A REVOLUTION IN WOMEN'S LIVES

In the struggle for independence, America's “ladies” served as medics, cooks, campaigners and even as fighters

- ELINOR EVANS

"Remember the ladies," Abigail Adams urged her husband John, 1776 letter. "Be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors." Otherwise, she warned the future president, the patriots resisting British rule would soon face a revolution of their own, as women would not "hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation".

In their famed exchange letters - of which more than 1,000 examples have survived - Abigail often advised her husband on political matters. She was a champion of education for women, writing to John in 1778 that, "You need not be told how much female education is neglected, nor how fashionable it has been to ridicule female learning."

Abigail was just one of many women - respected wives, relatives and friends - who had the ear of leading patriots. Mercy Otis Warren was an avid writer for the cause who, like Abigail, corresponded with notable revolutionaries, drawing on her extensive knowledge of classical history and displaying a flair for a rhetorical flourish. In one 1775 letter between Warren's husband, James, and John Adams, the former inserts a paragraph from his wife, urging that Congress should no longer piddle at the threshold. It is time to leap into the theatre, to unlock the bars, and open every gate that impedes the rise and growth of the American republic."

Warren also wrote publicly, with satire and commentary published under her name in Massachusetts newspapers such as the Boston Gazette. As a respected voice of the revolution, Warren's history book, a three-volume tome that tracked from the stamp acts into the years forging a new nation, was published in 1805 and was among the first nonfiction books published by a woman in America.

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