At the dawn of the American Revolution, Abigail Adams famously urged her husband to ‘remember the ladies’ when framing new laws for the emerging republic. In the ensuing years, however, the vital role women played in securing American independence has too often been forgotten. Their contributions extended far beyond those of Betsy Ross or the wives of Patriot leaders. As historian Carol Berkin, author of Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America’s Independence, observed, ‘Name an activity that men were engaged in, and the only one that did not involve women was high politics. In every other aspect of the war, women were present and engaged in unexpected heroism.’ This article examines nine heroic women whose courage, sacrifice, and intelligence work helped secure American independence, while also exploring the complex and often overlooked intersections with Native American nations whose lands and alliances shaped the Revolutionary War’s outcome.
Historical Overview: Women’s Roles in the American Revolution
After joining pre-war boycotts of British tea and cloth, women of all classes continued to step outside traditional gender roles when the fighting commenced. While continuing to tend to the home and raise children, women replaced their husbands, fathers, and brothers on the farm and in the shop. They accompanied the Continental Army as ‘camp followers’—who served as cooks, laundresses, nurses, and seamstresses. Crucially, the Revolution was fought across a landscape that remained fundamentally Indigenous territory. Native nations from the Haudenosaunee Confederacy to the Cherokee and Shawnee held sovereignty over vast regions, and their decisions about alliance, neutrality, or resistance profoundly influenced the war’s trajectory. Understanding the heroism of Patriot women requires acknowledging that their struggle for liberty unfolded on lands long stewarded by Native peoples.
Deborah Sampson: The Soldier Who Defied Gender and Convention
Born into poverty and bound into indentured servitude during her teen years, 21-year-old Deborah Sampson enlisted in the 4th Massachusetts Regiment in 1782 by disguising herself as a man and using the name Robert Shurtliff. Her true identity remained secret for 17 months as she skirmished with Loyalist raiders and matched her fellow soldiers in strength and endurance. Rather than risk discovery after being shot in combat, she extracted a bullet from her left thigh with a penknife and sewing needle. Another bullet was too deep to remove. A doctor who treated Sampson after she lost consciousness with a high fever in the summer of 1783 discovered her secret. After receiving an honorable discharge, Sampson successfully petitioned for a military pension. Following her 1827 death, a congressional committee awarded her husband a widower’s pension, stating that they encountered ‘no other similar example of female heroism, fidelity and courage.’
Sarah Bradlee Fulton: Mother of the Boston Tea Party
Born in 1740, Sarah Bradlee Fulton joined the Daughters of Liberty and participated in boycotts of British goods when protests over the Stamp Act and other taxes erupted in Boston. Following passage of the Tea Act, she helped plan the Boston Tea Party. Fulton earned the title ‘Mother of the Boston Tea Party’ for reportedly disguising the Sons of Liberty as Native Americans and later removing their face paint and concealing their costumes. This act of cultural appropriation—dressing as Mohawk or other Native people—was a common protest tactic of the era, echoing the irony that colonists fighting for liberty were simultaneously occupying and coveting Native lands. During the Battle of Bunker Hill, Fulton helped establish a makeshift hospital and nursed wounded soldiers. In 1776, she crossed enemy lines to deliver an urgent message to General George Washington, who is said to have personally thanked her for her patriotism. To explore how revolutionary protest movements intersected with Indigenous resistance, see the account of Popay’s Pueblo Revolt, the first successful American revolution against colonial rule.
Margaret Cochran Corbin: The First Woman to Receive a Military Pension
As a desperate Continental Army fought to hold the northern end of Manhattan island on November 16, 1776, assistant gunner John Corbin and his 25-year-old wife joined in the fierce defense of Fort Washington. Serving as a camp follower, Margaret Cochran Corbin was ferrying water to her husband when he was killed while manning a cannon. Despite her grief, she took her husband’s place on the cannon crew until grapeshot from an enemy cannon tore through her left shoulder, chest, and jaw. The badly wounded patriot known as ‘Captain Molly’ never regained use of her left arm and was left permanently disabled. In 1779, she became the first woman to receive a military pension, albeit at ‘half the pay and allowances of a soldier in service.’
