Women in Virginia Colony
When colonists first settled in Virginia, they attempted to transplant familiar patriarchal family and political structures. They did so with great difficulty because settlements were so dispersed and women traveled to the new colony in disproportionately lower numbers than men. By the era of the American Revolution, however, the skewed sex ratio had almost evened to approximately 0.95 free white women per every man. Changing demographics allowed colonists to reconstruct a social system governed by coverture, a legal doctrine that declared married women were completely subsumed or “covered” by their husbands. These married women were called femes covert and could not control property, keep their own wages, sign contracts, or appear in court. While young, unmarried white women typically answered to the authority of their fathers, they, along with widows, were known as feme soles and could buy or sell property and engage in other legal transactions.
Poor white and free Black women sometimes found work as dressmakers, midwives, washerwomen, or tavern keepers. Wealthier women assumed control of household management, which often meant directing women whom they enslaved. Most women enslaved in Virginia at the time of the Revolution had been born in the colony. They were usually forced to perform difficult physical labor and were at risk of sexual assault, but they also exercised control over their lives by caring for their own children or negotiating concessions from enslavers.
Male colonists considered these Black and white women to operate outside the realm of politics. Indigenous women, on the other hand, actively exercised political influence within their communities. In many Native nations, women had the power to distribute food and to veto military actions. They could also depose sachems, or chiefs. But they constantly struggled against English encroachment, which threatened not only their territories but also their social structures. Despite their differences, all Virginia women would experience dramatic social, economic, and political changes resulting from the American Revolution.
Women and Nonimportation
Virginia’s towns, though dispersed, bustled with commercial activity in the 1760s—partly thanks to female entrepreneurs. In Williamsburg and Fredericksburg, white women operated taverns, dry goods stores, millineries, and boarding houses. They partnered with suppliers in London or Scotland to import the most fashionable lace, gloves, and fabrics; they used their intimate knowledge of markets to secure financial and social independence.
In the late eighteenth century, however, British taxation limited white women’s business prospects. The Stamp Act (1765) taxed all paper goods, including the newspapers women used to advertise their businesses, the liquor licenses that kept their taverns operational, and the pamphlets they read. Two years later, the Townshend Acts taxed glass, lead, paint, paper, and tea. Several of Virginia’s burgesses, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Richard Henry Lee, protested by signing the Virginia Nonimportation Resolutions. In this document, they pledged to “not at any time hereafter, directly or indirectly import” any goods “from Great-Britain, or any Part of Europe,” including food, textiles, and shoes.
In this context, women gave consumer habits a political meaning: many vigorously supported the nonimportation movement, particularly when it came to articles of dress. In December 1769, for example, the Virginia Gazette reported that nearly 100 women attended a ball in Williamsburg “in homespun gowns” rather than dresses produced with British fabric. The newspaper did not mention, however, that many of those gowns were made by enslaved people. By 1775, planters increasingly forced the people they enslaved to plant and harvest flax. They reassigned women from fields to spinning wheels to produce the cloth that drove colonial protests.
Other women resisted boycotts. In fact, historian Kaylan M. Stevenson shows that white women opposed nonimportation more frequently than their male counterparts—especially if those women were entrepreneurs who could no longer sell their stocks of imported products. After the First Continental Congress accepted Virginia’s nonimportation resolutions, every single female milliner and dressmaker who had arrived in Williamsburg from London between 1766 and 1771 announced she would leave Virginia.
Dunmore’s War & Shawnee Women
Even as some Virginia women weaponized their consumer power, male colonists often described them as helpless victims in the contest for one of the most important commodities, western land. Speculators like George Washington claimed to have title to property west of the Appalachians, but in 1763, the British Parliament declared these apparent titles void and banned western settlement. Great Britain’s ban on settlement beyond the Appalachians was intended to reduce armed conflict between white colonists and Indigenous nations. Nevertheless, representatives of the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy, or Haudenosaunee, had ceded much of the territory in the Treaty of Fort Stanwix (1768). White settlers, however, failed to acknowledge that the Haudenosaunee did not speak for the Cherokee, Mingo, and Shawnee people living near the Ohio River, and violence between white Virginians and Indigenous residents intensified. In 1774, white Ohio Valley settlers killed twelve Mingos, including Chief Logan’s wife, Mellana, and his pregnant sister, Koonay, in what became known as the Yellow Creek Massacre.
