Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation

Roberts’s stories of women’s involvement in the Revolutionary War further reveal the changing nature of their roles. Some of their tasks were more traditionally domestic, such as cooking for the soldiers or cleaning and repairing their uniforms. However, other women took part in the war effort in ways that transcended traditional female roles, maintaining cannons, spying, or conveying messages, often by horseback through dangerous areas. Roberts will later argue that women taking on these new responsibilities—along with the “home front” responsibilities already discussed, such as running farms and managing businesses while their men were away—helped pave the way for great social change around women’s roles and responsibilities by demonstrating women’s capabilities.

Whether women were gathering information on British troop movement or tending to wounded soldiers, their actions provide more evidence for Roberts’ assertion that women were essential to the struggle for independence, here demonstrated through the vital supporting roles they played in the war itself. Perhaps no woman played a more central role than Martha Washington, whose work with the soldiers of her husband’s army helped keep them from mutinying or deserting. Martha’s support for the troops reflects tensions around women’s roles. Much of her support took the form of traditionally feminine activities, such as producing fabric and organizing sewing circles, so that she was essentially working in the domestic sphere to contribute to the public sphere. She also traveled to camps, offering support, comfort, and care to the neediest troops. While this is another traditionally feminine activity, the fact that she was engaging in it at the military camps made her highly popular with the troops. That is to say, she was remarkable because she surpassed a traditional woman’s role by enduring the hardships of military encampments, bringing the traditionally feminine domestic activities to the traditionally masculine world of politics and warfare.

Martha’s activities in this regard highlight an interesting point about duty. Martha’s commitment to George’s army kept her away from her extended family, who were grieving losses and dealing with considerable hardships. She felt a great conflict of responsibility but always chose the army. In other words, she overlooked a traditional female duty of caring for junior family members in favor of a broader patriotic duty to contribute to the struggle for independence by supporting the army and caring for the troops. 

Not all such contributions played out on the front line. Abigail Adams, for example, fulfilled her sense of responsibility by continuing to maintain the family farm in John’s absence, despite increasingly difficult conditions. Abigail was looking after several small children while heavily pregnant herself, aware that she might have to flee from British forces at any moment. Roberts uses this story as an opportunity to discuss a broader aspect of women’s traditional role in colonial America, highlighting how most women of the period struggled through a near-constant cycle of pregnancy, childbirth, and child rearing that was emotionally and physically draining and often detrimental to their health. She also notes the fact that Abigail’s child was stillborn to emphasize the period’s high levels of infant mortality and to segue into a discussion of how dangerous pregnancy and childbirth could be for colonial women, as we will see later in the death of Martha Jefferson. However, Abigail identified this struggle, alone and unsupported so that her husband could serve Congress, as her duty, her sacrifice, and her contribution to the republican cause. While even she began to question the extent of this commitment when John, only just returned home, was almost immediately sent on a diplomatic mission to France, she again quickly accepted her plight as duty—her essential but behind-the-scenes contribution to the cause. 

The work of Esther DeBerdt, Sarah Franklin Bache, and the Ladies’ Association of Philadelphia also provides a perspective on duty and behind-the-scenes roles. The idea of sacrificing to the cause was central to DeBerdt’s “The Sentiments of an American Woman” and its call for women to forgo indulgences in order to raise funds for the troops fighting for independence. That is to say, she suggested that women could do their duty to the nation by supporting the troops who were doing their duty by fighting the British. The fulfilling of this duty, however, would not be as recognized or credited as the women had hoped. They intended the funds to pay for “an extraordinary bounty” or “a special ‘offering of the ladies’ that the soldiers could point to with pride” (128). However, at George Washington’s stipulation, the money was ultimately spent on course fabric that the women then sewed into shirts, completing another underwhelming but necessary behind-the-scenes task for the cause.