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During the Revolution, American Women Fought for Freedom, Spied on the British, Cared for the Sick and Fell in Love. A New Exhibition Reveals Their Rich Wartime Stories
Now on view at the New York Historical, “Revolutionary Women” spotlights figures with connections to the state, including a Jewish chocolatier, a Mohawk leader and a woman who disguised herself as a man to enlist in the Continental Army
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At the height of the American Revolution, Jewish merchant Rebecca Gomez stocked her Manhattan shop with chocolate that she proudly advertised as “warranted free from any sediments and pure.”
The only woman in the world known to independently manufacture chocolate in the late 18th century, Gomez counted Robert Townsend, an agent for George Washington’s Culper Spy Ring, among her customers. She also worked closely with the founders of the Tontine Coffee House, the first headquarters of the New York Stock Exchange, selling them some of the land on which the financial hub was built.
Anna K. Danziger Halperin, director of the Center for Women’s History at the New York Historical, first saw Gomez’s name while looking through Townsend’s account book. “It stuck out to me because Gomez is such an unusual surname for the time, and then we figured out that she’s related to the first Sephardi Jewish settlers in New York,” the historian says. When colleague Tessa Bangs spotted Gomez’s name in the Tontine Coffee House ledgers, the pair realized that they’d stumbled onto the story of a woman who’d played “this really powerful role in the founding of our economic institutions,” Danziger Halperin adds.
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Gomez is one of the lesser-known historical figures highlighted in “Revolutionary Women,” a new exhibition at the New York Historical. “She’s one of the stories that we’re so excited to pull out,” says Danziger Halperin, who co-curated the show with Bangs, Isabelle Held, Rachel Pitkin and Lauren Cain. “We were really able to see, going through the records that we have on her, that she played this invisible role in the economy,” much like fellow businesswoman Mary Alexander, who sold dry goods, groceries and fabric from around the world.
“Revolutionary Women,” which opened late last month and runs through October 25, draws on the lives of Gomez, Alexander and their peers to examine the many ways in which women with connections to New York contributed to the Revolution (and later to the formation of a new nation). The exhibition spotlights individuals who fought in the war, some of whom disguised themselves as men to secure a spot in the Continental Army, as well as women who supported soldiers from the sidelines by working in military camps as laundresses and cooks. Also featured are nurses, spies, wealthy women who raised funds for the war effort and an assortment of other colonists whose lives were shaped by the war.
The show draws on the New York Historical’s rich collection of art, artifacts and documents—a trove that traces its roots to the organization’s creation, in 1804. As Danziger Halperin notes, many of these founders were “people who had been involved in the Revolutionary struggle and wanted to make sure that their stories were told.” Unsurprisingly, she adds, these individuals tended to favor men’s accounts, but women’s stories are still present throughout the collections.
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While some narratives of women during the Revolutionary era focus on mythical or symbolic figures, such as Molly Pitcher and the personification of Liberty, “this exhibition moves past symbolism to center the real expertise and labor of women who navigated a world of blurred allegiances to help found the United States,” says Louise Mirrer, president and CEO of the historical society, in a statement. “By unearthing these hidden contributions, we hope to shift how the American Revolution is understood for generations to come.”
Did you know? The myth of Molly Pitcher
- The legend of Molly Pitcher suggests that she took her husband’s place after he was killed at the Battle of Monmouth. But she wasn’t a real person; instead, the story draws on the experiences of multiple women, chief among them Margaret Corbin.
- Corbin stepped in for her husband after he was killed at the Battle of Fort Washington, in 1776. She manned a cannon against Hessian soldiers but was severely injured during the firefight, losing the use of her left arm.
Women’s labor, both paid and unpaid, is a throughline of “Revolutionary Women.” In 18th-century America, the doctrine of coverture “held that no female person had a legal identity,” historian Catherine Allgor wrote in a 2012 essay. “At birth, a female baby was covered by her father’s identity, and then, when she married, by her husband’s.” Under coverture, most women couldn’t legally own property—but a loophole existed for widows, who gained greater control over their affairs.
Both Gomez and Alexander were widows, and thus enabled “to be a force in the economy,” says Danziger Halperin. Alexander, who died in 1760 but served as the matriarch of a powerful Revolutionary-era family, was a “merchant in her own right,” the curator adds. She followed in the footsteps of her mother and grandmother, both of whom took up the family business after the deaths of their husbands.