After the massacre, Virginia governor John Murray, fourth earl of Dunmore, mobilized militia to fight the Shawnee and Mingo nations. Some Virginians, wary of Dunmore’s attachment to the Crown, suspected their governor had actually allied with the Shawnee and encouraged them to kill rebellious colonists. One Virginia Gazette writer charged Dunmore with “destroying our frontiers” and “butchering innocent women.” Still, Dunmore joined the militiamen who fought to protect idealized Virginia ladies by committing atrocities against Indigenous women. One militiaman recalled burning five towns, seventy acres of crop fields, and five hundred bushels of corn. Starving and homeless, more than 170 Shawnee women migrated west with their families to present-day Missouri, where they sought refuge under the Spanish. Other Native refugee women fled to present-day Kansas, Texas, Oklahoma, Ohio, and Indiana.
Dunmore’s War (1774) ended after Virginia militiamen defeated Shawnee and Mingo forces at the Battle of Point Pleasant (October 10, 1774). Both nations surrendered their hunting rights south of the Ohio River, but Virginians continued to attack the Shawnee and Mingos during the Revolutionary War, displacing hundreds more women.
Freedom-Seeking Women and Dunmore’s Proclamation
As Indigenous women fled Dunmore, many Black women liberated themselves from slavery by running to him. In 1774, white and Black Virginians spread rumors that Dunmore would liberate enslaved people and mobilize them against white colonists. Dunmore seemed to confirm their suspicions in 1774, when he seized gunpowder in the Williamsburg Magazine and moved it to a British navy ship, beyond colonists’ reach. When colonists ordered Dunmore to return the powder, he refused and warned that if white protestors persisted, he would “declare freedom to the Slaves, and reduce the City of Williamsburg to Ashes.” Virginia enslavers responded by pursuing criminal cases against the people they enslaved at a rapidly increasing rate.
On November 15, 1775, Dunmore formally proclaimed freedom to people who liberated themselves from Patriot enslavers and served the British Army. As the historian Karen Cook Bell shows, within weeks of Dunmore’s Proclamation, eighty-seven Black Virginians ran to Dunmore, including twenty-one women and twenty-three girls under sixteen. Virginia’s Patriot government resisted by permitting any white Virginian to sell, banish, or execute freedom-seeking Black people. As a result, several women were sold within Virginia, others to New York. Three freedom-seekers tried to join a British ship near Norfolk but accidentally boarded an American vessel, only to vow they would shed “the last drop of their blood in Lord Dunmore’s service.”
Some women were pregnant when they liberated themselves. One woman, Jenny, was eight months pregnant when she and her two-year-old daughter escaped their enslaver near Petersburg. Although Jenny disappeared from the historical record, her enslaver believed she traveled to Richmond to find work. In 1781, sixteen-year-old Deborah Squash likewise liberated herself from Mount Vernon, along with sixteen other people enslaved by George Washington, and joined a nearby British ship. Not all women sought refuge behind British lines, however. Some turned to the Continental Army. When Jane Wilson liberated herself, her enslaver conjectured she had joined the First Virginia Regiment to reunite with her spouse, a Black soldier.
When Black women did claim freedom behind military lines, they faced another set of challenges. Sarah Osborn Benjamin, a white woman who worked for the Continental Army, remembered that upon arriving in Yorktown, she saw “a number of dead negroes lying” around the British camp, “whom she understood the british had . . . starved and then thrown out.” Freedom seekers died not only of starvation but also of diseases like smallpox or typhus. Historians estimate that approximately half of the people who liberated themselves to join the British Army did not live to the war’s end. Those who survived, however, were sometimes able to support themselves with rations or wages. Letta, a Black woman from Philadelphia, traveled to Virginia with the Continental Army and supported herself by washing and cooking bread for the troops. Hannah Till was enslaved by New York Reverend John Mason, who leased her to George Washington. Till cooked food for Washington and kept some of her earnings. By 1778, she had made enough to purchase her freedom.
Martha Washington and Ladies’ Associations
Letta and Hannah Till were just two among thousands of women in Continental Army camps. Historians have estimated that approximately 10,000 women worked for American regiments. British and Hessian regiments also traveled with thousands of women and children. They represented diverse racial, ethnic, religious, occupational, and economic backgrounds, and had distinct motives for joining the troops. Officers’ wives made trips to camp to spend time with their husbands, as well as to support the Continental Army with critical social and political leadership. Perhaps the most famous example is Martha Washington, who spent nearly half the war in or near military camps.
