4. American Revolution

Women of all classes and races were not only supporters and opponents of the American Revolution, they actively promoted, engaged, wrote, fought, and were deeply impacted by the outcome of the American Revolution. There are a lot of perspectives to consider, and we can only brush the surface.

Wikimedia Broadcasting

Mention of the American Revolution evokes images of George Washington, Samuel Adams and the Sons of Liberty, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and even Benedict Arnold long before it conjures up images of Deborah Sampson, Abigail Adams, Mercy Otis Warren, and more. While the leading figures of the Revolution became known as the Founding Fathers, history tends to ignore the Founding Mothers fighting right alongside them. 

The American Revolution began in the wake of the Seven Years War, which ended in 1763. After 150 years of colonial growth, distance started to drive a wedge between the colonies and their mother country. Despite ample raw materials, increasinging wealth, a growing population, and a healthy one to boot, Americans had developed a growing sense of inferiority due to the treatment they received from their mother country. This was soon exacerbated by British efforts to control trade, restrictions on settling Native lands, and taxation without representation in response to America’s continued efforts to cement their autonomy. As the various male-centric dissenters around the colonies slowly congregated into groups like the Sons of Liberty, and resistance became more organized, history seems to indicate that women retreated into the shadows. After all, rebelling is men’s work, right? Wrong!

Women were involved in resistance from the very beginning. Women running taverns provided a safe place for rebels to meet, discuss ideas, and plan their protests. Women were also immediately recruited by the Sons of Liberty and others to serve as spies as tensions mounted closer to war. Seamstresses, servants, laundresses, and caregivers in the homes of loyalists and British officials were called on to provide information that proved critical to protecting rebels from the earliest protests through the greatest battles of the war.

We also cannot deny that many Americans opposed rebellion, and many loyalist women sought to support the war effort on the British side as well. 

Women were also at the forefront of defining what America was, and what it meant to be included among her people. 

Phillis Wheatley became the first African American author of published poetry in 1773, which eventually led to her emancipation from slavery. She would write controversial poems challenging the system of slavery, poems commending George Washington, and during the rebellion, described the dissolving relationship between mother country and her colonies: 

“A certain lady had an only son
He grew up daily virtuous as he grew
Fearing his Strength which she undoubted knew
She laid some taxes on her darling son
And would have laid another act there on
Amend your manners I’ll the task remove
Was said with seeming Sympathy and Love
By many Scourges she his goodness try’d”

In other words, Britain was saying “I’m doing this for you,” but deep down, she was continuing to test American’s good nature.

Likewise, Mercy Warren Otis was an outspoken patriot. Having been surrounded by politics her whole life, she regularly debated political leaders and wrote several plays calling out the wrongdoings of Britain and their royal officials years before the war broke out. She was willing to say “independence” far before the male representatives of her time and was brazen in her literary assault on the King. She was also unafraid to criticize military officers and the Continental Congress during the war. Talk about badass! She seemed unafraid to take on anyone, as she wrote, “Great advantages are often attended with great inconveniences, and great minds called to severe trials.” She would also go on to write and publish a history of the Revolution, being the first nonfiction book published by a woman in America. The first history! 

The scholarly pursuits of these women and the ideas they presented were not only important leading up to the war and throughout the conflict, but also in the question of women’s rights. 

Some women bonded together to match their written words with action. Society at the time did not expect, or often allow, women to play a prominent role in these more direct forms of protest. Instead, they were called on to take more dignified paths. Penelope Barker and over fifty women from the city of Edenton, North Carolina, would do exactly that. They would mail a letter signed by each of their party indicating that they would boycott British tea and cloth until a resolution was reached between Parliament and the newly formed Continental Congress. 

The British press had a good laugh at these patriotic ladies, but the Virginia Gazette heaped on the praise. While this event would not receive the historic attention of the Boston Tea Party, these women used their voice to tell Parliament what was up!

When Americans were called upon to start boycotting British goods, women stepped to the plate to fill in their economic gaps. These Daughters of Liberty groups gathered to spin wool to make their own textiles (where we get the term “home-spun”). They learned to make tea with American herbs, which they called Liberty Tea. Also, doing the majority of the shopping for their home, they held up the mantle of boycotting British manufactured goods as well.

We also can’t forget that women were used as pawns in war too. Namely, they became propaganda. This happens regularly throughout periods of war, where societies paint a message of men needing to protect women from their enemy. 

We can see this right from the jump with the Revolution. In the days after the Boston Massacre in 1770, Paul Revere and Henry Pelham’s engraving of the event spread far and wide through colonial newspapers. There are many, many inaccuracies of the image, each was hand-picked to highlight America’s innocence in the event.

