Over the last two decades, the literature on the American Revolution has made a dramatic shift away from a focus on ideas and ideology to one that puts a primary emphasis on what it was like to live through a long and excruciating war. Historians have pivoted from the political and constitutional questions of the revolution to turn their attention to the social, economic, and cultural consequences of the Revolutionary War. It stands to reason, therefore, that when contemporary scholars engage with what happened with, to, and about women during the revolution, they have also shifted from ideological concepts like “republican motherhood,” to engage with how women experienced the Revolutionary War. Thus, an excellent collection of essays edited by Holly Mayer, entitled Women Waging War in the American Revolution. But this was hardly one collective or monolithic experience. As Mayer points out in her introduction, the “Revolution's war was not a woman's war but comprised many women's wars” (1).
The thirteen short, engaging essays that follow do indeed illustrate the “complex and diverse lived experiences” that challenged North American women throughout the war. The conflict revealed wide “distinctions and intersections of place, rank or class, and ethnicity,” as Mayer writes (1). The volume's themes revolve around “war an (in)dependence, options and choices, challenges and actions, short-term costs and longer-term consequences” (10).
Taken as a whole, the essays are further reminders of how all-encompassing the eight-year war was for so many people living in North America. The essays stress that there were no distinctions between the homefront and the battlefield. Women of all sorts were drawn into, affected by, and shaped the Revolutionary War. They offer greater evidence of what may be termed the “new” “new military history,” whereby we are increasingly able to convey wide swaths about the experience of fighting and surviving the Revolutionary War—without having to mention George Washington or Valley Forge or Bunker Hill.
At around fifteen pages each, the essays are perfectly suited for the undergraduate classroom, especially for survey or upper-level courses on the revolution or women's history. In particular, Lauren Duval's contribution on sexual assault and military policy; Barbara Mann's essay on “war women of the eastern woodlands;” Martha King's exploration of the wartime experiences of Catharine Greene (wife of General Nathanael Greene); Carin Bloom's analysis of Lucy Banbury, an African American loyalist woman; and Lorri Glover's gloss on her larger work on Eliza Lucas Pinckney are deserving of special attention.
As we move into the 250th anniversaries of the start of the Revolutionary War beginning in 2025, the essays in Women Waging War should be required reading for both scholars and students to understand better the textures and complexities that the revolution's long, exhausting war put millions of North American men and women through.