Martha Washington held balls and dinners to boost troops’ morale. She also entertained foreign and domestic officials. For example, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Martha Washington met with twelve Indigenous men and women to strengthen their relationship with U.S. troops. She spoke with the ministers of France and England. And, as historian Mary V. Thompson shows, diplomat Martha Washington served as a liaison between her husband and colonial women, as when Quaker women from Pennsylvania asked her to deliver a petition they had written demanding permission to see their husbands, whom the Continental Congress had arrested and imprisoned in Virginia for their pacifism. Martha Washington joined the women in a meeting with George Washington, who in turn helped them communicate their demands before the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania. Within a month, Pennsylvania’s Executive Council released the Quaker men.
Martha Washington also used her networks with women to raise funds for troops, especially by supporting Esther Reed’s Ladies Association of Philadelphia. Reed was married to George Washington’s aide-de-camp, Joseph Reed, and she knew that the Continental Army was desperately short of funding and supplies; clothing shortages had even led to mutinies from January to June 1780. To raise funds, Reed divided Philadelphia into ten districts. She joined with thirty-seven women, mostly members of the upper class like herself, to go door-to-door, canvasing for donations from “all women and girls.” This directly inserted women into the traditionally male world of civic activity. To expand her organization’s reach, as well as to justify women stepping into the public sphere, Reed printed her fundraising plan and a call for support titled “Sentiments of an American Woman.” She encouraged other states to found committees and named Martha Washington the chief treasurer, tasked with communicating with regional committee chairs. Martha Washington, in turn, dutifully corresponded with Virginia’s chief officer, Martha Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson’s wife, to gather contributions. Donors in Alexandria gave $75,800, and in Prince William County, they gave $7,506. Martha Washington herself donated $20,000. While they had planned to donate the money directly to the troops, George Washington requested shirts, as the lack of clothing for soldiers had become acute. The association used the funds to purchase linen, which they used to sew shirts. The Ladies Association of Philadelphia ultimately produced 2,000 shirts. Reed, Martha Washington, and their fellow fundraisers not only clothed troops at a critical time in the Revolution, they also took on overtly political and financial roles by participating in what historian Emily J. Arendt recognizes as “the first female voluntary association in the United States.”
Regimental Women and Work
Officers’ wives were far from the only women in camp. Thousands of rank-and-file women also traveled with the Continental Army. Many were refugees. They fled their homes, often with their children, when enemy troops came near and joined their husbands in military camps. Some could not financially support themselves on the homefront, so they sought military employment. They washed and sewed; nursed the sick and wounded; cooked meals; sold food, goods, and sex; and gathered intelligence. Washington and his officers sometimes grew frustrated with regimental women during the war and did not hesitate to court martial women for charges like “mutiny and desertion.” Still, officers knew the army could not function without female workers. For instance, washerwomen not only rinsed away dirt and foul odors when they washed shirts; they also killed body lice, which spread typhus, a deadly fever, thus saving soldiers’ lives.
When women workers did not receive pay or supplies from military officers, they demanded fairer conditions by striking. Washerwomen serving under Anthony Wayne went on strike to protest men who picked up their clean clothes but never paid. Wayne reminded the women that they were not given “Victuals to distress and render the Men unfit for Duty, but to keep them clean and decent.” But he also ordered captains to “make stoppages from the pay” of men who were “not punctual in paying for all such Washing.” Likewise, after nurses in Yellow Springs, Pennsylvania, who had worked for seven months without pay went on strike, the hospital’s surgeon reported that their work stoppage rendered his hospital useless and requested that Congress immediately deliver him money for their wages.
Female Prisoners of War
British and Hessian regimental women also received inadequate support from the military, especially as prisoners of war. These women included Friederike Charlotte Luise Riedesel, who had sailed to the United States to join her husband, Friedrich Adolph Riedesel, a Hessian commander during the Battles of Saratoga. During the battles, Friederike Riedesel helped convert a private house into a hospital, where she cared for sick and wounded soldiers alongside several other women. When Continental troops directed their cannon fire at the house, she safely moved the women and patients into the cellar. They survived Saratoga but became prisoners of war after British general John Burgoyne surrendered to American general Horatio Gates.
