to him and his family.
Angelica Schuyler Church to Thomas Jefferson, Aug. 1793
Kings are not usually very wise; ours is afflicted by the greatest scourge of heaven. He is quite mad, and often fancys himself General Washington. Parliment meets to-day, undecided what is to be done in this exigency.
Angelica Schuyler Church to Thomas Jefferson, Nov. 1788
The tender breasts of ladies were not formed for political convulsion.
Thomas Jefferson to Angelica Schuyler Church, Sept. 1788
A common line in feminist historiography since Joan Kelly is "Did women have a (Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment)"--that is, did major societal and intellectual developments have a (usually positive) effect on women as women. As you might expect, "Did [white] women have an American Revolution" chalks up another answer in the immortal it's complicated column. In fact, the intellectual and economic currents that swirled into U.S. independence had both concrete and tangible effects on white women's lives, both as residents of the U.S. and as women. But three things are crucial to point out. First, black and Native women were excluded from developments by design. Second, the revolution didn't look the same for women as it did for men. And third, there's a sense in which the American Revolution served as a focal point and foundation for further developments for women, rather than the culmination of earlier ones.
There's no question that at the end of the 18th century, women on both sides of the Atlantic were sneaking into literary circles just to preach women's rights. Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is 1792, and Judith Sargent Murray's "On the Equality of the Sexes" is 1770/1779. And the experience of American men and women during the Revolution did a lot to sway more skeptics over to the view that women up and down the social scale needed basic education in reading, writing, and math to better run households and businesses--either helping their husbands, or on their own while they were away. (One of the really odd but enduring features of Western history is the assumption and, indeed, the reality of women taking over estate management while their husbands were e.g. off on Crusade, but as Christine de Pizan lamented in the 15th century, women received no education or preparation for this task). So while white American men in the Northeast were almost all literate by the Revolution, probably a little more than 50% of white women were. And yet as soon as 1815, scholars estimate, white women's literacy in New England was also approaching universal.
But that raises the question--literacy for what? Mary Beth Norton and Linda Kerber stress that the stunning speed of a standard for women's education around and after the Revolution was focused on practicality of running a household, not ideals of "being educated." That remained, as in the case of Murray and the Schuyler daughters (who were a singularly independent-minded bunch; four out of five of them eloped against their father's wishes, one of them reportedly escaping out the window on a rope to her wedding), a rare privilege.
And even for women whose education and interests did take them into the realm of philosophy, elite literature, and current events, there was a definite double standard in the idea of "civic society." The notion of separate public and private spheres is useful here so long as they aren't equated with a strict male-female dichotomy. Many later interlocutors of John Locke drew a distinction between civic society that did encompass women, and the role of governing, which did not. The First Amendment rights are a great example. Freedom of/from religion and freedom of assembly are undoubtedly "public-sphere" rights, and yet scholars generally agree those were intended to apply to women as well as men. And "It's 1800, ladies, tell your husbands--vote for Burr!", right? Women were necessary moral guides, not just the power but the virtue behind the 'throne.' (This would of course be trotted out as an anti-suffrage argument a century down the road--how dare we corrupt pure little women by making them wade into the mud of voting for themselves).
But while women were wrapped up in the public world in one sense, the ideal methods of engagement were, if not "private", then quiet. For example, civic virtue was added to the ideals that mothers were expected to inculcate in their children (women had long held that responsibility in the religious realm). It's right around the Revolution that women (beyond Catholic nuns, the OG champions of girls' education) became a major force in organized education of children outside the home, too. And most famously, through letter writing campaigns.
In the blurbs above, for example, you can see ASC acting as one intermediary between Lafayette, the courier who got his letter out of France, and the American elite she believed could help her friend. Hannah Lee Corbin wrote to the revolutionary leaders she was related to, to urge them to consider widows/unmarried women who owned property as holding the same citizenship responsibilities and rights as property-owning men. And most famously, Abigail Adams exhorted her husband John to "remember the ladies":
Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If perticular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice or Representation...Men of Sense in all Ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the vassals of your Sex.
John's response suggests that he thought she was indeed being intense and insane on this point--not through her political acuity and engagement, but by pushing for a development that would make him hear the drinking song people were singing:
As to your extraordinary Code of Laws, I cannot but laugh. We have been told that our Struggles has loosened the bands of Governmentevery where. That Children and Apprentices were disobedient - that schools and Colledges were grown turbulent--that Indians slighted their Guardians and Negroes grew insolent to their Masters. But your letter was the first Intimation that another Tribe more numerous and powerfull than all the rest were grown discontented.
If women get rights, everyone is going to demand rights.
The world turned upside down!
