Women's Essential Roles in the American Revolution

Welcome to part two of the lecture about women in the American Revolution. So here we go. Yay! Then the next kind of woman we have participating in the Revolutionary War is woman as political leader and our example here is Molly Brandt and she's interesting for a couple of reasons for us. One, Molly Brandt, while that's her English name, was actually a Mohawk. woman and the Mohawk were one of the five tribes of the Iroquois so she was a Mohawk woman in the Iroquois nation but she was also married to a British Army officer Sir William Johnson and I have quotes there around married because British Army you couldn't officially marry an Indian woman so they were at all but named married but not legally married um he was the British superintendent to Native American affairs And he died in the middle of the war. And it was a really important position. The British superintendent to Native American affairs not only served as the liaison between the British army and the Indian people in the neighborhood who were the Iroquois slash Mohawk people, but then that liaison would also sometimes liaise with the revolutionary governments, or at least representatives of the revolutionary governments. So he's dead, and she just steps into the job. And the British government essentially said, okay, you go ahead and do that job. She collected his paycheck. She engaged in liaisoning with the natives and the British. And this is super important because while we don't talk about the Indians in the Revolutionary War much, they were totally key. If the local Indians were on your side in any given battle, there was a good chance that was going to turn the battle in your favor. Now, the British ended up losing the American Revolution, but they had very good Native American support all the way through, in part because the British officials and the British army was significantly better at dealing with Indians than were the American colonials. The American colonials, who were the people who were going to stay there, were super intent on wiping Indians out and taking their land. So, many Indian tribes fought on the side of the British because they didn't want... the colonial people to get any more power and control because that would be bad for them. So while we like, yay, we won the American Revolution, yay for us, it was indeed for many of the Indian people who lived in America a bad and dark day. Nonetheless, Molly Brandt. Next slide, let's take a peek. I like this drawing here is we don't know what Molly Brandt looked like. It's just it's a famous drawing that illustrates just what it says up there at the top of the slide, the three faces of Molly Brandt. That is, she was an Indian woman or an Iroquois woman. She was a European woman in that she was married to a European guy and she was a very good English speaker. And she was a loyalist. That is, she was loyal to the British government. And so, you know, like lots of us, she was different people in different times to different people. In 1785, when she retired from the job at the end of the war, in recognition for the services she did to the British government, they gave her a retirement pension. And we mention that here because it suggests, again, how truly seriously they took her contribution to the war effort. So that's cool. All right. Example four. Want to see that? Next slide. Example four is the woman who went off to war and acted as an informal soldier. That is, she wasn't enlisted in the regular army. She didn't have a uniform, but she was nonetheless fighting alongside the men. And lots of women did this. Lots and lots of army companies, groups of dudes, had women in them as women. Not all of them, but there's more than one. Less than, you know, 500. And the most famous one is a woman known now as Molly Pitcher. Her name was Mary, or Molly being the nickname for Mary Ludwig Hayes, Mary Hayes, known as Molly Pitcher. And here you see her down in this picture, surrounded by patriotic, look at the iconography there, this icon, this patriotic woman. She's literally dressed in red, white, and blue. She's surrounded by red, white, and blue. And and it showing her engaged in the activity that made her really famous So let's see more about her at the next slide her nickname Molly pitcher because during the battles she would take water to not only her husband's artillery team because these big artillery guns what you would call cannons but nobody really calls cannons in the military they're artillery guns um those take teams of guys to run those things a guy to to to charge the power a guy to plunge the thing got a light there's a thing there's a whole bunch of stuff that happens um and anyway that's hot and thirsty work and these battles would go on off and on all day long and people she would take water to the guys before and after the battles and so she gets this nickname Molly Pitcher for the pitcher of water. And then in November of 1776 in the Battle of Monmouth, her husband John, who was an assistant gunner, so a guy on the team of guys that ran this cannon, for lack of a better word, he was killed during the battle and so Margaret, Molly took over. It says John took over but it's supposed to be Captain Molly. Captain Mollie took over as gunner for him and finished the battle, and then she continued to work on that artillery gun team for a number of months. The regiment jokingly called her Captain Mollie, though she has no official recognition in the Army. And then she had to retire from her life as a military woman when she was wounded by a cannonball, severely injuring, as it says here, her shoulder, chest, and jaw. But... You will hear of the famous women of the American Revolution, probably Molly Pitcher comes up as much as anyone. And you would have lots of women who went off primarily with their husbands and kind of fought alongside them or right behind them in a support thing, a support kind of mechanism. But men who, women who were in the thick of battle, which I don't think we hear about much in American history, but it's actually pretty cool, isn't it? Wouldn't you agree? You do agree. Good job. 5 is perhaps at least for students and certainly I think for me too the most interesting way in which women could participate in war which is they could dress up like men like soldiers and go off to war as men so they were passing as men thus there you see it I think passing soldiers so it turns out that between the in the Revolutionary War which is the war this lectures about Somewhere probably around 500 women dressed as men and fought in the war. It may be a larger number. It's hard to know how many women we never, like didn't get caught. And so we don't know about. In the Civil War, the number is between 500 and 800, with 600 being the most common number you see. Women who dressed up like men and went off to fight in the war. How great is that, huh? Next slide. Deborah Sampson here. She