What Role Did Women Play in the American Revolution?

In colonial America, women could not buy or sell property. Their wages and even bodies belonged to their husbands. Participating in politics was out of the question… until war came to their doorstep. “When you fight on someone’s territory for an extended period of time, you politicize everybody there,” says Carol Berkin, author of Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America’s Independence.

Colonial women led boycotts, nursed and housed soldiers, served as spies and messengers and played critical roles in army encampments. Some even went into battle. The brave acts of “the fairer sex” during the conflict ultimately increased women’s access to education in peacetime and set American women on the long road to suffrage.

While the Sons of Liberty are praised for the Boston Tea Party, women held the line in boycotting British goods. They flexed their power of the purse in droves. “Boycotts could not work unless women said no to English goods. In doing that, their domestic life was politicized,” says Berkin.

In Edenton, North Carolina, 51 women signed an agreement to boycott British-made goods. Their pledge was printed across the colonies and splashed across London newspapers. In 1775, British cartoonist Philip Dawe published the satirical print “A Society of Patriotic Ladies at Edenton in North Carolina,” depicting the women as masculine figures in revealing clothing, signing their names while a neglected child played on the floor. “The idea was, ‘everything will go to hell in a handbasket' if women get involved in politics," says Berkin.

Resistance deepened. Before the Revolution, cloth was among the largest British imports to the colonies. Wearing homespun became a “badge of honor and a visible political statement,” says Berkin. Homemade contributions strengthened boycotts while weakening the impact of British blockades, though shortages continued, forcing women to get creative.

They shared recipes for homemade saltpeter for use in gunpowder and planted crops to feed armies. A journalist for the Boston Evening Post exclaimed: “The industry and frugality of American ladies must exalt their character in the Eyes of the World and serve to show how greatly they are contributing to bring about the political salvation of a whole continent.”

While husbands were away fighting, “armies were marching across their property, destroying or taking crops and burning their furniture for warmth. Women were desperate,” says Berkin. “Women went to Valley Forge and Monmouth in throngs. Valley Forge became an instant city of children, women, pets and soldiers,” Berkin says.

Women were put to work as cooks, seamstresses, nurses and washerwomen. Doing laundry may not sound patriotic, but it was critical in crowded camps where disease spread quickly. Women were paid for their work, even if conditions were not ideal. New York’s 2nd Regiment allotted two washerwomen for every 248 men, while Maryland regiments set a more humane ratio of one washerwoman for every 10 soldiers.

Encampments didn’t guarantee safety and sometimes put women in harm’s way. “Women were sent out on the battlefield to pick up needed boots, clothing and weapons from the dead and dying. Some of them were killed in the crossfire,” Berkin says. In the midst of the Battle of Yorktown, Sarah Osborn Benjamin served beef, bread and coffee to soldiers in entrenchments. When Washington asked her if she was afraid of the cannon fire, she replied: “It would not do for the men to fight and starve too.”

“There was a generalized belief that women weren’t supposed to be political, and it worked to their advantage,” says Jacqueline Beatty, author of In Dependence: Women and the Patriarchal State in Revolutionary America.

An unknown number of women served as spies, including in the upper echelons of the notorious Culper Spy Ring. Many more served as couriers, including 18-year-old Emily Geiger, who was intercepted by the British while carrying top-secret correspondence from General Nathanael Greene. The quick-thinking Geiger swallowed the letter and delivered the message verbally.

Women like Deborah Sampson and Sally St. Clair disguised themselves as men and enlisted in the Continental Army. Sampson was given an honorable discharge for her service when her identity was discovered, while St. Clair’s gender was kept a secret until she was mortally wounded at the Siege of Savannah.

While the infamous “Molly Pitcher” is more of a composite figure akin to World War II’s Rosie the Riveter, real-life women inspired the legend. Margaret Corbin became the first woman to receive a lifelong military pension after she took up her husband’s cannon after he was killed in the Battle of Fort Washington, firing his weapon until she was too badly wounded to continue.

At the Battle of Monmouth, Joseph Plumb Martin described witnessing a woman load a cannon: “While in the act of reaching for a cartridge… a cannon shot from the enemy passed directly between her legs…carrying away all the lower part of her petticoat. Looking at it with apparent unconcern, she observed that it was lucky it did not pass a little higher, for in that case it might have carried away something else.” Historians point to Mary Hays McCauley as the likely heroine.

Women didn’t have to leave home to encounter the enemy. In 1780, 150 loyalists surrounded the home of Jane Black Thomas while her husband, Colonel Thomas was away. She loaded her family’s muskets and emerged from the house waving a sword, scaring off the attackers and saving critical military supplies buried in her front yard. Across the colonies, women’s homes were used to quarter troops and transformed into field hospitals, stretching already strained resources.

And while Paul Revere is remembered for his midnight ride, 16-year-old Sybil Ludington rode 40 miles—double the length of Revere’s journey—to warn of the British advance on Danbury, Connecticut.

Women’s experiences in the war varied widely across class and race. “This was not a single war for independence and freedom,” Berkin says. “Native Americans were fighting to save their culture from the people we call the Patriots.” Many presumed, correctly, that a victory for the colonists would mean further expulsion from their tribal lands, leading them to side with the British.

“Within many Indigenous societies, women were empowered to have important political roles in negotiating with the British,” Beatty says.

Molly Brant, born Konwatsi'tsiaienni, was a Mohawk Clan Mother who became the consort of Sir William Johnson in 1759. She used her vast influence within the Iroquois Confederacy to encourage support for the loyalist cause. Nancy Ward Nanyehi was a gifted speaker and Cherokee leader who negotiated peace treaties between colonists and her people.

“Seeing women negotiate sparked backlash from American leaders, who saw it as an upheaval of proper gender roles,” says Beatty, citing the brutal massacres of the Sullivan Campaign, during which women in Haudenosaunee communities, including the Mohawk, Seneca, Onondaga and Cayuga Nations, were subject to physical and sexual violence.

“Words like ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ mean different things to people based on their race,” Berkin says. “Enslaved Black Americans were fighting for their freedom from the very people who wrote the Declaration of Independence,” she says.

Before the war, it was mainly enslaved men who self-emancipated. “Enslaved women used the disruptions inherent in wartime as a moment of opportunity to escape in higher numbers,” says Beatty.

Two British proclamations aimed at attracting able-bodied men to fight—Dunmore’s Proclamation in 1775 and British Commander Sir Henry Clinton’s Philipsburg Proclamation of 1779—offered freedom to enslaved people who fled a rebel owner. They didn’t account for the resourcefulness of women and children when their freedom was at stake. An estimated 100,000 enslaved people escaped bondage during the war, damaging the economy of the Southern colonies in particular and providing recruits and laborers to the British.

The most famous poet of the era, Phyllis Wheatley, became America’s first published female poet and first published African American poet while still enslaved. Her poems dedicated to the patriot cause inspired George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, even if it would take another 89 years for slavery to be outlawed in America.

“The language of rights and freedom and liberty is in the water in the long revolutionary period. This rhetoric is so central to life in this period that regardless of your race, gender, or class, you internalize it and start to think about how it impacts your own life,” Beatty says

The taste of education and political participation granted by the Revolution was a Pandora’s Box. “Women went from being extraordinarily removed from civic and political life to a consciousness that they were critically important to sustaining the achievement of American liberty and independence,” says Berkin. By the mid-1800s, women were organizing for the temperance movement, abolition, and women’s suffrage, though they would not be granted the right to vote until the 19th Amendment in 1920.