America's Brave Founding WOMEN Who Helped Create Our Country

In a bizarre era where men are called "brave" for putting on a dress, heels, wig and makeup!

Mar 29, 2024

I wrote this last year in honor of “Women's History Month”, with all the nonsense of XY chromosome men somehow insanely being recognized as XX chromosome women. Sadly, it is still with us. Since I have talked quite a bit about the Founding Fathers, I felt it appropriate to mention the Founding Mothers who were, of course, XX chromosome women and their contributions to founding America.

Hopefully, because of their mention in regard to the prominent Founding Fathers, you know of Martha Washington, wife of George, who ran the plantation while he was away for years, in addition to joining her husband for part of each winter encampment he attended, including the 1777-1778 encampment at Valley Forge. Or Abigail Adams, wife of John Adams, most trusted advisor and friend to John and Thomas Jefferson, even after the great rift between Adams and Jefferson. There are of course thousands more whose stories and exploits are not widely known. Here are a few.

This is a depiction of Nancy Hart “entertaining” her Redcoat “guests”.

Nancy Hart was a woman known to have a hot temper, fearless spirit and no hesitation to deliver revenge if she felt herself or any member of her family had been harmed.
The most well-known account of Nancy’s life begins when six British soldiers stopped at her cabin in search of a Whig leader, demanding information if he had stopped at her farm. Although the man they were tracking had been there, she denied seeing anyone.
Convinced that she was lying, one of the Tories shot and killed Hart’s prized gobbler, ordering her to cook the bird. Entering the cabin, they stacked their weapons in a corner and demanded something to drink. Hart obliged them by serving up wine. As the soldiers drank the wine, Hart sent her daughter to the spring for a bucket of water. She secretly instructed her daughter to blow a conch shell, kept in a nearby stump, to alert the neighbors that Tories were in the cabin.
As Hart served her unwelcome visitors and passed between them and their weapons, she began to pass the muskets through an opening in the cabin wall to her daughter, who had slipped outside to the rear of the house. When the soldiers noticed what was going on, they rushed to try and retrieve what weapons were left. She gave them one warning that she would shoot the next man that moved. Ignoring her warning, one man made the deadly mistake of approaching her. She held the rest off until her husband, Benjamin, and others arrived.
Benjamin Hart wanted to shoot the remaining hostages, but she insisted on hanging them.
In 1912 workmen grading a railroad near the site of the old Hart cabin unearthed a neat row of six skeletons that lay under nearly three feet of earth and were estimated to have been buried for at least a century.

The first and definitive history of women of the American Revolution:

Elizabeth Fries Ellet was not the first woman historian in America. She was the first women’s historian. She authored The Women of the American Revolution (1848-1850).

There are three volumes containing the life stories of 160 women documenting their contributions to the Revolutionary War and the creation of America.

Her primary source materials included sifting through many unpublished letters and diaries and interviews with descendants of women of the American Revolution; she was the first historian to undertake this monumental task. Ellet noted the “abundance of materials for the [masculine] history of action” and attempted to add balance by telling the feminine side, referring to the founding mothers as giving “nurture in the domestic sanctuary of that love of civil liberty which afterwards kindled into a flame and shed light on the world.”

From The Women of the American Revolution, Elizabeth Fries Ellet, (1818-1877):

Patriotic mothers nursed the infancy of freedom. Their counsels and their prayers mingled with the deliberations that resulted in a nation's assertion of its independence. They animated the courage, and confirmed the self-devotion of those who ventured all in the common cause. They frowned upon instances of coldness or backwardness; and in the period of deepest gloom, cheered and urged onward the desponding. They willingly shared inevitable dangers and privations, relinquished without regret prospects of advantage to themselves, and parted with those they loved better than life, not knowing wThen they were to meet again. It is almost impossible now to appreciate the vast influence of woman's patriotism upon the destinies of the infant republic.

Myths about the Founding Mothers:

Women did not own businesses or work outside of the home:

Thousands of women in colonial America had paying jobs outside of the home.
Several had and ran their own businesses:
Mary Katherine Goddard, the woman who signed the Declaration of Independence:

Owned a publishing house in Baltimore, Maryland. In addition to her printing business, she ran the Baltimore post office, a bookstore, and published a newspaper, the Maryland Journal.
For three years after taking over Baltimore’s six-month-old Maryland Journal from her vagabond, indebted brother, Goddard had advocated for the patriot cause. She’d editorialized against British brutality, reprinted Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, and published extra editions about Congress’ call to arms and the Battle of Bunker Hill. In her 23-year publishing career, Goddard earned a place in history as one of the most prominent publishers during the nation’s revolutionary era.

