[MUSIC] Just about any war, most certainly the Revolutionary War, isn't successful without the help of women.

You needed them to do your laundry, you needed them to cook for you, you needed them to nurse you, to maintain your health and well-being.

Women were actually participating and actively doing things to move the war effort along.

In the war, it wasn't just soldiers, it was these vast mobile communities that comprised of women and children and families, of soldiers and officers alike.

I do think it's important to recognize these women as veterans, even though in this time period they weren't considered part of the Army.

[vocalizing] When history looks back at the women in the Revolutionary War, they are almost always referred to as Molly Pitcher.

And never more famous than at the Battle of Monmouth.

The levels of the story changed over time.

There were women with the American Army.

That goes back to, there was a Plum Martin, a soldier at the battle who saw a woman add a cannon.

She would have been bringing water to the soldiers because in order to fire a cannon, you'd need to cool it down in between rounds.

If you don't cool it between rounds, it's going to blow up in your face.

Mary Hayes was coming in with water, and she noticed that her husband had fallen, and she decided to man that cannon and was even spoken about by Joseph Plum Martin, who recalled seeing her have a cannonball shot through her legs and actually took out a piece of her lower petticoat, but just acted like nothing happened and kept going.

Molly's a nickname for Mary.

And Pitcher because she's bringing water in a household pitcher.

Now, that doesn't make any sense whatsoever.

She would have been using what's called a camp bucket.

So her name should not be Molly Pitcher.

It should be Mary Bucket.

It is loosely based off of two women, and that's Mary Hayes, who is from the Battle of Monmouth, and Margaret Corbin.

Margaret Corbin's husband fell at Fort Washington.

He was an artillery man, and she decided to man the cannon in his place.

The stories and the legends grew through word of mouth, and that's how Molly Pitcher came to be.

In 1822, the government was giving out land grants and pensions to widows of soldiers, and there was a bill going through the Pennsylvania legislature that Mary Hayes McCauley would pick up a pension, and they changed it.

It says, "McCauley, Mary, Revolutionary Heroine."

There are only three women who were awarded pensions for their own services during the Revolutionary War.

Margaret Corbin, who fired a cannon at Fort Washington after her husband fell during the battle.

Deborah Sampson, who disguised herself as a male soldier and joined the 4th Massachusetts Regiment.

And Mary Hayes McCauley, what did she do that was heroic?

I think that there's a lot of unsung women that often become silent sentinels, that fight alongside of, whether it's their husbands, their partners, their fathers, their brothers, that often don't get the credit that they deserve.

You have 74-year-old Elizabeth Covenhoven, who's refusing the British General Clinton quarter in her house to the point where she's hiding all of her personal possessions and sleeping in a milk room to make sure that he doesn't rob her of her cattle, her horses, her family's home.

In May of 1778, the British decided to move one of their encampments in Philadelphia and regroup them up in New York.

The fear was that when the British got onto the Burlington Path, right on through to the coast, that they were going to burn houses of those who were supporting independence.

Leading up to the arrival of the British, Monmouth County was in complete panic, with the majority of residents fleeing to nearby swamps and woodlands for safety.

Elizabeth Covenhoven decided to stay.

She knew that if she left, chances were pretty clear that her house would be destroyed.

And if you focus on what is human, what happens with people, you're going to see the story, not just what's done to people.

When the British arrived, Elizabeth was making plans.

They emptied the entire house, everything was put on wagons.

So when the British walked in, there wasn't anything to sit on.

And so General Clinton himself addresses this elderly little woman.

General Clinton assured Elizabeth Covenhoven that her house would remain safe as long as she told him where there was at least one wagon full of furnishings.

So she took the gamble, and she told Clinton and his men where at least one of the wagon loads of goods were, but she never saw anything off the wagon again.

However, one morning, a guard posted in her home would not grant her access to her belongings.

And so she confronted soldiers and confronted General Clinton.

She was able to express her feelings, and they heard her.

And so he had an officer go with her, and the officer turned to her and said, "There, you old rebel, with one foot in the grave, take it and be damned to you."

And the reason we sit in this house today is because she was brave enough to protect the house.

These women did miraculous things in spite of the trauma and the suffering.

Everybody has a historical hero or heroine, and Elizabeth Covenhoven is one of mine.

She was a little old lady, she was 73 years old.

She couldn't do anything against the British soldiers, but she was able to walk this tightrope and in a way confront General Clinton himself.

Women's history is not just about oppression, not just about abuse.

It's about what those people do with it.

One story was Hannah Dennis, and if you know her story, you understand why Elizabeth's decision to stay in the house was all the braver.

Hannah Dennis lived in Toms River, and her husband, I believe, was captain in the Army, so he was thought to have a lot of cash in the household.

And in May of 1778, less than a month before the Battle of Monmouth, two Hessian soldiers, sort of German mercenaries, showed up at her doorstep.

She saw them coming and told her two young children to run to the woods to hide, and they watched as the two Hessian soldiers beat her so badly that they thought they had killed her.

And in September, pine robbers heard about the likelihood of cash within the Dennis household, and the robbers broke in and they attempted to hang her with a bedrope.

Fortunately, they did such a bad job that she was able to get free, but this was a woman who went through two exceptionally violent incidents.

There isn't a need to focus on the suffering.

We know it's there, and we talk about it because it is a true thing, but it is not their story.

Their story is what we use as a vehicle to learn and move on.

We think of the Civil War as happening during Abraham Lincoln's presidency between the North and the South.

But America's first civil war really was the American Revolution.

It was literally neighbor against neighbor.

So not only do you have the British marching through, but you also have fights between the Loyalists and the Patriots.

There were so many skirmishes and small battles, and to try and keep a household going and raise children.

Women are sometimes caught in the middle, but you can find women who are Quakers who try to be neutral or try to take care of soldiers that are wounded while their son is out fighting with the Patriots.

If you look at how Native culture worked, the elders in the community are the ones with the most power.

The decision makers, the one with the most knowledge, the oral history keepers.

Women that traveled with the Army were expected to earn their keep in a legitimate job and getting involved in surgeries where they usually in a traditional hospital setting might not have been able to do.

In the aftermath of the Battle of Princeton, it was assumed that General Hugh Mercer died on the battlefield.

They realized that he was still alive and that he had been in the care of Sarah Clark, whose family owned a house nearby that had been turned into a field hospital.

Sarah and her enslaved woman Susanna helped with the surgeries that were happening in Sarah's house.

We also know at the battles of Saratoga in New York that the Baroness von Riedesel , who was a camp follower, she was traveling with her husband, who was a German officer.

She was helping to treat wounded hiding in the basement with them while cannons crashed through the house above them.

The Baroness is with Burgoyne's forces as they march from Canada down to New York.

Their aim is to break the colonies apart.

After years of attending to wounded soldiers, the Baroness and her family are eventually exchanged for American prisoners and migrate to Canada.

This is a very diverse place in terms of immigrants and people of different religions.

You have African Americans who are both free and a lot of them who are slaves, but they were fighting on both sides.

Ona Judge has a very different perspective of life with George Washington.

She was born at Mount Vernon and her mother was a seamstress, so it's generational enslavement.

They end up first in New York after the war.

Then they move to Philadelphia.

It is here that Ona Judge first experiences living in a free Black city while being enslaved.

She soon finds out that she is bequeathed to Martha Washington's granddaughter, who will take her out of the free city of Philadelphia, where she will have no hope of freedom.

Using the connections around her in the free Black community, she runs away.

George Washington sends people after her.

But she has friends in high places who continue to warn her and block him from taking her back.

Ona Judge hides on various ships within the port of Philadelphia.

There are lots of Black people who work on those ships and they actually help her.

She hides on a ship and she sails away.

The pursuit of her starts immediately.

George Washington sends messengers and one actually does come to the door to speak to her.

Because she has friends in high places who are watching George Washington pursue this enslaved woman, they can't just snatch her and go back.

This is how she's able to remain free.

These women did miraculous things in spite of the trauma and the suffering.

Washington is known as our do-no-wrong founding forefather, but for many Native nations, he was anything but.

Any Native nation that was siding with the British would have their villages destroyed.

In 1779, John Sullivan had a scorched earth policy known as the Sullivan Campaign.

Its goal was to decimate and destroy Native villages who had sided with the British.

Madam Sacho was a Seneca woman from Catherine's Town, which was one of the areas that John Sullivan had launched his Sullivan Campaign.

Native American tribes were caught in the middle between siding with the Patriots or the Loyalists.

She stayed behind and when she was found by the Patriots, they were so impressed by her resiliency to not only survive, but also stand her ground, they brought her in, gave her food and shelter.

That's why when we look at people like Madam Sacho who decided to stay, she was a symbol of Native American resiliency.

It's a story of rights and it's a story of diversity.

They were fighting on both sides.

Most of the Native Americans in the Revolution sided with the British because they knew the Americans wanted their land.

Some of them sided with the Americans and they're caught in the middle like everybody else.

There was a lot of upheaval going on and they didn't know whether they wanted to stick with the hard they knew or the hard they didn't know.

For many Native American nations, they are matriarchal, which means that the women are in charge of choosing whether the nation stays in peace or goes to war.

One of the most famous American women of the Revolutionary War was Mohawk leader Konwatsi'tsiaienni, known as Molly Brandt.

Molly Brandt was so significant because she was in the room.

She was guiding rooms of men where Natives were not usually present.

She supplied the British with intel and she was able to get this intel because women speak.

They talk to each other and they often fly under the radar.

Women have always had a network of women.

If no one understands women, women do.

They weren't the ones that the British or the colonists were looking for when it came to spies or those collecting intel.

So she was able to get information when others weren't.

This is why she was so heavily rewarded once the war was over because she was literally treated like she was in the Army, like she was a soldier.

This was unheard of at the time and it was revolutionary in its own right.

The American Revolution is still important.

It's a story of bitter divisions and then how people live together after the war is over.

From the 1750s forward to about the 1790s, there's a massive cultural shift.

As a result of the Revolution, you see women having to take up a lot more responsibilities that they normally would not have been in charge of.

Particularly, you see rural women having to take up the responsibility of managing not only the household like they would have before, but also now having to figure out how to manage finances, how do you manage your farm, your homestead, the purchasing of new equipment, things like that that they would not have been in charge of.

And as things progress, you get a lot of these new ideas of what does it mean to be a citizen, what does it mean to gain freedom from the British Empire.

Particularly for women who are raising up this new generation, the daughters post-Revolution really can't grasp what type of world their mothers had experienced growing up.

This is the era that you're getting into with the Statue of Liberty.

That this image of American freedom is a woman.

And there weren't a lot of women that they knew specific stories about other than Betsy Ross and Molly Pitcher.

And it's unfortunate that we don't because again, poor women didn't get the press that they deserved.

And there's some theory, and I think it's valid, that what kept the Army together was the fact that Washington allowed women to be with the Army.

Women served as laundresses, they served as nurses.

So they kept the kitchen, their bedding, their clothes, everything clean.

And in the Army, the nurses oversaw the laundry of the Army because disease carries through the air in the form of bad smells.

So if the laundry still smells after it's been washed, it has to be re-washed.

As far as we know, nurses worked at every medical hospital throughout the Revolution.

Any established hospital, you're going to see nurses.

It was one of the few jobs that women could have in the Army.

It was severely regulated.

Some of the women, especially those that were trained at hospitals like Penn Hospital, had some of the newest and most groundbreaking research that soldiers in the field and surgeons in the field might not have had as much access to.

Women like Margaret Davenport bringing information to surgeons like Dr. Bodo Otto and his sons, who were also surgeons here, could have been a fairly common occurrence in hospitals like these, especially in the Mid-Atlantic, where the Penn Hospital, the Princeton, New Jersey Hospital, and the Trenton Barracks Hospital were all frequently exchanging staff and information and patients.

The smallpox training tool suggests that nurses are the ones best able to select appropriate patients, because they have constant hands-on viewing, and they can pick the right stage of pox and can collect that pox, put it next to their person to keep it warm, and then transfer it to the doctor.

And cause smallpox variolation, when done by anybody, is so dangerous, because they could select a kid that was horribly ill and use way too much.

It was an intensely deadly disease at the time, and it was killing more soldiers than combat wounds were.

For female camp followers, there were often certain implications and stereotypes.

that followed being a camp follower.

Even today, a lot of people hear the term "camp follower" and think that we mean sex workers.

Of course, there were exceptions.

We do hear about women that were doing sex work as they traveled with the Army, but the idea that a majority of women camp followers were prostitutes and sex workers is a false narrative.

Women that traveled with the Army were expected to earn their keep in a legitimate job within the Army.

These women had to follow the rules or they would be removed.

They would lose their source of income.

For many of them, they would lose their source of food.

Women were given rations from the Army.

Hannah Till.

She was personal chef to George Washington during the Revolutionary War.

She was enslaved and sold twice.

Then she meets George Washington because she is leased to the Army in 1776.

What George Washington does is he makes a deal with her enslaver that after a certain amount of time she's worked, that she can be freed and earn wages.

She stays with George Washington the entire war.

She's at all of the encampments.

This is an important thing because she is actually providing the dinners for everyone in his household.

So, Valley Forge, there are 850 women and children at Valley Forge with the Army.

She is one of several women who would have given birth during this time.

It is significant for her because this is her first child born free.

So, she was freed right after that.

She's free.

She's free to go.

She actually stays and she stays throughout the rest of the war cooking for George Washington.

This is really more complicated than we understand.

There were times where these men in power did shift and do things strictly because of their relationship with the person that they were dealing with.

There's truth behind every good man stands an even stronger woman.

I think New Jersey's women during the American Revolution definitely hold up their part.

Growing up in New Jersey, you learn about Molly Pitcher because she's the first real female heroine that sticks out to children as they're learning in school.

It's the first real taste of a woman that was fighting, whether she's legend or not.

It's hard to track her because 18th century working women don't leave much paper trail.

The best evidence you might get is when they get married or their children get baptized.

And this Mary Hayes McCauley, who's the original Molly Pitcher, was poverty stricken.

And when she died, they didn't even afford a tombstone for her.

The gravestone was not put up until 1878 when they're doing the 100th anniversary of the Revolution.

And everybody started wondering, oh, we have a hero here.

You start to learn more about the experiences that women faced during the American Revolution, the struggles that they entailed and the sacrifices that they made for our cause.

Women in those days were tough, not to say they are today, but we don't respect them for being tough then.

Where is the Molly Pitcher story going?

The nature of oral history or folk history is to embellish stories and to try to track those stories back.

It's a neat story.

It's our story.

And it's here in New Jersey.

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