came from a very poor family and she went off to fight in the war for all the usual reasons that people do. The adventure to serve her country, but really also to earn money because there was a paycheck to be had in soldiering by the 1780s. The government, the now American government, had gotten itself together, gotten some loans from France. There was money to be made here. And so for all of those reasons, she went off to fight. Just like... Anybody would go off to fight in a war for many, many reasons. Patriotism, money, adventure, duty, all those things. When she enlisted, it's kind of a funny story. The first time she enlisted, she put on her brother's clothes and she just went down to the local enlistment office. But the guys down there knew her and they were like, Debra, we know who you are. Go home. And she's like, we're all rats. So she takes another shot at it. A couple of weeks later, she dresses up in her brother's clothes again. And she walks to the next town over where nobody knows her. And she enlisted there, and she gave her name as Robert Shurtleff, and indeed she was accepted into the army, and she served 17 months in the Continental Army as a private. And here's the cool thing. Well, there's a bunch of cool things. One, it's already cool, isn't it? It is, isn't it? Yeah. You're saying, but you have questions. One of your questions is, why didn't they notice she was a dude during her medical when she enlisted? Well, there wasn't a medical before she enlisted. You just... enlisted so there's that too how did how come they didn't know she was a dude afterwards like she didn't shave well lots of guys you could be very young and enlist in the army so lots of guys uh didn't shave yet and guys i think came to puberty a little later than they do now because they had fewer calories in their diet you Um, um, um, what about her boobs? Well, you can bind those up and cover them with a big bulky wool uniform. Uh, what about her period? How did she had disguised that? And my answer to that question is women have been disguising menstruation, uh, for the millennium. If we were in class, I'd say, you know, statistically a quarter of the women in this room are, are menstruating, but we can't tell who. So I think hiding your menstruation is not the biggest problem she had. Also probably given the stress of being at war and being in disguise pretending to be somebody she wasn't Combined with the crummy army food and army rations and the low calorie count of that food She probably quit menstruating fairly early on. What else do students ask about? Oh, how did she pee and not get caught? People in the 1700s and even men were really really private about that So you guys didn't stand around in a circle wiggle waggling their weenies at each other peeing, but you went off someplace, not that I'm suggesting they do that now, sorry dudes, you went off somewhere private to pee, and they would build, when you stayed in camp, they would build latrines that had doors and were private, so you wouldn't necessarily, nobody would necessarily ever see you pee or see that you didn't have a penis when you peed. Also, apparently it's possible for women to learn to pee standing up and to direct the stream of their urine. I'm gonna be super honest. I read that in a book and I thought I'm gonna try that so I was camping one time And I did I could now start laughing I did that and I peed all over my hiking boots And I was like oh sad and now I'm camping and I'm I only got my one pair of hiking boots And I peed all over him and now I have to wear them so that was the end of that experiment But I hear and I've seen on YouTube videos that it can be done, so I'm just saying anyway in the 17th month of service, or his service, Robert Shurtleff was injured high in the thigh. You can see the scene now in your head. They take her off to a tent with a doctor who examines her wound high in the thigh by pulling her pants down and saying, wait a second, where are your manly appendages? You're not a dude, you are a girl. She was discharged in 1783, but here's again the interesting thing, she was honorably discharged. So while they threw her out of the army, She was not punished. She was not dishonorably discharged. And so now with an honorable discharge, you can see that that's going to leave her open for all sorts of things we'll talk about in the next slide. In case you were wondering about her sexuality, was she trans, was she a lesbian, was she bi, she got married in 1785 and she had three kids. And that doesn't really tell us anything, but it does suggest that unlike, say, Jenny Hodges that you read about in the reading, who probably... wanted to be a man or felt like a man in her heart of hearts and spent her life dressed as a man even after the war, Deborah Sampson went back to being a woman right after the war and then went on to be a wife and a mother. So you do with that whatever you need to do with that, right? Okay. So in 1792, she petitioned the Massachusetts legislature for back pay. for money she had not been paid after discovered she was a woman. So this is what's cool. And then the Massachusetts legislature, the Massachusetts state government said, yep, yep, Deborah, you were a soldier. We're going to pay you your back pay because that wasn't fair that you didn't get paid it. Ten years later, she took to the lecture circuit to earn money by telling tales of her war service and doing rifle drills. And if you're thinking, oh my God, the lecture circuit, ick. You have to keep in mind in 1802 there were no televisions, no computers, no Facebook, no TikTok, no nothing. What do you do for fun? Well, you'd go, people would give talks. They called it the lecture service. And you could go to a talk, a guy who'd had an adventure in the Amazonian rainforest, or a guy who knew everything about butterflies, or a lady who had been in the war dressed as a man. And she was apparently immensely popular and got a good price for her ticket, so she made a good amount of money doing that. Two years later, in 1804, she petitioned the U.S. Congress for a pension as a veteran. A number of soldiers wrote letters, including Paul Revere, and said, Yeah, she was a good soldier. You should give her a pension. And a year later, the U.S. Congress, the federal government, awarded Deborah Sampson... a pension as a retired United States Army soldier. And I think what's really cool about that is, one, we have both the state of Massachusetts recognizing she was a soldier by paying her back pay, and then we have the federal government recognizing she was a soldier by giving her a pension. And we live in a world where conservative politicians are often rambling on about how women can't be in the military. Or they can be in the military. but they can't be in combat. When in reality, until modern times, women have always been in combat. And our own government recognized it by giving women pensions. Because Deborah Sampson was not