“It is impossible for me to describe to you what I felt, while the British Army was on this side Ashley-Ferry,” Mary Lucia Bull wrote from Charleston in 1779 in the midst of the American Revolution. Recounting the terror and uncertainty that war introduced into her life, she recalled, “we never went in to our beds at night, had Candles constantly burning & were alarmed at every noise that we heard.”[1] Like Mary Lucia Bull, civilians throughout the American colonies experienced the American Revolution as a disruptive and violent event that upended their lives, their safety, and their sense of security. Indeed, as Kathleen DuVal notes in the JER’s Revolution 250 forum, “for most people who became involved in the Revolutionary War, the war came to them.”[2] Yet for too long, the experiences of these people have been overlooked in our studies of the Revolution. Certainly, political developments and battles were vital aspects of the Revolution and were central features of the larger conflict. But for most people, people like Mary Lucia Bull, revolutionary ideology was often far less important than the mundane, quotidian task of survival as their world crumbled—often violently—around them.

Centering such everyday experiences has the potential to broaden our understanding of the Revolution in order to consider the profound consequences of a prolonged military conflict waged among civilian populations. As John Shy advocated nearly fifty years ago, there is much to be learned by examining the American Revolution from the perspective of those who lived through it: “as a process, which entangled large numbers of people for a long period of time in experiences of remarkable intensity.”[3] In recent years, scholars have heeded this call, bringing renewed attention on the military conflict and the experiences of the diverse people who were swept up in its throes.[4] These efforts have enabled us to grasp a fuller understanding of the Revolution and the frequently contradictory ways that people throughout the colonies experienced the war and understood its implications for their lives and loved ones.

Over the last fifty years, these scholarly developments have been particularly evident in my own field of women’s and gender history. Indeed, at the time of the bicentennial, Mary Beth Norton and Linda Kerber had yet to publish their field-changing books.[5] Ensuing decades have witnessed an wave of exciting scholarship on women in the revolutionary era.[6] Still, as Leslie M. Harris points out, even as our narrative of the Revolution has expanded in significant ways, “the category of ‘women in the American Revolution’ was and perhaps still is presumed to refer to white women.”[7] With a few, notable exceptions, affluent, educated republican mothers remain overrepresented in studies of the American Revolution—in large measure due to the field’s emphasis on ideology and politics.

But focusing on the experience of war allows us to ask new questions about how the Revolution unfolded, what it meant for diverse women’s lives. Women’s history and military history have a great deal to say to one another. As Holly A. Mayer has argued, “war and women do not exist in entirely separate spheres.”[8] War places new stresses on societies and established hierarchies in ways that permit us to more clearly see how women of diverse races and status interacted with one another, with their households, their communities, and with the armies invading their cities and farms. Attending to these circumstances and how women navigated them therefore allows us to broaden our narrative of the American Revolution to include diverse women’s experiences.

Pennsylvania Packet, July 16, 1778. Courtesy of America’s Historical Newspapers.

During the American Revolution, lines between the home front and the battlefront were frequently blurred—conditions that had immense consequences for the varied inhabitants of British North America, especially women. The British army captured and occupied every major city on the eastern seaboard; frequently, the Continental army followed. Battles and sieges occurred among civilian communities, as troops besieged civilian cities and commandeered their houses for fortifications, building materials, and officers’ quarters. The presence of troops introduced new threats and heightened the dangers of city streets, particularly for women. Throughout the war, military occupation upended the power dynamics of daily life, placing restrictions on movement, property, and the authority of white male civilians that weakened the patriarchal norms that undergirded revolutionary society. War also created new labor markets in which women’s sexual and domestic labors were especially in demand among soldiers. The British army’s emancipatory policies meant that British lines became a destination of freedom for enslaved women and their families. The new dangers and opportunities that military conflict brought into civilian communities exposes the contradictory ways that varied women experienced the war and understood its meaning for their lives.