Patience Lovell Wright: America’s First Professional Sculptor and Spy
‘Women are always useful in grand events,’ wrote America’s first professional sculptor, Patience Lovell Wright—a claim she fulfilled as a Patriot spy living in the heart of the British Empire. After fire destroyed much of her work in the American colonies, she moved in 1772 to London, where she molded lifelike tinted wax figures and gained fame as a predecessor to Madame Tussaud. When war erupted, she organized patriot supporters in London, raised funds for American prisoners of war, and collected intelligence from the aristocrats, members of Parliament, and members of the royal court who visited her wax museum. She reportedly relayed that information to America by concealing secret messages inside wax busts sent to her sister in Philadelphia. Despite her service, the Continental Army denied her sister’s plea for burial funds after Wright’s death in 1786. Her resting place remains unknown. Wright’s use of wax sculpture as an intelligence tool parallels the sophisticated communication systems employed by Native nations, whose wampum belts served as mnemonic records of treaties and diplomatic agreements.
Sybil Ludington: The Midnight Rider Who Rivaled Paul Revere
On the night of April 26, 1777, a messenger arrived at Colonel Henry Ludington’s New York state farmhouse with word that British troops were marching toward Continental Army stockpiles in Danbury, Connecticut. According to later accounts, as the colonel prepared for battle, 16-year-old Sybil Ludington leapt onto her horse and thundered across some 40 miles of rutted roads into the teeth of a driving rain. Much like Paul Revere, the colonel’s daughter roused the slumbering countryside on her midnight ride to warn of the coming British. The 400 militiamen awoken from their sleep arrived too late to prevent the Danbury depot’s destruction, but they aided General Benedict Arnold to repel the British at the Battle of Ridgefield.
Mercy Otis Warren: The Conscience of the Revolution
‘In the era before the Declaration of Independence, women increasingly engaged in public discourse,’ says Berkin. Mercy Otis Warren, whom John Adams hailed as a ‘real genius’ and ‘the most accomplished woman in America,’ is a prime example. Born into a prominent Massachusetts family in 1728, the pioneering intellectual stirred New England to rebellion with her poems, plays, and essays. Warren skewered local royal officials such as Governor Thomas Hutchinson in biting political satires printed in Boston newspapers during the 1760s and early 1770s. While raising five sons, Warren, nicknamed the ‘Conscience of the Revolution,’ opened her home to patriot salons and Sons of Liberty meetings. In 1805, she published the three-volume History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution, one of the earliest comprehensive histories of the rebellion—and among the first nonfiction books penned by an American woman.
Lydia Barrington Darragh: The Quaker Spy of Philadelphia
During the British occupation of Philadelphia in the fall of 1777, British officers commandeered Lydia Barrington Darragh’s parlor for staff meetings. The Irish-born midwife, mother, and publicly pacifist Quaker secretly eavesdropped on the conversations and hid coded messages in the cloth coat buttons of her 14-year-old son to deliver to her eldest boy, Charles, a Continental Army lieutenant camped outside the city. Although ordered to her bedroom during a December 2, 1777, staff meeting, Lydia snuck out and overheard plans for a surprise attack on Washington’s encampment at Whitemarsh two days later. The next day, she trudged through the snow and slipped through British military checkpoints under the pretense of buying flour. By varying accounts, she carried a warning hidden inside her dress or an old cloth needle book. When the British arrived at Whitemarsh, they were the ones taken by surprise when they discovered Washington’s army awaiting their attack—thanks to the Quaker matron.
Esther de Berdt Reed: Organizing the Ladies Association of Philadelphia
Along with Benjamin Franklin’s daughter Sarah Franklin Bache, Esther de Berdt Reed launched the Ladies Association of Philadelphia, the war’s biggest domestic fundraising campaign, in 1780. The London-born wife of Pennsylvania Governor Joseph Reed likely wrote or co-authored ‘Sentiments of an American Woman,’ a broadside declaring that men did not hold a monopoly on patriotism and urging women to sacrifice their luxuries for donations to Continental Army soldiers. Canvassing door-to-door, the association collected the equivalent of more than $300,000 in today’s money, according to Berkin. ‘In the 18th century, women did not appear on the streets without a male escort, and they certainly did not knock on the doors of strangers and talk to strange men. What they were doing was absolutely shocking in its contempt for genteel norms,’ Berkin says. Refusing to distribute cash directly to the troops—lest it be spent on liquor—Washington dictated that the money be spent to purchase cloth for more than 2,000 military shirts sewn by women volunteers.