the only woman to get a pension after the American Revolution. And the government also gave some women in the Civil War, who fought as men, pensions too. So it's not just that women have always fought in wars, but that in this country they have fought in wars, and our own government has recognized it. But we're so bad at American history that we've forgotten it, and now we want to pretend like women can't be in combat, which is stupid. Okay, next slide. Slave women also did important work during the American Revolution on both the loyalist side, so the British side, and on the patriot or the American side. Both sides, both the British and the Americans, promised slaves, male and female, that if they fought, fight for us and we'll free you after the war. Now, it turns out most of that was a lie. The British freed some slaves, the Americans very few. That was the beginning of our government lying to people about stuff like that. But anyway, that didn't mean slaves didn't believe the promise and didn't fight for that reason. Female slaves, in addition, fought not just to free themselves, but to free... their children born and unborn. This is something slave women, whenever slave women undertook to free themselves by any means, running away, volunteering in a war, etc. etc. they were always thinking about the children that they would have one day. Because if you are free then your children are born free, but if you were enslaved your children are born slaves. So it turns out that in the South, which is where most of the slaves were, Most of the dirty work of military installations, like digging ditches, building fortifications, building walls, building big dirt ramparts, building latrines, all that stuff, was done by slave women, masters who ordered them to do so. We also know that a number of women ran away, volunteered their services to the other army, So if your master was British, you would run away from him and volunteer your services to the American army. And a lot of those women made very effective spies. That is, you could send those women back in to the area they came from because they knew it, and they could spy on the British army on that side, or whatever the other army was. And that black women made very good spies because nobody takes women seriously, or men didn't take women seriously, so women were always good spies in wars. And that nobody take if people don't take women seriously, they certainly don't take women of color seriously so women of color have always made very effective spies because they they function kind of invisibly to the power structure Indeed one of the most effective spies in the Civil War was Harriet Tubman who was primarily famous for the Underground Railroad stuff But she was a she was she did a lot of spy work during the Civil War and she was immensely successful because she was really good at sneaking around and really good at making herself unseen. Also, we know some black women, and we don't know exactly how many, but we know it's some, just like Deborah Sampson, disguised themselves as men and fought in the war. That is what I'm trying to say, is that anything white women did in the war, black women probably did too, though we know that the bulk of what slave women ended up doing was this. this dirty work of building fortifications and stuff, the kind of work that masters would put slaves to, but that black women did all of the things that they were able to do and everything white women did, black women did as well. And in many senses, the Native American women, and those would have been the three big racial groups in America at the time, black women, white women, and Indian women. Yeah, cool. Next slide. This is so much fun. This is Oney Judge. Oney Judge was George Washington's slave. And she ran away from him. And she went to the British Army. And she volunteered to be a spy. So she worked for the British Army, spying against the Continental Army, which was run by her former master, George Washington. Isn't that fun? So you see this advertisement, and notice there's a funny little thing about colonial spelling. They used to print... S is like F, so you'll see advertisement there. A-D-V-E-R-T-I. It looks like F, but they would have seen that as an S, too. And don't ask me why, because, like, absconded's got an S in it, but advertisement, they used an F. And I don't know enough about printing to know why. I just know when I read stuff, that's how you do it. So absconded from the household, a president of the United States, Oney Judge, a light mulatto girl, much freckled, with very black eyes and fluffy black hair. She is of middle nature and slender, delicately armed, and about 20 years of age. Oh, Oni. And you go down there to the bottom. $10 will be paid to any person who will bring her home. You have taken a city or on board any vessel in the harbor for a reasonable additional amount, etc., etc., etc. Oh, Oni. Isn't that fun? Oni ran away from her master, the President of the United States, a man who was fighting so people could be free. The irony there is fun. And then spied for the British Army against him. So that's fun. Want to see another fun young black woman? Okay, next slide. Is Phyllis Wheatley. She was also on our list of women that we looked at. That night we did the big list. Phyllis Wheatley, we put her down as one of America's first great female poet. She was a slave. Some Quakers who did not believe in slavery bought her, freed her, and then educated her, and then Phyllis turned into a poet. And she was like 14 when she started writing poems good enough to be published in newspapers and journals. And then she got kind of famous. George Washington said, Phyllis, why don't you come to my camp and read poems to the soldiers to entertain them? And she was like, cool. And then she wrote her moderately famous uh, addressed to President Washington. So I enjoy that because I like that this little girl, uh, little girl, she was, she was a teenager, uh, wrote a poem to George Washington at about the same that Oney Judge was running away from him and lending herself out, uh, to, to his enemies. I think it suggests two really interesting and complicated things about the nature of American history and American liberty, right? Um, uh, but anyway, uh, I think if you went and looked at Phyllis Wheatley's poems today, you'd be like, oh, not for me. But at the time, people really dug her stuff, and she was like rock star famous. You cannot overemphasize what a big shot Phyllis Wheatley was in the 1780s in America. And she was, people loved her. Anyway, next slide. Okay. Well, here we go. The big finish. What's it all mean? The upshot. Uh, one. And most obviously, women played a significant role in the American Revolution. It's not just, oh, look, I'm an American historian, and I found these three women who did these things that aren't that important, but we're going to pretend like they are. These are truly important things. It is