Goddard was the first printer to publish the Declaration of Independence in its entirety. It had previously been printed with only John Hancock's signature.

By including her name, she was committing treason like the rest of the signers. Goddard bravely used her name and company to aid the Revolution.

Courtesy Library of Congress

Women were not involved in the war efforts and did not participate in the Revolutionary War.

Deborah Sampson was a teacher and a weaver, but in 1782, after years of war, she decided to join the fight. She dressed as a man and joined the Fourth Massachusetts Regiment as Robert Shurtleff. She was an adept soldier, participating in hand-to-hand combat and even leading a group to capture 15 men holed up in a Tory home. At one point, Sampson was shot in the left thigh and to escape detection she dug the bullet out herself. She was finally discovered about a year and half into her service when she became ill and lost consciousness. Sampson was honorably discharged on October 23, 1783 and received a pension from the Massachusetts government for her military service.

Today armies have hundreds or thousands of support personnel following them to feed them, maintain their uniforms and equipment and keep the soldiers able to concentrate just on fighting. The Patriots only had their wives and the women hired to keep the battle going in the same way. Martha Washington during her stays organized the women to mend and make clothing for the troops. Sometimes the women joined in the fighting.

Mary Ludwig Hays McCauley and Margaret Cochran Corbin have very similar stories: both women were camp followers; both women were tasked with bringing water to the front lines during battle; and when their husbands collapsed, both women stepped up to man the cannons and continued fighting until the battle concluded. McCauley (Hays at the time) was at the Battle of Monmouth on June 28, 1778. Her husband collapsed from supposed heat exhaustion while manning his cannon, she stepped up, and took her husband’s place. Multiple soldiers at that battle corroborate McCauley’s story.
Corbin was at the Battle of Fort Washington on November 16, 1776 when her husband was killed. Her story is a bit different because she was wounded in the process, sustaining three gunshot wounds. Corbin survived the battle and successfully gained a pension along with a clothing allowance. After her death in 1800, she was buried along the shore of the Hudson River but was later reinterred at the United States Military Academy at West Point, the only female Revolutionary War veteran buried there. Both McCauley and Corbin are believed to be the inspiration for the legend of Molly Pitcher.

Women were demure, stayed at home, and did not get involved in politics or political activities.

We all know of the December 16, 1773 Boston Tea Party that was accomplished by an all-male band of Massachusetts colonists. The Edenton Tea Party occurred about a year later in Edenton, North Carolina. A group of 51 women, led by Penelope Barker, gathered for a meeting of the Edenton Ladies Patriotic Guild on October 25, 1774. They drank a concoction of local tea referred, to as “balsamic Hyperion,” and drafted a notice of protest against the British Tea Act of 1773. They wrote up a resolution stating their displeasure with the taxes and vowed to not buy British tea or cloth. News of the resolution made its way throughout the colonies and over to England where political cartoons satirizing the women were published. There is even some evidence that women took this a step further and burned their tea in Wilmington, North Carolina sometime in 1775.

Women made up a majority of George Washington's spy corps:

This is an image of agent 355. She was so important, whoever she was had her own number in the Culper code. Her identity remains unknown even today.

Culper Spy Ring, also called Culper Ring, American intelligence organization that was put together and managed by Maj. Benjamin Tallmadge for the Continental Army during the American Revolution. It operated in British-controlled New York City from 1778 to 1783. The ring was named for the operational names of two of its members: Abraham Woodhull (code-named Samuel Culper) and Robert Townsend (code-named Culper, Jr.). It comprised several other agents, including Caleb Brewster, Austin Roe, Anna Strong, Hercules Mulligan, and Townsend’s paramour, possibly known today only by her code name “355.”

There were many women spies, on both sides of the war. Women would get a job in the enemy camp, and listen to important battle plans. Men were suspected of being spies much more then women.
Women actually made better spies then men, as they were viewed as very simple. This meant men thought they could not understand plans, and often discussed in front of them. Sneaking supplies would have been easier for a women as well. They said they were visiting family of going to market.
Anna Strong, another spy possibly believed to have gone by codename 355. Strong lived in Setauket on the Long Island coast. Her job was reportedly to relay signals to couriers smuggling intelligence through Long Island Sound to Tallmadge, stationed in Connecticut. Her manner of communication was ingenious: She hung out her laundry on a clothesline—in full view of British soldiers and also of boats moving through the Sound.
If Strong hung a black petticoat, that signaled that a message was ready to be picked up by a courier. She would then hang handkerchiefs—the number of which would correspond to a secret pickup spot. Another Culper Ring spy, Caleb Brewster, who commanded whale boats in Long Island Sound, watched for her signals so that he would know, literally, when the coast was clear—and where the message was to be found.

