Revolutionary War Women

The equally admirable goals of marriage and motherhood were the only realistic options available for American women prior to the Revolutionary War. As the war approached, then fully materialized to stark, unavoidable reality, many women were either forced to or sometimes willingly surrendered their previous limited roles.

In a full time effort to almost single-handedly support the war effort by securing the home front, including running entire farms, making military uniforms or knitting stockings, and managing the family blacksmith or carpentry business, women of the American Revolution began to establish new, broader roles with an intrinsic value superceding gender.

Rarely mentioned in the annuls of history is the "midnight ride" of sixteen year old Sybil Ludington. She valiantly rode on horseback some forty miles through New York and Connecticut to sound the alert that the British army was burning Danbury, Connecticut. Enough patriots mustered to Danbury to beat back the British to their ships in Long Island Sound.

Lydia Darragh, a Philadelphia Quaker, deliberately eavesdropped on the private conversation of several British officers. What she heard was the outline of a plan to have British troops covertly leave Philadelphia for a surprise attack at the American encampment at White Marsh. This knowledge stirred something deep inside Lydia whereby she summoned the courage to travel on foot the five miles to Frankford and warn General George Washington.

Transforming the family home into a field hospital or offering unconditional medical aid is a noble undertaking. This is exactly the action taken by yet another Quaker, Margaret Hill Morris of Burlington, New Jersey, who left a journal that has proven an invaluable source of information about the Revolutionary War as seen through the eyes of a woman.

Women were no stranger to the battlefield either, considering many were camp followers serving as cooks, nurses, and laundresses. Consider the well known story of Mary Hays, a water carrier dubbed Molly Pitcher, who took up arms and continued to fire a cannon after her own husband fell in battle.

Many more examples of female valor exist in the complete telling of the American Revolutionary War. While some stories contain images of physical gains by the gentler sex there are also a large number stories where women sought to apply their cultivation of words.

As wordsmith to express important issues of the time after the war, some women used any independence they had gained to seek social change. Abigail Adams wrote to her husband imploring him to stand for the rights of women and ensure their representation in the laws of the new land.

Stating the obvious, the Revolutionary War could not have been won nor an independent nation built without the physical and emotional strength of colonial American women.