women who helped build and spread the ideas that encouraged the Revolution. Indeed, I think we can lay that almost firmly at their feet. It's not just that... Founding father dudes. That's not how ideas get to regular people. It's the women who went to the revivals who liked the ideas because they were women and then spread them to their men. Women also played important political roles like Molly Brandt did or even Martha Custis Washington did. Though Martha is more of a camp follower, but nonetheless kind of in supporting her political husband. um abigail adams the same thing she's both doing the work that allows her husband to go off and be a founding father and also being political herself it is abigail adams and women like her who kept the farms and businesses going so that men could go to war and to make revolutionary governments and then women went to war in all the ways that women could go to war so they went as women like molly pitcher did they went dressed as men pretending to be male soldiers you as Deborah Sampson did, and as uncounted and unnamed white and black women did. That there is no part of the American Revolution that women didn't play an important role in. So, let me sum up on the last slide, which is next. Yay! It says the end of lecture. Yay! But hold on for just a second while I talk at you a little bit. So you see there, that's a picture of sort of the Betsy Ross thing. And the only bad news I have in this lecture is probably the only woman that most people could name for the American Revolution is Betsy Ross. And Betsy Ross is... imaginary. She doesn't exist. There is no single woman who invented the American flag. Indeed, the American flag wasn't really invented during the American Revolution. It was invented after the American Revolution, after the war was over. Lots of different women sewed lots of different kinds of flags. There's no one person and if there was, her name was not Betsy Ross. I think it's interesting that that is the only person who's famous in American history, and she's famous for sewing something, and all these women who did legitimately important things. All that stuff I've been talking about the last hour, none of that stuff we can remember. We can only remember as a culture this imaginary seamstress. And that says something really important. Remember I told you I'm always going to try and make this about... What does it mean to me today? And the point of this lecture today is, I suspect most of you, before you listened to these notes, did not know any of this. And you probably, to be fair, didn't remember much about the American Revolution at all. But I think the problem we have in American history is because we leave women, of all classes and races and religions and sexual orientations, we leave them all out of American history. And it gives us the illusion that American women never did anything important. That America is America because men did important things. And thus it is okay to continue to exclude women from the important things the country does. It's okay that we've never had a serious woman run for, I mean, a serious presidential run at the, I'm sorry, I'm tired. A serious... female contender for the presidency, or we have, but she's never been elected. That's okay, because women aren't really important to American history anyway. I mean, and again, if we go back to the lecture last week where we talked about how oppression works, not just because men oppress women, because women collaborate in it. In 2016, the reason the orange guy won is because a number of women said, I'm not going to vote for Hillary. And the problem wasn't Hillary per se. because there's nothing actually wrong with her, and all the things they said about her turned out to be lies. The problem was, she was a woman, much in the same way that in this very recent primary, Elizabeth Warren, who was a serious candidate, and easily as serious as Biden or Bernie, and way more coherent than Biden, and younger than Bernie, and yet nonetheless really struggled in the polls. Because again, we live in a country that doesn't think women should, don't have, women don't have to be important in our current world because we were never important in the past. And it turns out we were important. It's just that we've erased women from history. And when we add them back in, we not only create sort of torturous women's history lectures and women's history classes, but maybe we do that. But, but... When you add women back in, you suggest that women have always been important to American history and that we do or we should count fully as citizens in all the ways that citizens do things. And I think that's a helpful thing to think because we can't talk about liberty and equality in this country if we live in a place where women are discounted from positions of power, where women are told you have to be this major that gets paid that this much. less than these majors that are more traditionally male majors. That when we live in a country that continues to funnel women into secondary positions, we can't be honest about our commitment to liberty and equality. And I think one of the reasons we're allowed to not be honest about that is because this country is so bad in a woman's history. So even if, say, six years from now or six months from now, You don't remember any of the details from this lecture. What I want you to take away is there was a bunch of stuff about the American Revolution that I didn't know and all I can remember, and I don't remember any of it. I memorized it all for a test and I forgot it. But I can remember that women were important and we never talk about it. And if it's true that women are important in the American Revolution and we don't teach it and we don't talk about it, then maybe it's true that women are important in every event in American history. And we don't teach it. And we don't talk about it. Maybe we should. What do you think? All right. Okay, now, that is your lecture. So, now what you're going to do is you're going to email me your notes for that lecture. Remember? If you've already done your reading response, then go ahead and email me your notes, take a picture of them or whatever, and email me those and your reading response. If you haven't done your reading response yet, wait and do the reading response so you can email me the things together. It's way easier for me if I get your email with both your notes and your reading response in it. Okay? Does that sound cool? All right. And, um, If you have any questions about the lecture, go ahead and email me, because that's the only flaw with this is there's no, hey, Peg, I have a question in the middle of the lecture. And, you know, that's the fun thing about in-class teaching. But we don't live in in-class teaching land anymore, and here we are. I'm going to sign off for the night, or if it's morning or day where you are, go now and spread the love. And I miss you, peeps. Bye-bye.