Focusing on how women navigated these daily experience of war and the choices that they made allows us to broaden our understanding of women in the Revolution beyond the world of political ideology and republican motherhood. For instance, such a framing allows us to see Dinah, a twenty-year-old enslaved woman who “was big with child, and near the time of her lying in” when she fled to British lines in Philadelphia in June 1778, where she hoped that the British army’s promises of protection and emancipation would secure freedom for herself and her child.[9] We can also see women like Elizabeth Anderson, a New York woman who hired herself into the household of British Lieutenant Colonel Nisbet Balfour. When Balfour was named Commandant of Charleston in 1780, Elizabeth Anderson accompanied the officer south, where she reveled in her new situation. “I never was [hartier] in my Life . . . you would Skesley Beleave it if you seed me how I am oltred [altered],” she enthused to a friend in New York, “Whe Have the handsomest House and Garden in town you might walk with pleshour all Day.” The nature of Elizabeth’s work also changed in Charleston: although she was still a servant, she now oversaw “three Blak women to do the housework and wash.”[10] For Elizabeth Anderson, war brought both economic opportunity and the ability to experience a modicum of power that elite and middling women wielded over household labor systems.

“The Camp Laundry,” London, printed for R. Sayer and J. Bennett, 14 Feb. 1782. Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection at Brown University. https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:234304/.

We can also glimpse women who, whether by choice or force, engaged in relationships with soldiers as a strategy to survive the war, with varying success. For some women, such as Philadelphia servant Jane Boone, these relationships ended in marriage, permitting them to leave domestic service and embark on new lives.[11] Others were not so fortunate. For instance, Suckey Johnson, a Philadelphia woman “Cohabited with a british officer and was left with Child.”[12] Margaret Locke, a Philadelphia seamstress, was similarly abandoned by the solider who fathered her child; although the couple never wed, she subsequently adopted the moniker of “widow” in an effort to claim respectability and access systems of support.[13] We can also see the choices of women like Kate, a self-emancipated women who attached herself to Ensign Richard Boyle, a loyalist officer in New York. The relationship likely secured Kate protection and rations in the crowded, resource-scarce garrison. Notably, and unusually, Kate also adopted the officer’s name, introducing herself around the city as Kate Boyle—an assertion of intimacy and proximity to military authorities that may have aided her pursuit of security and freedom.[14]

For each of these women, war introduced destabilizing, life-altering choices—choices that they navigated to the best of their abilities as the Revolution threw their lives into chaos. Women’s wartime experiences were often contradictory; the challenges faced and choices made by enslaved or laboring women contrasted in meaningful ways from women of elite and middling status. By seeking to understand the everyday experience of war we can begin to grasp how the military conflict transformed diverse women’s lives—often in ways that intersected with one another. Asking how varied women survived and navigated war therefore allows us to uncover stories that complicate familiar narratives of camp-followers, home-front heroines, and republican mothers. For as the daily experience of war shows us, there is no single narrative about women in the Revolution—rather, women’s stories are complicated, contradictory, and frequently intertwined. Starting with the war allows us to begin untangling these stories in ways that show us a broader, more inclusive understanding of what the Revolution meant for American women.

Endnotes

[1] Mary Lucia Bull Guerard to Susannah Stoll Garvey, 1779, North American Women’s Letters and Diaries [Orig. Pub. “A Woman’s Letters in 1779 and 1782 written by Mary Lucia Bull Guerard” (Charleston, SC: South Carolina Historical Society, 1909)].

[2] “The Revolution at 250: A Conversation,” Journal of the Early Republic 44 (Winter 2024), 545.

[3] John Shy, “The American Revolution: The Military Conflict Considered as a Revolutionary War,” in Essays on the American Revolution, ed. Stephen G. Kurtz and James H. Hutson (Chapel Hill, NC, 1973), 124.

[4] Kathleen DuVal, Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution (New York, 2015); Judith L. Van Buskirk, Standing in Their Own Light: African American Patriots in the American Revolution (Norman, OK, 2017); Richard Godbeer, World of Trouble: A Philadelphia Quaker Family’s Journey Through the American Revolution (New Haven, CT, 2019); T. Cole Jones, Captives of Liberty: Prisoners of War and the Politics of Vengeance in the American Revolution (Philadelphia, 2019); John Gilbert McCurdy, Quarters: The Accommodation of the British Army and the Coming of the American Revolution (Ithaca, NY, 2019); Aaron Sullivan, The Disaffected: Britain’s Occupation of Philadelphia during the American Revolution (Philadelphia, 2019); Donald F. Johnson, Occupied America: British Military Rule and the Experience of Revolution (Philadelphia, 2020); Serena R. Zabin, The Boston Massacre: A Family History (Boston,  2020); Karen Cook Bell, Running from Bondage: Enslaved Women and Their Remarkable Fight for Freedom in Revolutionary America (Cambridge, UK, 2021).