The women and troops marched to Boston and, eventually, to the Albemarle Barracks in Charlottesville. They arrived in January 1779 to unfinished barracks and spoiled provisions. Riedesel asked local Patriot women for food, but they denied it to her, instead proclaiming they would rather see her family perish. Summer brought its own challenges. Historian T. Cole Jones writes that “insects, snakes, rats, and bats descended on the camp, torturing the prisoners.” The commissary, Joshua Mersereau, begged for more food, writing that the ranks were full of “women and children crying … murmuring for bread.” As a general’s wife, Riedesel avoided the worst of these conditions and dined with members of Virginia’s gentry, including Thomas Jefferson. When Jefferson became governor in 1779, he realized Virginia could never feed so many prisoners and successfully asked Congress to relocate the prisoners to Maryland. Shortly afterward, Riedesel’s husband was paroled. Legislators sent the 500 remaining female prisoners to Pennsylvania. There, the women languished in jails and prison camps or looked for work among locals until the war ended.
Mary Willing Byrd and War on the Homefront
Not all women went to military camps. Many faced the war’s social and economic ramifications on the homefront. Mary Willing Byrd of Charles City County suffered losses from both British and American troops. A native Pennsylvanian, Byrd married William Byrd III in 1760 and moved to his Westover plantation. Her husband, who was a veteran of the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), initially volunteered his services to British troops, but after Dunmore issued his famous proclamation, Byrd instead offered his support to the Americans; however, doubtful of his loyalty, they offered him no position, and, mired in debt, he committed suicide in 1777. The widowed Mary Byrd raised eight children while also overseeing multiple estates and the nearly 100 people she enslaved. British soldiers camped at Westover in 1781. They seized crops, slaughtered livestock, and plundered Byrd’s furniture. Moreover, forty-nine of the people she enslaved liberated themselves and disappeared behind British lines.
Byrd complained about her loss of property to Baron von Steuben. But at the same time, she nursed sick and wounded British soldiers to health and even buried one who perished on her property. American officers later discovered evidence that Byrd was illegally trading with British troops, and the Executive Council tried her for treason. She was acquitted but could not recover from her wartime debt, lamenting, “my property is taken from me and I have no redress.” As Ami Pflugrad-Jackisch insightfully notes, Byrd was tried for treason because Revolutionary Virginians saw her as an inherently political creature, one who was capable of providing essential services to enemy troops. Although the Revolutionary War had politicized Byrd’s daily tasks—directing enslaved people to tend crops or produce goods—it nevertheless failed to provide her with the social and political power to claim redress for wartime losses.
Refugee Women and Post-War Migrations
Although the Treaty of Paris (1783) formally ended the Revolutionary War, it did little to stabilize many women’s post-Revolutionary lived experiences. The war in Virginia left Shawnee women with scorched homes and fields. By 1790, approximately 80,000 white settlers and the people they enslaved had moved to Shawnee territory.
The war similarly uprooted self-liberated Black women. In 1783, more than 800 Black Virginians—including hundreds of women and girls—who had seized Dunmore’s Proclamation to declare their freedom lived in refugee camps around New York. But in peace negotiations, the British agreed to return self-liberated people to their former American enslavers. British general Guy Carleton refused to obey those terms and vaguely promised American enslavers monetary compensation. Some self-liberated people nevertheless faced re-enslavement. British troops evacuated 10,000 Black refugees to Savannah and Charleston, South Carolina where many were sold to the Caribbean. In New York, 3,000 refugees received certificates of freedom and boarded ships for Nova Scotia. Although free, Black refugees there did not live on terms equal to white residents. Many Black women could only earn wages as domestic servants for white refugees. Their white neighbors blamed them for driving down average wages and responded violently.
In 1792, 1,000 Black Loyalists moved again, this time to Sierra Leone, where they hoped to evade further discrimination. Single women could apply for ten acres of their own land from the Sierra Leone Company, which sponsored their immigration. Upon arriving in Sierra Leone, many Black women became homeowners, opened stores, and even voted for local representatives. Still, their independence was circumscribed by other forms of discrimination. Sierra Leone Company leaders had a monopoly on stores and dramatically inflated prices, in addition to imposing steep taxes on the freedom-seekers’ land. When several Black migrants protested taxation, company officials murdered two and exiled twenty-five.