Welcome to part two of the lecture about women in the American Revolution. So here we go. Yay!

Then the next kind of woman we have participating in the Revolutionary War is woman as political leader and our example here is Molly Brandt and she's interesting for a couple of reasons for us. One, Molly Brandt, while that's her English name, was actually a Mohawk. woman and the Mohawk were one of the five tribes of the Iroquois so she was a Mohawk woman in the Iroquois nation but she was also married to a British Army officer Sir William Johnson and I have quotes there around married because British Army you couldn't officially marry an Indian woman so they were at all but named married but not legally married um he was the British superintendent to Native American affairs And he died in the middle of the war.

And it was a really important position. The British superintendent to Native American affairs not only served as the liaison between the British army and the Indian people in the neighborhood who were the Iroquois slash Mohawk people, but then that liaison would also sometimes liaise with the revolutionary governments, or at least representatives of the revolutionary governments. So he's dead, and she just steps into the job.

And the British government essentially said, okay, you go ahead and do that job. She collected his paycheck. She engaged in liaisoning with the natives and the British.

And this is super important because while we don't talk about the Indians in the Revolutionary War much, they were totally key. If the local Indians were on your side in any given battle, there was a good chance that was going to turn the battle in your favor. Now, the British ended up losing the American Revolution, but they had very good Native American support all the way through, in part because the British officials and the British army was significantly better at dealing with Indians than were the American colonials. The American colonials, who were the people who were going to stay there, were super intent on wiping Indians out and taking their land.

So, many Indian tribes fought on the side of the British because they didn't want... the colonial people to get any more power and control because that would be bad for them. So while we like, yay, we won the American Revolution, yay for us, it was indeed for many of the Indian people who lived in America a bad and dark day. Nonetheless, Molly Brandt. Next slide, let's take a peek.

I like this drawing here is we don't know what Molly Brandt looked like. It's just it's a famous drawing that illustrates just what it says up there at the top of the slide, the three faces of Molly Brandt. That is, she was an Indian woman or an Iroquois woman.

She was a European woman in that she was married to a European guy and she was a very good English speaker. And she was a loyalist. That is, she was loyal to the British government. And so, you know, like lots of us, she was different people in different times to different people. In 1785, when she retired from the job at the end of the war, in recognition for the services she did to the British government, they gave her a retirement pension.

And we mention that here because it suggests, again, how truly seriously they took her contribution to the war effort. So that's cool. All right. Example four. Want to see that?

Next slide. Example four is the woman who went off to war and acted as an informal soldier. That is, she wasn't enlisted in the regular army.

She didn't have a uniform, but she was nonetheless fighting alongside the men. And lots of women did this. Lots and lots of army companies, groups of dudes, had women in them as women.

Not all of them, but there's more than one. Less than, you know, 500. And the most famous one is a woman known now as Molly Pitcher. Her name was Mary, or Molly being the nickname for Mary Ludwig Hayes, Mary Hayes, known as Molly Pitcher. And here you see her down in this picture, surrounded by patriotic, look at the iconography there, this icon, this patriotic woman. She's literally dressed in red, white, and blue.

She's surrounded by red, white, and blue. And and it showing her engaged in the activity that made her really famous So let's see more about her at the next slide her nickname Molly pitcher because during the battles she would take water to not only her husband's artillery team because these big artillery guns what you would call cannons but nobody really calls cannons in the military they're artillery guns um those take teams of guys to run those things a guy to to to charge the power a guy to plunge the thing got a light there's a thing there's a whole bunch of stuff that happens um and anyway that's hot and thirsty work and these battles would go on off and on all day long and people she would take water to the guys before and after the battles and so she gets this nickname Molly Pitcher for the pitcher of water. And then in November of 1776 in the Battle of Monmouth, her husband John, who was an assistant gunner, so a guy on the team of guys that ran this cannon, for lack of a better word, he was killed during the battle and so Margaret, Molly took over.

It says John took over but it's supposed to be Captain Molly. Captain Mollie took over as gunner for him and finished the battle, and then she continued to work on that artillery gun team for a number of months. The regiment jokingly called her Captain Mollie, though she has no official recognition in the Army. And then she had to retire from her life as a military woman when she was wounded by a cannonball, severely injuring, as it says here, her shoulder, chest, and jaw. But...

You will hear of the famous women of the American Revolution, probably Molly Pitcher comes up as much as anyone. And you would have lots of women who went off primarily with their husbands and kind of fought alongside them or right behind them in a support thing, a support kind of mechanism. But men who, women who were in the thick of battle, which I don't think we hear about much in American history, but it's actually pretty cool, isn't it?

Wouldn't you agree? You do agree. Good job. 5 is perhaps at least for students and certainly I think for me too the most interesting way in which women could participate in war which is they could dress up like men like soldiers and go off to war as men so they were passing as men thus there you see it I think passing soldiers so it turns out that between the in the Revolutionary War which is the war this lectures about Somewhere probably around 500 women dressed as men and fought in the war.

It may be a larger number. It's hard to know how many women we never, like didn't get caught. And so we don't know about.

In the Civil War, the number is between 500 and 800, with 600 being the most common number you see. Women who dressed up like men and went off to fight in the war. How great is that, huh? Next slide. Deborah Sampson here.

She came from a very poor family and she went off to fight in the war for all the usual reasons that people do. The adventure to serve her country, but really also to earn money because there was a paycheck to be had in soldiering by the 1780s. The government, the now American government, had gotten itself together, gotten some loans from France.

