Revolutionary
Women
American women contributed to the Revolutionary War in innumerable ways, often unsung and undocumented. While men were fighting, women ran the households, kept the crops planted, butchered the animals, chopped the wood, and raised the children. Women made do when goods were scarce. Herbal teas substituted for imported tea, homespun replaced British cloth. The scarcity of cloth, in part, accounted for the ill-kempt look of the local militias, who might have felt their poor clothes demonstrated a level of patriotism.
By all accounts, the 1770s were a time when women were considered the gentler, sweeter sex, and certainly not as capable of understanding the events of the day as did their male companions. And, happily, they used that stereotype to their advantage. Sweet innocent ladies lied, spied, and ran to raise the alarm. They pleaded, beseeched and harangued British troops. They barred their front doors, blocked passage into storage rooms, and in as many ways as there were women to do so impeded the search for powder, silver, money and papers.
They hid valuables in soap barrels and under their skirts. They made cartridges, rolled bandages, and nursed the sick and injured -- including the enemy. They witnessed the death of bayoneted, shot and wounded husbands, fathers, sons and neighbors at their feet, in their doorways and in their own beds. Prudence Wright Cummings and her military company of women dressed as men to guard the Pepperell Bridge in order to capture a Tory spy. Mother Batherick, while digging dandelions in Menotomy, accepted the surrender of 6 British soldiers and is said to have told them: “Tell King George that an old woman took six of his grenadiers prisoners.”
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