As a follow-up/clarification question: Would Angelica Church's experience be reflective of all socially elite women throughout the 13 colonies? i.e. Would a socially elite woman reading political literature in the Southern Colonies face different pressures than one in the New England Colonies?
This is a difficult question to answer definitively. One reason for this is that it's always difficult to tell who's reading what in the past, unless they specifically write about it. After some searching and reading of the relevant secondary literature (cited below), I was unable to locate a direct reference to a woman in the 1770s reading or commenting on Common Sense.
This isn't too surprising, because a) most of the materials that survive from the 1770s were written by men; and b) according to the prescriptive political ideologies of the day, women weren't supposed to talk about politics in public. The prevailing "classical republican" ideology of the American Revolution viewed a republic as supported by two kinds of virtue: public virtue was associated with men, and private virtue was associated with women. While women played an important role in this formulation, reading and discussion of a political pamphlet would have been a "public" and thus masculine kind of activity.
With those caveats, I want to make the case that a woman like Angelica reading Common Sense wouldn't have been terribly unusual. Or, put another way, if a woman in North America during the 1770s did read Common Sense, it would have most likely been a woman like Angelica Schuyler. There are at least five reasons for this:
First, elite women were better educated. In 1780, according to historian Nancy Cott, about half of the women in New England (the most literate part of the continent) could sign their names. So literacy wasn't quite universal among women during the Revolution. But the Schuylers and other rich families could easily afford to educate their daughters—even beyond a minimal level of literacy.
Second, women were not always confined by prescriptive ideologies during the revolutionary era. The ideals of "separate spheres," "Republican Motherhood," and private virtue that dominated in early America did not always describe reality. Especially in the late eighteenth century, there was often quite a bit of fluidity. As historian Rosemarie Zagarri has shown, after the revolution many women made significant claims to inclusion in the political sphere. In New Jersey, elite women could even vote for several years. During this era one's relationship to politics was defined more by class than by gender—which would have allowed a woman such as Angelica some leeway. According to Mary Beth Norton, the revolution brought more women into politics than ever: "women, who in the mid-1760s offered profuse apologies whenever they dared to discuss politics, were by the 1780s reading widely in political literature" (Liberty's Daughters, p. 156). Naturally, some men disliked this, and attacked the "female politicians" making claims for inclusion in politics. It was only in the early 19th century, though, that prescriptive norms excluding women from politics would have been more rigidly enforced.
Third, urban women would have found politics hard to avoid. From what I can tell, Angelica lived in both Albany and New York around this time. Especially in an urban port city such as New York, women were very active in the non-importation movement of the 1760s. By producing "homespun" cloth and by refusing to consume tea, women participated in the politics of the era. To many women, politics seemed to be all around them.
Fourth, many women probably read the pamphlet without participating in public conversations about it. During the 1770s, many women still faced public pressure to stay out of the political sphere. But they were interested in what was going on! Especially in places like New York City, the revolution was totally engrossing. As the musical says, "Look around, look around, the revolution's happening in New York." It's hard to imagine that women weren't engaged with it. But social norms at the time may have led many women to pretend that they weren't. For example, a woman named Anne Emlen in 1777 noted in her commonplace book that she couldn't remain silent on the revolution: "the subject is so very interesting, so much engrossing Conversation—& what every Member of the Community is more or less concerned in." There was a difference, of course, between observing politics and being involved in them. Emlen scolded herself by asking God for "prudence... which may prove a stay to my mind & a bridle to my tongue" (Norton, 170-71). Women such as Emlen were often reluctant to speak publicly about politics even when they were privately engaging with political news and ideas. This, of course, makes it that much more difficult to know whether women were reading pamphlets such as Common Sense.
Fifth, it's worth noting that Angelica Schuyler was white and free, and would have thus been in a better position to engage with national politics than many other women living in revolutionary America.
Another point I want to make is that if a woman was reading a political pamphlet in the 1770s, it would most likely have been Common Sense. This pamphlet was probably the most widely read document in revolutionary America. Though Trish Loughran has admonished historians to temper the "legend" of the spread of Common Sense, it was undoubtedly the most widely read pamphlet of the era. It's almost certain that the Schuyler men would have read it and that Angelica's future husband John Barker Church would have read it. It wouldn't have been difficult for Angelica to get her hands on it—either by borrowing it from one of them, or by purchasing a copy herself (it was cheaply priced). It would have been widely sold and reprinted in Albany and New York City. So while some women might have felt compunctions about discussing Paine's ideas, it would have been perfectly easy and normal for a literate, elite, white, urban woman like Angelica to get ahold of a copy of Common Sense and read it.
Secondary sources consulted: