Review: The Women Behind the American Revolution

“In a canon rife with the contributions of white males to the creation of our nation, most of us know there is more left unsaid and unwritten,” writes Denise Kiernan about midway through Obstinate Daughters: The Rebels, Writers, and Renegade Women Who Ignited the American Revolution.

An attempt to leave a little less of this unwritten, the book includes women of various stations, statuses, and sympathies navigating the drama—military, political, and domestic—of the Revolutionary War.

There is Mary Katharine Goddard, the newspaper publisher whose name is the only woman’s to grace the Declaration of Independence, since she printed it. There is Phillis Wheatley, an enslaved poet who won the admiration of George Washington and many others. There is Prudence Wright, who led a women’s militia in Pepperell, Massachusetts, while the town’s men were off fighting elsewhere. Wives, writers, fighters, spies, sex workers, tavern owners, instigators of British tea and fashion boycotts all make an appearance.

So too do a lot of men, and not just the famous ones or those integral to the lives of the women mentioned. There’s a lot of material on enslaved or indigenous men as well. It feels like the author wanted to write a broader history of people who were not white or male during this era. It’s a fine concept, but it sometimes feels a bit jarring given that the book positions itself as a women’s history.

Obstinate Daughters left me wanting more about the women it chronicles. Instead, it reads more like a general and chronological war history with women and nonwhite men peppered in. That’s understandable, since source material about women’s lives during this period is scarce. But it makes this more a “record of the female experience during this era” than a compendium of dramatic tales or detailed explorations of any particular women.