Female militia units:

Some women even went as far as to form their own militia units. When the women of Pepperell, MA heard about the Boston Tea Party, they burned their own tea leaves in the middle of the town common. After the men left to fight in the American Revolution, the women of Pepperell formed their own militia to protect their town. According to Battlefields.org, the leader of the militia was Prudence Cummings Wright, mother to eleven children and a fierce patriot. Calling themselves “The Minutewomen,” Prudence and 30 to 40 other women dressed in men’s clothing and armed themselves with muskets or whatever farm implements they could find. When the British were marching toward their town, the Minutewomen met them at Jewett’s Bridge on the Nashua River. Not only did they intimidate and stop the advancing British, but the women also took several British prisoners, including a Tory spy named Leonard Whiting, and intercepted messages regarding troop movements. A marker that remains to this day on Jewett’s Bridge reads: “Near this spot, a party of patriotic women, under the leadership of Mrs. David Wright, of Pepperell, in April 1775, captured Leonard Whiting, a Tory who was carrying treasonable dispatches to the enemy at Boston.”

Mother of the Tea Party:

Sarah Bradlee Fulton is most known for her role in the 1773 Boston Tea Party. She is credited with coming up with the idea that Tea Party participants should wear Mohawk disguises to avoid detection from British officials. This suggestion earned her the nickname, "Mother of the Tea Party." She was an active member of the Daughters of Liberty throughout the Revolution, and in later years, she helped to coordinate volunteer nurses to assist with the Battle of Bunker Hill.
Sarah Fulton and her sister-in-law, Mrs. Bradlee, are credited with disguising Nathanial Bradlee and his compatriots as Mohawks and, later, as transforming them back into "respectable Bostonians.
A year later she traveled alone across enemy lines to deliver an urgent message to General George Washington. When a shipment of wood was confiscated, she went in pursuit, reportedly grabbing a pair of oxen by the horns and leading them away, even as the British prepared to shoot her. Defiant, Fulton told them to “shootaway” and astonished, they surrendered without resistance.

Sybil Ludington:

From Veteran Life:

Bravery comes in many different shapes and forms, and in the events that would spark the Revolutionary War, this could not be more apparent. You’ve likely heard the story of Paul Revere and his famous cry, “The British are coming!” His place in history is rightfully preserved. However, forgotten in the pages of history is the story of a teenage girl who helped spread the news of the British invasion throughout what would develop into Putnam County, New York. Her name is Sybil Ludington. And if you think that she was simply the female Paul Revere or just another one of the Midnight Riders, you are sadly mistaken.

Sybil Ludington facts:

Although Sybil Ludington was only sixteen years old when news of British forces burning Danbury, Connecticut, reached her home, she knew she had to serve what would become her country. Henry Ludington, her father, was a Colonel in a Colonial militia group and received word of the British forces heading their way. Sybil Ludington would volunteer her services to ride and warn hundreds of militiamen to prepare for the attack. Here are some interesting facts that help distinguish her from Paul Revere, or any other Midnight Rider for that matter:
Let’s get the obvious out of the way. She was the only female rider, and she was also only a teenager participating in a dangerous strategy that would help begin the Revolutionary War.
Her ride was well over double the length Revere’s, with Ludington covering over 40 miles and warning around 400 militiamen throughout New York.
Revere was joined by others in his ride, whereas Sybil Ludington faced her trek all alone.
Sybil Ludington’s Midnight Ride was also filled with far worse weather conditions, forcing her to ride through heavy rain and unfavorable conditions.
Paul Revere’s Midnight Ride was a success in the fact that he was able to warn the Minutemen successfully; however, he was also caught. Sybil Ludington completed her ride and was home by dawn, never being caught by British forces.

All of the Midnight Riders helped warn Colonists with vital information that enabled them to defend against the British and spark a revolution that would be felt around the world. It’s a shame that lost in the mix is the heroic story of Sybil Ludington, a teenage farm girl who was able to help mobilize and prepare hundreds of troops to save the Colonies and begin the process of becoming the United States of America.

This is only a sampling of the women who helped co-found your country! Without their efforts we would not be here. Do some reading and research on your own. Type into your browser the names of these women and see how much more you can learn about them than I was able to place here. Better yet, make a project of delving into Elizabeth Fries Ellet’s three volume work telling the stories of 160 of the mothers of your country. You can get them at a library, online at the internet library, or buy them. Teach your children about their country's Founding Mothers. Share it with everyone you know.

Our Founding Mothers were consummate bad asses who did what needed done regardless of personal cost. I guarantee they would have no time for our current nonsense of not even being able to define what a woman is and pretending men can somehow become women. They would definitely think we have lost our minds and would definitely end this nonsense immediately!