Molly Pitcher: Legend and Legacy of the Battle of Monmouth
Historians debate whether one of the best-remembered women of the American Revolution ever existed. ‘Molly Pitcher,’ the famous heroine of the Battle of Monmouth, is likely more legend than fact. During the heat of battle on June 28, 1778, she is said to have carried pitchers of water to cool cannons and quench thirsty soldiers who broiled under the summer sun. While some historians believe Molly Pitcher could be a composite of several women, others claim her true identity to be Mary Ludwig Hays, a camp follower who joined her husband, a gunner in the 4th Continental Artillery. When he collapsed in battle—either from heat or a wound—his wife took his place at the cannon, continuing to fire based on her observations of artillery drills. One soldier’s diary claimed a cannonball passed between her legs as she reached for a cartridge, piercing her petticoat.
Native Nations and the Revolutionary War: A Complex Alliance
While these nine women demonstrated extraordinary courage, the Revolution was also a pivotal moment for Native American nations whose sovereignty and lands were at stake. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy (Iroquois) split during the conflict, with the Mohawk, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca largely siding with the British, while the Oneida and Tuscarora supported the Americans. In the South, the Cherokee fought against colonial expansion, while the Shawnee and Lenape sought to protect their territories from both British and American encroachment. The war’s aftermath saw intensified pressure on Native lands, leading to policies that would culminate in the significant roles Native women held in tribal governance, often as clan mothers and decision-makers whose influence predated and paralleled the Patriot women’s activism.
Historical Context & Key Cultural Takeaways
The nine women profiled here represent a fraction of the countless women—Patriot, Loyalist, enslaved, and Native—whose lives were transformed by the American Revolution. Their stories reveal several critical historical truths:
- Women’s Contributions Were Essential: From battlefield heroism to intelligence gathering to fundraising, women’s participation was indispensable to the Patriot cause, yet their stories were marginalized for centuries.
- Native Nations Were Sovereign Powers: The Revolution was not simply a conflict between Britain and its colonies; Native nations were independent actors whose alliances and resistances shaped the war’s geography and outcome.
- Gender Norms Were Challenged: Women like Deborah Sampson and Esther de Berdt Reed defied contemporary expectations, laying groundwork for future movements for women’s rights.
- Cultural Complexity Defines the Era: The use of Native disguises during the Boston Tea Party highlights the complex, often contradictory ways colonists engaged with Indigenous identity while simultaneously dispossessing Native peoples.
- Legacy and Memory: The debate over Molly Pitcher’s existence illustrates how historical memory is constructed, contested, and often mythologized, underscoring the importance of rigorous scholarship in understanding the past.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Who was the first woman to receive a military pension in the United States?
A: Margaret Cochran Corbin, known as ‘Captain Molly,’ became the first woman to receive a military pension in 1779 after being wounded at the Battle of Fort Washington in 1776. She received half the pay and allowances of a soldier in service.
Q: Did women actually fight in the American Revolution?
A: Yes, while women were not formally enlisted, some, like Deborah Sampson, disguised themselves as men to serve in combat. Others, like Mary Ludwig Hays (the likely inspiration for Molly Pitcher), took over their husbands’ positions on cannon crews during battle.
Q: What role did Native American nations play in the American Revolution?
A: Native nations were sovereign actors with their own interests and alliances. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy split, with most nations siding with the British and the Oneida and Tuscarora supporting the Americans. In the South, the Cherokee and other nations fought against colonial expansion. The war ultimately led to intensified land dispossession for Native peoples.
Q: How did women contribute to intelligence gathering during the Revolution?
A: Women like Patience Lovell Wright and Lydia Barrington Darragh played crucial roles as spies. Wright, living in London, collected intelligence from British aristocrats and concealed messages in wax busts sent to Philadelphia. Darragh, a Quaker in occupied Philadelphia, eavesdropped on British officers and smuggled warnings to Washington’s army.
Q: Why was the Boston Tea Party important for women’s history?
A: Sarah Bradlee Fulton, known as the ‘Mother of the Boston Tea Party,’ helped plan the event and disguised the Sons of Liberty as Native Americans. Her participation demonstrated women’s active involvement in colonial protest movements and their willingness to defy British authority.
Conclusion: Legacy and Modern Preservation
The stories of these nine heroic women—and the Native nations whose lands and alliances shaped the Revolutionary era—remind us that American independence was won not by a few great men alone, but by the collective courage of countless individuals whose names history has too often forgotten. Today, historians, museums, and tribal nations continue working to preserve and honor these complex legacies. The National Museum of the American Indian and the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia are among the institutions dedicated to telling more complete stories of the era. As we revisit the Revolution, we must remember the ladies—and the Indigenous peoples—whose sacrifices and sovereignty were central to the world that emerged from the conflict. Through rigorous scholarship and cultural respect, we can ensure that their contributions are neither erased nor romanticized, but understood in their full, complicated humanity.