Republican Mothers
When Continental Congress members outlined a new government, they and their constituents had to confront a difficult question: to what extent should women engage with politics in the new republic? After all, revolutionary women had boycotted goods, organized strikes, gathered donations for troops, and even worked as military employees. But some Americans worried that if women formally received political rights, they would neglect domestic duties like child-rearing. Historian Linda K. Kerber argues that white women and men in the post-Revolutionary states forged a compromise between politics and domesticity: “republican motherhood.” This ideology held that women’s role as citizens of the republic was not to participate directly in the government but to educate their sons in politics, history, and civics so they would grow into upstanding American citizens.
To fulfill this role, women needed an education. Some southern women went to northern boarding schools, like the Moravian Young Ladies Seminary in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where they studied English, mathematics, German, history, geography, music, sewing, and knitting. Others stayed nearer to home and attended short-term specialized schools for subjects such as chemistry, Latin, English, or needlework. In Alexandria, educators opened free schools for poor women and orphans. Many historians celebrate these schools as a turning point that expanded women’s access to education, although others like Joan Hoff-Wilson assert the schools only “encouraged greater separation between men’s and women’s cultural and economic roles, thus institutionalizing a double standard of sex-stereotyped education.”
To serve as “republican mothers,” women also needed to limit family size so they could give more attention to a small number of children. According to historian Susan E. Klepp, women used the language of the American Revolution to demand the freedom to control their bodies with contraception, including “delayed marriage, sexual restraint, prolonged breast-feeding” and “herbal remedies.” Using the model of Britain and the colonies, women also reimagined how parents should treat their children. Rather than seeing children as workers who should contribute to their parents’ wealth, Americans increasingly believed children should have a distinctive, playful period of childhood, which required that parents invest in their children. Smaller families suddenly seemed more financially feasible. As a result, while delegates to the Second Continental Congress had an average of 7.3 children in their families, just ten years later, delegates to the Constitutional Convention had an average of 4.9 offspring.
Female Petitioners Demand Wages for Work
The “republican motherhood” ideal primarily applied to white, middle- and upper-class women. However, women who worked for wages also perceived themselves as political actors, and some petitioned state and federal governments to pay them for their wartime work. Nonhelema, a Shawnee woman, had driven cattle to American troops who were besieged and starving in Fort Randolph (in present-day Point Pleasant, West Virginia). Her British-allied family and nation disowned her for treason, so Nonhelema asked the federal government for support—specifically for 1,000 acres of land. Instead, Congress gave her food and clothing for life.
Ann McClean similarly signed a petition to Congress alongside seven male veterans who demanded back pay after having “enlisted and entered” Virginia’s navy. An “old woman” who worked for the Virginia State Guard as a nurse—likely Connecticut veteran Anna Maria Lane—refused to continue working until she received wages in addition to the provided housing and rations. She reasoned that guardsmen received pay just as Continental Army soldiers did, so why shouldn’t she receive wages like a Continental Army nurse? Her supervising doctor forwarded her complaint to Virginia Governor James Monroe, who conceded to her demand.
Women’s Freedom Suits
Some women demanded not pay, but freedom. In 1778, Virginia’s General Assembly banned enslavers from participating in the international slave trade. Enslavers could only move from other states to Virginia if, within ten days of relocating, they took an oath to swear that the people they enslaved had not come from abroad. As historian Michael L. Nicholls shows, when James Craik moved to Alexandria from Maryland, he failed to take the oath. Thus, Ann Williams and Betsey Scarlett—women who Craik enslaved—successfully sued him for their freedom. Phene Phillips, too, sued for her freedom. Born free, she had been enslaved in Massachusetts and sold to Virginia, so she filed an unlawful imprisonment suit. Although she won in both Norfolk and the Suffolk County Court, she died before the courts had settled her enslaver’s final appeal. Still, her daughter Maria used the case as a precedent to demand her own freedom.
Successful freedom suits alarmed Virginia legislators, who passed laws to limit women’s avenues to freedom. In 1795, they prohibited women from initiating freedom suits in counties they did not live in, thus limiting women’s access to legal support from abolitionist groups in Richmond and Alexandria. People who helped Black plaintiffs in failed freedom suits had to pay a $100 fine. These laws are a poignant reminder that although some women used revolutionary rhetoric to demand their freedom, they still received a flawed freedom, one limited by Virginia’s persistently discriminatory judicial and social structures. Their activism demonstrates that for many women, the Revolution did not end with the War for Independence; rather, its ideology and rhetoric continued to frame women’s protracted struggles for freedom and equality.
