What Role Did Women Play In The American Revolution

The Women of the American Revolution played many roles. I believe women were a vital part in how the war played out. In chapter three the author, Carol Berkin, focuses on how the lives of women change as the war breaks out. Women were left at home to run things such as their businesses, farms, and to protect their children while their husbands went off to war. There were shortages of food and goods which had an effect on everyone. “While men faced the enemy, women faced the challenge of managing on their own” (Berkin, p.31). With all of these horrible things happening around them, and what felt like their world was crumbling down, women were forced to step up and change their roles. Nothing would be normal for them. Berkin goes on to explain the different roles that women were to play during the war. Camp followers were lower-class women who cooked or did the laundry for the soldiers. They followed the soldiers where they went and completed these tasks for them. A lot of these women brought their children along with them because they had no one else to care for them. “Winthrop also saw “great numbers of women, who seemed to be beasts of burthen, having a bushel basket on their back, …show more content…
One part of the book that I read and took a liking to was about a woman named Mammy Kate. She was a slave who traveled 50 miles to rescue her master, a Patriot. Mammy went to the British fort and asked to work as a washerwoman. Using her skills, she smuggled her master out in a laundry basket (that she balanced on her head by the way), saving him from his execution of death. In return for her job, she was given her freedom and then lived near, who was now her former, master and his family for the rest of her days on Earth. It amazes me that these women in this time were thought to be unintelligent as well as unequal to men, yet they were performing acts like this that nobody knew