A New Touch on the Times

A woman in a tricorn hat holds a rifle and a powder horn in this 1779 woodcut illustration to a broadside poem. The poem, written by Molly Gutridge of Marblehead, Massachusetts, bemoans the financial hardships that the Revolutionary War had placed on women and includes the lines:

We can’t get fire nor yet food
Takes 20 weight of sugar for two foot of wood
We cannot get bread nor yet meat
We see the world is nought but cheat.