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Outside of her financial ventures, Alexander came up with the idea for the New York Society Library, which served as a quasi-predecessor of the Library of Congress. Her prominence in pre-Revolutionary New York is evidenced by a death threat sent to her by an anonymous man who tried to extort her fortune.
“The question is whether the writer singled her out from her husband because he thought her particularly powerful or particularly vulnerable,” historian Serena Zabin wrote in a 2006 journal article. “The paradoxical place that elite women held in New Yorkers’ imaginations—physically weak while economically able—led men to use particularly gendered strategies to try to ruin them.”
When selecting the individuals included in the exhibition, Danziger Halperin and her colleagues thought critically about what it meant to be a “revolutionary woman.” As the curator explains, the group landed on Elizabeth Freeman because her story allowed them “to highlight the contradictions of Revolutionary liberty and the continuation of slavery within the new nation and during the war.”
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Born into slavery in the Province of New York around 1744, Freeman sued for her freedom in Massachusetts court in 1781, citing the state constitution, adopted the previous year, which stipulated that “all men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential and unalienable rights.” Freeman’s success paved the way for other freedom suits that culminated in the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts in 1783.
Another lesser-studied aspect of the Revolution covered in the exhibition is the experience of Native women. During the war, some Indigenous nations, including the Mohawk and the Cherokee, sided with the British over the Americans, viewing such alliances as “the best chance they have to protect their homelands from increasing invasion and settler encroachment,” Brandon Dillard, the director of historic interpretation and audience engagement at Monticello and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, told Smithsonian earlier this year.
Molly Brant was one Mohawk leader who favored an alliance with the British. Today, “her memory is subsumed by that of her brother, Joseph Brant,” and her Irish-born husband, William Johnson, a trader who often worked with members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, a coalition of six Native nations in New York’s Mohawk Valley, Danziger Halperin says.
“In Haudenosaunee society,” the curator explains, “lineage and identity follow the mother’s lines of descent, and women are at the center of political structures.” After Brant warned the British that American soldiers and their Oneida allies were on their way to liberate Fort Stanwix in central New York, the Oneida retaliated by attacking her village, forcing her to flee. When the war ended, Brant moved to British-controlled territory in what is now Ontario, Canada, receiving farmland, a house and an annual stipend as thanks for her support during the Revolution.
Danziger Halperin’s favorite object in the exhibition—a love poem written by a patriot to his loyalist lover—speaks to how differing political sympathies placed pressure on families and friends during the war.
Elizabeth Shipton, the niece and sole heir of loyalist merchant William Axtell, met her future husband, the rebel soldier Aquila Giles, while he was detained as a prisoner of war. Against Axtell’s wishes, the pair started courting, exchanging passionate letters and poems expressing their love. The poem on view in the exhibition ends with the plaintive line “Oh, Eliza, I’m undone.”
“It’s really a really beautiful story, and the letters are also very sassy,” Danziger Halperin says. “There are some where she’s saying, ‘Oh, I’m writing to you while my uncle is sitting at the same table, and I better sign off because he’s looking at me funny.’ They’re really cute.”
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After Shipton and Giles eloped in 1780, Axtell “entirely shook her off, and withheld every friendship and attention from her,” Giles wrote in a 1783 letter. He added, “Our differences of political sentiments were without doubt his reason for this kind of conduct, for I flatter myself he could have no other objection to the connection.”
The recipient of Giles’ letter was none other than George Washington. The soldier requested the general’s help in recovering Axtell’s property, which had been confiscated as a result of his loyalist sympathies. Although Axtell had disinherited Shipton after her marriage, she and Giles successfully petitioned the New York State Legislature to allow them to purchase his estate for $4,500.
“It’s a happy ending,” Danziger Halperin says, and it “undermines our ideas that the British and the patriots were so strictly divided. There were people on both sides of the military that were assisting Eliza and Aquila and even congratulating them after they got married. They were star-crossed lovers, but it wasn’t as frowned upon as we might have thought.”
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“Revolutionary Women” closes by posing a question to the public: How would you tell the story of the American Revolution? As Danziger Halperin explains, the show’s curators hope that visitors think about why they haven’t heard most of these women’s stories before.
“We want the exhibit to feel like the tip of an iceberg,” she adds, encouraging people to delve into stories hidden in the margins of historical records and arrive at “a deeper understanding of what it might have been like to live through this period for women from all walks of life.”
“Revolutionary Women” is on view at the New York Historical in Manhattan through October 25./https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/accounts/headshot/meilan_headshot2.png)