The British soldiers appear to be firing into a completely unassuming crowd. The figure of the woman standing clearly in the midst of the crowd was not meant to show that women were involved in the scuffle that made the Revolution inevitable, but rather to make America seem to be the undeniable victims. After all, if a woman was present, it must have been a peaceful crowd right? 

Fighting eventually broke out at Lexington and Concord and around the English colonies. Sybil Ludington, a sixteen year old girl, took a ride just as daring as Paul Revere’s and more than double the distance, to warn the militias of New York and Connecticut that British invaders were on their way. After the war, General George Washington personally thanked her for her service. 

As men joined militias and headed off to war, gender norms were disrupted and women assumed responsibilities managing businesses and farms. This also left some women vulnerable. A South Carolina woman, Eliza Pickney, described her situation, “my property pulled into pieces, burnt and destroyed; my money of no value, my Children sick and prisoners.” Women were also attacked and raped at home by Tory and British soldiers as they came through while their spouses were away.

But many women did not dismay. Abigail Adams wrote, “We possess a spirit that will not be conquered. If our Men are drawn off and we should be attacked, you will find a Race of Amazons in America.” She turned her home into a hospital at times of war and did whatever she could to keep the home fires burning. 

Martha Washington was a wealthy woman, inheriting a great deal of money from her first husband. During the war, she maintained her elaborate estates and bankrolled the war effort. Every winter, when the war was stalemated, she would travel, like a lot of wives would, to be with Washington in the camps. Washington and other prominent women began a campaign to America's women to collect direct aid for soldiers in the Continental Army. Mount Vernon records show that Martha herself donated $20,000. 

As the British stomped their way through upstate New York, young Jane McCrea (Mc-Cray), met her untimely end. Engaged to a loyalist officer who had rushed off to serve, McCrea was making her way toward him when she was abducted and killed. While there is much debate about her killers, the blame was placed on General John Burgoyne’s Native scouts. Jane became a tool for the Patriots.

The message was spread among the communities that Jane had been one of their own, having been a resident of Saratoga. If Burgoyne would allow that to happen to a loyalist woman, and one of his own officer’s fiancés, what would he do to your wife, fiancé, daughter, or sister, when he came through?

This takes a political war into the realm of a moral or ethical one. The women needed protection from the British brute!

Let’s also remember that women were certainly not absent from the war itself. We’ve already discussed their roles as spies, and very often, the wives of officers and some women looking for work traveled with the army, known as “camp followers”. They cooked, cleaned, and cared for the men. They were often kept far to the rear to protect them from the battlefield, but this doesn’t mean they always stayed there. Who could forget Molly Pitcher?

Molly Pitcher was one such camp follower who is famed for having operated a cannon in the place of her husband, who was killed in the line of duty. Who was she really? Now, that’s a good question!

Many claim it was Mary Hays, who was a camp follower of her husband William. She stayed with him at Valley Forge, and in the summer after, was with him at the Battle of Monmouth Courthouse. When he died, she had been delivering pitchers of water to the men, and immediately jumped in his place. They took her husband, and she was going to take a bite out of them in response! She took on the role of swabbing and reloading the cannon, supposedly even earning Washington’s attention.
 
Others claim this was really Molly Corbin at Fort Washington, where she, like Hays, stepped into her husband’s place fighting against the attacking Hessians until she was wounded in the arm. She was awarded a monthly pension from the state of Pennsylvania for her heroism; the first American woman to be awarded such a military honor.
 
As to who the real “Molly Pitcher” is, we can only guess. These two women are the best recognized, but likely dozens of women took on similar positions at some point in the war. The legend really became a composite of all of them. Thus, Molly Pitcher is just a singular figure that is meant to represent multiple women who took on the British in the heat of battle. 

Mammy Kate was an enslaved woman who worked on the future Georgia Governor’s plantation. When he was captured and held prisoner during the American Revolution, Mammy Kate infiltrated and smuggled him out. She was the first Black woman to be honored as a patriot of the American Revolution in the state of Georgia. 

Then, there is Deborah Sampson Gannett, the underappreciated queen of the Revolutionary War battlefield.
 
Deborah Sampson was born into poverty, and struggled through most of her early life, serving as an indentured servant, teacher, weaver, and more. The Revolutionary War raged through her late teens, and at twenty-one, in the war’s waning years, she jumped at the opportunity for regular pay. She joined a Massachusetts regiment under the alias of Robert Shurtleff, not only a scandalous move, but an illegal one given Mass’s laws against women dressing as men at the time.
 