There was money to be made here. And so for all of those reasons, she went off to fight. Just like...

Anybody would go off to fight in a war for many, many reasons. Patriotism, money, adventure, duty, all those things. When she enlisted, it's kind of a funny story. The first time she enlisted, she put on her brother's clothes and she just went down to the local enlistment office.

But the guys down there knew her and they were like, Debra, we know who you are. Go home. And she's like, we're all rats.

So she takes another shot at it. A couple of weeks later, she dresses up in her brother's clothes again. And she walks to the next town over where nobody knows her. And she enlisted there, and she gave her name as Robert Shurtleff, and indeed she was accepted into the army, and she served 17 months in the Continental Army as a private. And here's the cool thing.

Well, there's a bunch of cool things. One, it's already cool, isn't it? It is, isn't it? Yeah. You're saying, but you have questions.

One of your questions is, why didn't they notice she was a dude during her medical when she enlisted? Well, there wasn't a medical before she enlisted. You just... enlisted so there's that too how did how come they didn't know she was a dude afterwards like she didn't shave well lots of guys you could be very young and enlist in the army so lots of guys uh didn't shave yet and guys i think came to puberty a little later than they do now because they had fewer calories in their diet you Um, um, um, what about her boobs?

Well, you can bind those up and cover them with a big bulky wool uniform. Uh, what about her period? How did she had disguised that?

And my answer to that question is women have been disguising menstruation, uh, for the millennium. If we were in class, I'd say, you know, statistically a quarter of the women in this room are, are menstruating, but we can't tell who. So I think hiding your menstruation is not the biggest problem she had.

Also probably given the stress of being at war and being in disguise pretending to be somebody she wasn't Combined with the crummy army food and army rations and the low calorie count of that food She probably quit menstruating fairly early on. What else do students ask about? Oh, how did she pee and not get caught? People in the 1700s and even men were really really private about that So you guys didn't stand around in a circle wiggle waggling their weenies at each other peeing, but you went off someplace, not that I'm suggesting they do that now, sorry dudes, you went off somewhere private to pee, and they would build, when you stayed in camp, they would build latrines that had doors and were private, so you wouldn't necessarily, nobody would necessarily ever see you pee or see that you didn't have a penis when you peed. Also, apparently it's possible for women to learn to pee standing up and to direct the stream of their urine.

I'm gonna be super honest. I read that in a book and I thought I'm gonna try that so I was camping one time And I did I could now start laughing I did that and I peed all over my hiking boots And I was like oh sad and now I'm camping and I'm I only got my one pair of hiking boots And I peed all over him and now I have to wear them so that was the end of that experiment But I hear and I've seen on YouTube videos that it can be done, so I'm just saying anyway in the 17th month of service, or his service, Robert Shurtleff was injured high in the thigh. You can see the scene now in your head. They take her off to a tent with a doctor who examines her wound high in the thigh by pulling her pants down and saying, wait a second, where are your manly appendages?

You're not a dude, you are a girl. She was discharged in 1783, but here's again the interesting thing, she was honorably discharged. So while they threw her out of the army, She was not punished. She was not dishonorably discharged.

And so now with an honorable discharge, you can see that that's going to leave her open for all sorts of things we'll talk about in the next slide. In case you were wondering about her sexuality, was she trans, was she a lesbian, was she bi, she got married in 1785 and she had three kids. And that doesn't really tell us anything, but it does suggest that unlike, say, Jenny Hodges that you read about in the reading, who probably... wanted to be a man or felt like a man in her heart of hearts and spent her life dressed as a man even after the war, Deborah Sampson went back to being a woman right after the war and then went on to be a wife and a mother.

So you do with that whatever you need to do with that, right? Okay. So in 1792, she petitioned the Massachusetts legislature for back pay. for money she had not been paid after discovered she was a woman.

So this is what's cool. And then the Massachusetts legislature, the Massachusetts state government said, yep, yep, Deborah, you were a soldier. We're going to pay you your back pay because that wasn't fair that you didn't get paid it. Ten years later, she took to the lecture circuit to earn money by telling tales of her war service and doing rifle drills. And if you're thinking, oh my God, the lecture circuit, ick.

You have to keep in mind in 1802 there were no televisions, no computers, no Facebook, no TikTok, no nothing. What do you do for fun? Well, you'd go, people would give talks.

They called it the lecture service. And you could go to a talk, a guy who'd had an adventure in the Amazonian rainforest, or a guy who knew everything about butterflies, or a lady who had been in the war dressed as a man. And she was apparently immensely popular and got a good price for her ticket, so she made a good amount of money doing that. Two years later, in 1804, she petitioned the U.S.

Congress for a pension as a veteran. A number of soldiers wrote letters, including Paul Revere, and said, Yeah, she was a good soldier. You should give her a pension.

And a year later, the U.S. Congress, the federal government, awarded Deborah Sampson... a pension as a retired United States Army soldier. And I think what's really cool about that is, one, we have both the state of Massachusetts recognizing she was a soldier by paying her back pay, and then we have the federal government recognizing she was a soldier by giving her a pension. And we live in a world where conservative politicians are often rambling on about how women can't be in the military.

Or they can be in the military. but they can't be in combat. When in reality, until modern times, women have always been in combat.

