9 Heroic Women of the American Revolution

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 (also sometimes recorded as Shurtleff). 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.”

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. During the Battle of Bunker Hill, she 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.

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.”

“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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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 cannon ball passed between her legs as she reached for a cartridge, piercing her petticoat.