She was ushered off to West Point where she served in the light infantry, constantly on the move, scouting, and skirmishing. In one nasty engagement, she was slashed across the forehead with a saber, and shot twice in the leg. She let her forehead wound be tended to at a field hospital, and then ran back to her tent to dig out the two iron balls and stitch up her wounds herself to avoid being caught. She served for over a year and half before she was finally caught, at the very end of the war, and would eventually successfully lobby for a federal soldier’s pension in return for her service. 

For Native Americans the war was incredibly complicated. They had to hedge their bets on which side would have favorable policies following the war. The British had an advantage as their policies limiting white encroachment on Native lands were one of the catalysts for war. But some nations did side with the Patriots. 

The war split up the Iroquois, or Haudenosaunee (hoe-deh-no-SHOW-nee), Confederacy. Haudenosaunee (hoe-deh-no-SHOW-nee) women played an important role in deciding on war, peace, captivity, and death– so they were crucial to the war. One French man declared, “it is the women who really make up the Nation. . . . All the real authority rests in the women.” 

Most of the Confederacy sided with the British but had little interest in joining what they saw as a family affair between Europeans. Konwat-sits-ia-ienni, or Molly Brant urged her nation to support the British cause, resulting in a series of raids in New York that hurt the Patriots. Haudenosaunee (hoe-deh-no-SHOW-nee) warriors attacked settlements, killing men, women and children, in retaliation for ill treatment. One Patriot captain wrote, “Such a shocking sight my eyes never held before of savage and brutal barbarity; to see the husband mourning over his dead wife and four dead children lying by her side, mangled, scalpt.”

In retaliation, General Washington planned to raid Native villages stealing away the women and luring the warriors out. They employed scorched earth warfare setting afire crops, fruit trees, and longhouses. Women, children, and the elderly were murdered. 

But when they came to one village they found it abandoned save for an old, known as Madam Sacho. The woman reported to them that her people had debated whether to surrender, and decided not to. It’s possible her age pulled on the soldier’s sympathy. It’s also possible she was incredibly wise, but the soldiers left her alive. When they came back through, another Native woman was found dead, shot and probably raped by Patriot soldiers. 

Why was Madam Sacho left alone in her village when the rest of the community departed? Where did the rest of her village go? Soldiers couldn’t track them. Did Madam Sacho give him bad information to give her people more time to get away? And why was the young woman who returned to care for Madam Sacho murdered?

For enslaved Americans the American Revolution presented a potential opportunity and they took advantage of it. They fought for both sides, whichever would ensure their freedom. The British issued Dunmore’s Proclamation guaranteeing freedom to any enslaved person who abandoned their Patriot owners and aided the British cause. In 1777, Vermont became the first colony to abolish slavery, providing safe haven for fugitive slaves.

Enslaved women’s desire for freedom for themselves and their children propelled them to flee slavery during the Revolutionary War, because the war disrupted the normal functioning on plantations and lack of oversight allowed them to discuss freedom more seriously. One-third of all fugitives were enslaved women. 

Margaret, Sarah, and Jenny were all enslaved women who fled bondage during the war. They knew they were worth more than the dollar amount put to them, what some referred to as her “Soul Value.” I’m obsessed with this term.

Sarah was pregnant and ran away with her six-year old son. Her husband had joined the British Army and she intended to try and  “pass” as free to join him. Jenny fled at eight months pregnant! Her enslaver advertised widely for her return. But Jenny had heard of Dunmore’s Proclamation and had spent months planning her escape. These women knew that whatever the outcome of the war, their newborns would be enslaved and they couldn’t let that happen. 

Elizabeth Freeman, or Mum Bett, was an enslaved woman in Massachusetts. Her husband died fighting the war. Throughout the war she had listened to the wealthy white people she served discuss concepts of freedom and liberty– and decided this Enlightened philosophy should apply to her too. Finally, one day she was beaten, providing a catalyst to make demands. She fled, finding refuge with a white lawyer, who helped her sue for her freedom.

In Brom & Bett v. Ashley the jury ruled in her favor and ordered her former owners to pay them. Her case ultimately led to the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts just before the close of the American Revolution. Soon every northern state would abolish slavery. But the Revolution left a complicated legacy for Black people, as slavery still existed and persisted for decades to come in the south. Black women’s freedom cannot be segregated from the story of American independence. These women monitored the war and were heavily affected by the outcome. 

Revolutionary debates among the white male elite about freedom and liberty absolutely included discussions of abolition, but they tabled the discussion for another generation to decide on– preferring union over freedom. How different might that discussion have been if women, all women, were included?

At least when Mum Bett died in 1829, a free woman with her family around her! One of her great-grandchildren was W.E.B. DuBois, the first Black man to graduate from Harvard and a founder of the NAACP.

