To commemorate Women's History Month, we're featuring Virginian women who played roles large and small in the American Revolution, from raising money for the war effort to literally wearing their political allegiance on their chest, as in the portrait above. The political and social upheaval of the war provided new opportunities for many women: the possibilities of land ownership, political influence, paid work, or, for enslaved women, freedom from slavery. The experiences of Virginia women during the Revolution were as diverse as their backgrounds, but they created a language of liberty that all women could eventually use to demand full citizenship.
Women were key players in the boycotts, protests, and political ferment before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. During the war itself, women could not avoid politics. They were forced to choose a side—Patriot or Loyalist? The ideals of liberty and the experience of war led women in Virginia to see new possibilities for their rights and roles. Both necessity and ideology drove women to engage more directly with the government than they ever had before.
Virginia women, including Martha Washington, joined the ranks of the Continental Army’s female camp followers during the American Revolution. The women that George Washington called "Women of the Army" played a crucial role in supporting the army during the American Revolution.
Hannah Lee Corbin was a member of the Virginia gentry and an early advocate of women’s rights. Corbin supported the American Revolution, and in 1778 wrote to her brother Richard Henry Lee questioning why propertied widowed women such as herself should be taxed without representation since they did not have the right to vote. In 1892, women’s suffrage activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton named Hannah Lee Corbin as a pioneer of women's rights advocacy.
Join Encyclopedia Virginia Managing Editor Patti Miller and Ami Pflugrad-Jackisch of the University of Toledo to hear about one of the most shocking events of the American Revolution: Turncoat General Benedict Arnold’s audacious raid on Richmond and the Tidewater area in January 1781 and the trail of destruction it left at a critical moment in the war.