[5] Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill, NC, 1980); Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (Ithaca, NY, 1980).

[6] Holly A. Mayer, Belonging to the Army: Camp Followers and Community during the American Revolution (Columbia, SC, 1996); Sharon Block, “Rape without Women: Print Culture and the Politicization of Rape, 1765–1815,” Journal of American History 89  (Dec. 1, 2002), 849–68; Rosemarie Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia, 2007); Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor, The Ties That Buy: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary America (Philadelphia, 2009); Woody Holton, Abigail Adams: A Life (New York, 2009); Susan E. Klepp, Revolutionary Conceptions:  Women, Fertility, and Family Limitation in America, 1760–1820 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2009); Sharon Block, “Rape in the American Revolution: Process, Reaction, and Public Re-Creation,” in Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones, ed. Elizabeth D. Heineman (Philadelphia, 2011); Kate Haulman, The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth Century America (Chapel Hill, NC, 2011); Lucia McMahon, Mere Equals: The Paradox of Educated Women in the Early American Republic (Ithaca, NY, 2012); Sarah M. S. Pearsall, “Recentering Indian Women in the American Revolution,” in Why You Can’t Teach United States History without American Indians, ed. Susan Sleeper-Smith et al. (Chapel Hill, NC, 2015), 57–70; Sara T. Damiano, “Writing Women’s History Through the Revolution: Family Finances, Letter Writing, and Conceptions of Marriage,” William and Mary Quarterly 74, no. 4 (2017), 697–728; Barbara B. Oberg, ed., Women in the American Revolution: Gender, Politics, and the Domestic World (Charlottesville, VA, 2019); Kacy Dowd Tillman, Stripped and Script: Loyalist Women Writers of the American Revolution (Amherst, MA, 2019); Zabin, The Boston Massacre; Bell, Running from Bondage; Holly A. Mayer, ed., Women Waging War in the American Revolution (Charlottesville, VA, 2022); Jacqueline Beatty, In Dependence: Women and the Patriarchal State in Revolutionary America (New York, 2023); Cynthia A. Kierner, The Tory’s Wife: A Woman and Her Family in Revolutionary America (Charlottesville, VA, 2023); David Waldstreicher, The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence (New York, 2023).

[7] “The Revolution at 250: A Conversation,”, 521.

[8] Holly A. Mayer, “Bearing Arms, Bearing Burdens: Women Warriors, Camp Followers and Home-Front Heroines of the American Revolution,” in Gender, War and Politics: Transatlantic Perspectives 1775–1820, ed. Karen Hagemann, Gisela Mettele, and Jane Rendall (Basingstoke, UK, 2010), 169.

[9] Pennsylvania Packet, July 16, 1778.

[10] Elizabeth Anderson to Mrs. Morphey, Aug. 29, 1780, New-York Historical Society.

[11] Elaine Forman Crane, ed., The Diary of Elizabeth Drinker (Boston, 1991), 1: 325 (Sept. 7, 1778); 1:7 56 (Nov. 29, 1795); 1: 389 (June 30–July 1, 1781); 428–29 (Sept. 19–24, 1784); 440 (Oct. 8, 1785); see also Alison Duncan Hirsch, “Philadelphia Quaker Elizabeth Drinker and Her Servant, Jane Boon ‘Times Are Much Changed, and Maids Are Become Mistresses,’” in The Human Tradition in the American Revolution, ed. Nancy L. Rhoden and Ian K. Steele (Wilmington, DE, 2000), 159–82.

[12] Account Book 1778–1779, Haverford College Quaker and Special Collections, Haverford, PA

[13] Evidence on the Foregoing Memorial of Margaret Locke, AO 12/38, 352, NAUK.

[14] Royal Gazette, Oct. 10, 1783.