And our own government recognized it by giving women pensions. Because Deborah Sampson was not the only woman to get a pension after the American Revolution. And the government also gave some women in the Civil War, who fought as men, pensions too. So it's not just that women have always fought in wars, but that in this country they have fought in wars, and our own government has recognized it.

But we're so bad at American history that we've forgotten it, and now we want to pretend like women can't be in combat, which is stupid. Okay, next slide. Slave women also did important work during the American Revolution on both the loyalist side, so the British side, and on the patriot or the American side.

Both sides, both the British and the Americans, promised slaves, male and female, that if they fought, fight for us and we'll free you after the war. Now, it turns out most of that was a lie. The British freed some slaves, the Americans very few.

That was the beginning of our government lying to people about stuff like that. But anyway, that didn't mean slaves didn't believe the promise and didn't fight for that reason. Female slaves, in addition, fought not just to free themselves, but to free...

their children born and unborn. This is something slave women, whenever slave women undertook to free themselves by any means, running away, volunteering in a war, etc. etc. they were always thinking about the children that they would have one day. Because if you are free then your children are born free, but if you were enslaved your children are born slaves. So it turns out that in the South, which is where most of the slaves were, Most of the dirty work of military installations, like digging ditches, building fortifications, building walls, building big dirt ramparts, building latrines, all that stuff, was done by slave women, masters who ordered them to do so.

We also know that a number of women ran away, volunteered their services to the other army, So if your master was British, you would run away from him and volunteer your services to the American army. And a lot of those women made very effective spies. That is, you could send those women back in to the area they came from because they knew it, and they could spy on the British army on that side, or whatever the other army was.

And that black women made very good spies because nobody takes women seriously, or men didn't take women seriously, so women were always good spies in wars. And that nobody take if people don't take women seriously, they certainly don't take women of color seriously so women of color have always made very effective spies because they they function kind of invisibly to the power structure Indeed one of the most effective spies in the Civil War was Harriet Tubman who was primarily famous for the Underground Railroad stuff But she was a she was she did a lot of spy work during the Civil War and she was immensely successful because she was really good at sneaking around and really good at making herself unseen. Also, we know some black women, and we don't know exactly how many, but we know it's some, just like Deborah Sampson, disguised themselves as men and fought in the war.

That is what I'm trying to say, is that anything white women did in the war, black women probably did too, though we know that the bulk of what slave women ended up doing was this. this dirty work of building fortifications and stuff, the kind of work that masters would put slaves to, but that black women did all of the things that they were able to do and everything white women did, black women did as well. And in many senses, the Native American women, and those would have been the three big racial groups in America at the time, black women, white women, and Indian women.

Yeah, cool. Next slide. This is so much fun. This is Oney Judge.

Oney Judge was George Washington's slave. And she ran away from him. And she went to the British Army. And she volunteered to be a spy. So she worked for the British Army, spying against the Continental Army, which was run by her former master, George Washington.

Isn't that fun? So you see this advertisement, and notice there's a funny little thing about colonial spelling. They used to print... S is like F, so you'll see advertisement there. A-D-V-E-R-T-I.

It looks like F, but they would have seen that as an S, too. And don't ask me why, because, like, absconded's got an S in it, but advertisement, they used an F. And I don't know enough about printing to know why. I just know when I read stuff, that's how you do it.

So absconded from the household, a president of the United States, Oney Judge, a light mulatto girl, much freckled, with very black eyes and fluffy black hair. She is of middle nature and slender, delicately armed, and about 20 years of age. Oh, Oni.

And you go down there to the bottom. $10 will be paid to any person who will bring her home. You have taken a city or on board any vessel in the harbor for a reasonable additional amount, etc., etc., etc. Oh, Oni.

Isn't that fun? Oni ran away from her master, the President of the United States, a man who was fighting so people could be free. The irony there is fun.

And then spied for the British Army against him. So that's fun. Want to see another fun young black woman? Okay, next slide. Is Phyllis Wheatley.

She was also on our list of women that we looked at. That night we did the big list. Phyllis Wheatley, we put her down as one of America's first great female poet. She was a slave.

Some Quakers who did not believe in slavery bought her, freed her, and then educated her, and then Phyllis turned into a poet. And she was like 14 when she started writing poems good enough to be published in newspapers and journals. And then she got kind of famous.

George Washington said, Phyllis, why don't you come to my camp and read poems to the soldiers to entertain them? And she was like, cool. And then she wrote her moderately famous uh, addressed to President Washington. So I enjoy that because I like that this little girl, uh, little girl, she was, she was a teenager, uh, wrote a poem to George Washington at about the same that Oney Judge was running away from him and lending herself out, uh, to, to his enemies. I think it suggests two really interesting and complicated things about the nature of American history and American liberty, right?

Um, uh, but anyway, uh, I think if you went and looked at Phyllis Wheatley's poems today, you'd be like, oh, not for me. But at the time, people really dug her stuff, and she was like rock star famous. You cannot overemphasize what a big shot Phyllis Wheatley was in the 1780s in America. And she was, people loved her.

Anyway, next slide. Okay. Well, here we go. The big finish.

What's it all mean? The upshot. Uh, one. And most obviously, women played a significant role in the American Revolution.

