Lin-Manuel Miranda’s «Hamilton»: Silenced Women’s Voices and Founding Mothers of Color

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Founding Father story Hamilton does not intuitively read as a political text but, first and foremost, as a vastly entertaining and artistically inspiring piece of art that does all the expectations of a Broadway musical exceptional justice. So, Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Critical Race Feminism (CRF) as the analytical frameworks to investigate race relations and gender bias in this text are not initially evident. This is even truer as contemporaneous events have catapulted CRT and CRF to become topics that concern the highest level of government since President Trump’s 2020 Executive Order 13950.¹ And this is even though these theoretical frameworks were initially developed in the 1980s to investigate racial discrimination in the US justice system and have only ever been explored in university studies at a graduate level. Now, they have become framed as “a subversive set of ideas” (Crenshaw qtd. in Fortin) or “divisive and anti-American” (“Memorandum”), to name just a few labels. In March 2022, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson became the first African American woman to be nominated for the Supreme Court and even she had to answer questions on CRT during her Senate hearing.

And yet, aside from all the bluster and partisan gaslighting, we find in Hamilton a unique composition: A Broadway musical that makes good on all the promises of its genre in being an allegory for show business in general, including the glamour, brashness, and carefree fun this specific form of stage entertainment is known for. At the same time, when decoded, it becomes a political text regarding race relations, not least because it is a US Founding Father story performed by people of Color. As such, it can be read as a template to critique the institution of slavery in the US and a text that specifically speaks to gender representation.²

One structural idiosyncrasy in Hamilton is particularly indicative of gender representation, namely that the women in the show go by their first names, Eliza, Angelica, Sally, Maria, and Theodosia. At the same time, the men are referred to by their surnames. It is this disparity that first pointed me to historically contextualizing the female characters if the application of the CRT and CRF lenses was to uncover marginalization regarding race and gender. This is because calling the female characters by their first names allots to the audiences a familiarity that it does not when it comes to the male characters. By contrast, the male characters are awarded more status and deference merely by being referred to by their surnames.³ In Hamilton, this discursive gap affects the construction of all the female characters in the show from the first song onwards. This is despite the fact that they, equal to the male characters, are also based on historical people. At the same time, the gap literally enshrines the mythological imagination that US culture has granted the historical male founders.

Founding stories are myths and Hamilton is no different. The blockbuster Broadway musical about the life of the first US Treasury Secretary by Lin-Manuel Miranda has set a standard of mythical proportions with regard to framer narratives. Although at the time of its premiere on Broadway, “Founder’s Chic [in its characteristic of offering] individual and ensemble portraits of the founding generation aimed at the general reader” (Waldstreicher and Pasley 137) was well underway, historians had over time shown less interest in Alexander Hamilton than in other founders (Hogeland 36). In fact, Alexander Hamilton was to have been replaced on the 10-dollar bill by Harriet Tubman in 2015, but after Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew went to see the musical, he decided not to remove Alexander Hamilton’s portrait from the ten-dollar bill as planned. Instead, it was now Andrew Jackson who would have to make place for Harriet Tubman on the 20-dollar bill. Subsequently, in 2016, after Trump’s election, his Treasury Secretary’s announcement became indicative of the new political and social sentiment in Washington – Harriet Tubman, who would have been the first woman to grace the front of a dollar bill and a woman of Color, would have to wait until 2028. This was after Donald Trump had laid a wreath on Andrew Jackson’s grave just two months into his presidency.

As the Obama presidency was ending in 2016, Hamilton won 16 Tony awards, indicating the scale of its radiant visibility in the dominant framer discourse that went on to spill over into a global community looking for new narratives regarding the representation of old ideas. When on Independence Day 2020, Miranda premiered the musical as a movie on Disney+, where it instantly became accessible to a global audience, this was against an altogether changed historical backdrop. Not only was it in the midst of a global pandemic in Trump’s America, but the #BlackLivesMatter (#BLM) movement had also spread around the world and had, in its wake, changed the global discourse on systemic racism for good.