Even white women were let down by the failure to fulfill the full ideas of the revolution. Maybe the most famous of Revolutionary women, Abigail Adams, wife of John Adams, was not only his closest advisor, but also one of the few women who became known as a founder of the nation. Their letters exchanged during his time in Congress, serving as a diplomat overseas, and even during the Constitutional Convention show his reliance on her advice and contributions to major affairs. Most famously, during the Constitutional Convention, she would ask her husband and the other delegates to "remember the ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular 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." In other words, the ladies will stand up for ourselves, just the way we Americans did against this government that didn’t represent us. John’s response was, “I cannot but laugh.” She would take her time in writing back and it would take over a century for her warned rebellion to happen, but the women of America held true to Abigail’s warning!

The Revolutionary War spread far beyond the battlefields, encompassing the American people, economy, and the way of life for many. The war would come to an end in the fall of 1783. While the men would be lauded for their efforts to bring America its independence, history quickly forgot the diverse women who also made that possible. The Sampsons and Pitchers on the battlefield; the Otis’, Adams’, and Wheatleys using their intellect, and the thousands of unnamed Native, Black, and rebel women serving as Daughters of Liberty, working behind the scenes as spies, battling for their livelihood, or going uncelebrated for keeping their family farms, businesses, and trades alive while their husbands, fathers, and sons left for war.

With all the gendered disruptions, it’s important to ask whether the war was revolutionary for women?

This period is such an important part of American History, but women’s roles are so often underrepresented in lieu of the images of tradesmen and farmers dropping the tools of the trade to take on mighty England. We have so much room for growth here! What ways did women contribute to the rebellion and war effort? How are women’s contributions rewarded or ignored after the war’s conclusion? How did women’s roles inspire future generations in their pursuit of greater rights and recognition from the government they helped form?

---

BACK

NEXT

Draw your own conclusions

Learn how to teach with inquiry.

Power Point for Teachers

Include the basics in what you already teach.

Bibliography

Bell, Karen Cook. “Black Women and American Freedom in Revolutionary America.” Black Perspectives. July 13, 2021. https://www.aaihs.org/black-women-and-american-freedom-in-revolutionary-america/. 

​Collins, Gail, America's Women: Four Hundred Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines. New York, William Morrow, 2003.

DuBois, Ellen Carol, 1947-. Through Women's Eyes : an American History with Documents. Boston :Bedford/St. Martin's, 2005.Indians Editors. “NATIVE AMERICAN WOMEN.” Indians. N.D. http://indians.org/articles/Native-american-women.html.

Frederick Cook and George S. Conover, eds, Journals of the military expedition of Major General John Sullivan against the Six Nations of Indians in 1779, 1887 (Auburn, N.Y.: Knapp, Peck, & Thomson, 1887). New-York Historical Society Library. 

NY Historical Society Editors. “Madam Sacho and Sullivan’s Army: Soldiers’ accounts of encounters with a Haudenosaunee woman who lost everything during General John Sullivan’s raids against Native communities in New York.” New York Historical Society. Women in the American Story. N.D.
https://wams.nyhistory.org/settler-colonialism-and-revolution/the-american-revolution/madam-sacho/.

Pearsall, Sarah M.S. “Recentering Indian Women in the American Revolution.” 2013. https://history.msu.edu/hst202/files/2013/04/Indian-Women-in-Revolution.pdf.

Thompson, Mary V. “Martha Washington and the American Revolution.” Mount Vernon. N.D. https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/martha-washington-and-the-american-revolution/.

Ware, Susan. American Women’s History: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Primary AUTHOR:

Jacqui Nelson

Primary Reviewer:

Dr. Barbara Tischler

Consulting Team

Editors

Kelsie Brook Eckert, Project Director
Coordinator of Social Studies Education at Plymouth State University

Dr. Barbara Tischler, Consultant
​Professor of History Hunter College and Columbia University

Dr. Alicia Guitierrez-Romine, Consultant
Assistant Professor of History at La Sierra University

Jacqui Nelson, Consultant
Teaching Lecturer of Military History at Plymouth State University

Dr. Deanna Beachley
Professor of History and Women's Studies at College of Southern Nevada

Alice Stanley

Reviewers

18th Century
Dr. Margaret Huettl
​Hannah Dutton
​Dr. John Krueckeberg

19th Century
Dr. Rebecca Noel
Michelle Stonis, MA
Annabelle L. Blevins Pifer, MA
Cony Marquez, PhD Candidate
​
​20th Century
Dr. Tanya Roth
​Dr. Jessica Frazier
Mary Bezbatchenko, MA