It's not just, oh, look, I'm an American historian, and I found these three women who did these things that aren't that important, but we're going to pretend like they are. These are truly important things. It is women who helped build and spread the ideas that encouraged the Revolution.

Indeed, I think we can lay that almost firmly at their feet. It's not just that... Founding father dudes. That's not how ideas get to regular people.

It's the women who went to the revivals who liked the ideas because they were women and then spread them to their men. Women also played important political roles like Molly Brandt did or even Martha Custis Washington did. Though Martha is more of a camp follower, but nonetheless kind of in supporting her political husband. um abigail adams the same thing she's both doing the work that allows her husband to go off and be a founding father and also being political herself it is abigail adams and women like her who kept the farms and businesses going so that men could go to war and to make revolutionary governments and then women went to war in all the ways that women could go to war so they went as women like molly pitcher did they went dressed as men pretending to be male soldiers you as Deborah Sampson did, and as uncounted and unnamed white and black women did. That there is no part of the American Revolution that women didn't play an important role in.

So, let me sum up on the last slide, which is next. Yay! It says the end of lecture.

Yay! But hold on for just a second while I talk at you a little bit. So you see there, that's a picture of sort of the Betsy Ross thing. And the only bad news I have in this lecture is probably the only woman that most people could name for the American Revolution is Betsy Ross.

And Betsy Ross is... imaginary. She doesn't exist.

There is no single woman who invented the American flag. Indeed, the American flag wasn't really invented during the American Revolution. It was invented after the American Revolution, after the war was over.

Lots of different women sewed lots of different kinds of flags. There's no one person and if there was, her name was not Betsy Ross. I think it's interesting that that is the only person who's famous in American history, and she's famous for sewing something, and all these women who did legitimately important things.

All that stuff I've been talking about the last hour, none of that stuff we can remember. We can only remember as a culture this imaginary seamstress. And that says something really important.

Remember I told you I'm always going to try and make this about... What does it mean to me today? And the point of this lecture today is, I suspect most of you, before you listened to these notes, did not know any of this. And you probably, to be fair, didn't remember much about the American Revolution at all.

But I think the problem we have in American history is because we leave women, of all classes and races and religions and sexual orientations, we leave them all out of American history. And it gives us the illusion that American women never did anything important. That America is America because men did important things. And thus it is okay to continue to exclude women from the important things the country does.

It's okay that we've never had a serious woman run for, I mean, a serious presidential run at the, I'm sorry, I'm tired. A serious... female contender for the presidency, or we have, but she's never been elected. That's okay, because women aren't really important to American history anyway. I mean, and again, if we go back to the lecture last week where we talked about how oppression works, not just because men oppress women, because women collaborate in it.

In 2016, the reason the orange guy won is because a number of women said, I'm not going to vote for Hillary. And the problem wasn't Hillary per se. because there's nothing actually wrong with her, and all the things they said about her turned out to be lies. The problem was, she was a woman, much in the same way that in this very recent primary, Elizabeth Warren, who was a serious candidate, and easily as serious as Biden or Bernie, and way more coherent than Biden, and younger than Bernie, and yet nonetheless really struggled in the polls. Because again, we live in a country that doesn't think women should, don't have, women don't have to be important in our current world because we were never important in the past.

And it turns out we were important. It's just that we've erased women from history. And when we add them back in, we not only create sort of torturous women's history lectures and women's history classes, but maybe we do that.

But, but... When you add women back in, you suggest that women have always been important to American history and that we do or we should count fully as citizens in all the ways that citizens do things. And I think that's a helpful thing to think because we can't talk about liberty and equality in this country if we live in a place where women are discounted from positions of power, where women are told you have to be this major that gets paid that this much.

less than these majors that are more traditionally male majors. That when we live in a country that continues to funnel women into secondary positions, we can't be honest about our commitment to liberty and equality. And I think one of the reasons we're allowed to not be honest about that is because this country is so bad in a woman's history. So even if, say, six years from now or six months from now, You don't remember any of the details from this lecture. What I want you to take away is there was a bunch of stuff about the American Revolution that I didn't know and all I can remember, and I don't remember any of it.

I memorized it all for a test and I forgot it. But I can remember that women were important and we never talk about it. And if it's true that women are important in the American Revolution and we don't teach it and we don't talk about it, then maybe it's true that women are important in every event in American history.

And we don't teach it. And we don't talk about it. Maybe we should. What do you think? All right.

Okay, now, that is your lecture. So, now what you're going to do is you're going to email me your notes for that lecture. Remember?

If you've already done your reading response, then go ahead and email me your notes, take a picture of them or whatever, and email me those and your reading response. If you haven't done your reading response yet, wait and do the reading response so you can email me the things together. It's way easier for me if I get your email with both your notes and your reading response in it.

Okay? Does that sound cool? All right.

And, um, If you have any questions about the lecture, go ahead and email me, because that's the only flaw with this is there's no, hey, Peg, I have a question in the middle of the lecture. And, you know, that's the fun thing about in-class teaching. But we don't live in in-class teaching land anymore, and here we are. I'm going to sign off for the night, or if it's morning or day where you are, go now and spread the love.

And I miss you, peeps. Bye-bye.

Transcript for:Women's Essential Roles in the American Revolution

Transcript for:
Women's Essential Roles in the American Revolution