Was Feminism Born During The American Revolution?

Is it possible that American feminism was born out of the same battle-scarred breath that gave birth to the country? The courage and valor, the feistiness and thrust for freedom that we see across the nation today is the same story that unfolded in the life of one amazing Revolutionary War soldier named Deborah Sampson.

Did that create a little cognitive dissonance? Did it scramble your brain? After all, everyone knows the struggle for women to have a role in combat is just now bearing fruit. A soldier during WHAT war? That’s right, the Revolution.

This is a tale worthy of Shakespeare. It involves one of his favorite themes, but I rather imagine Deborah Sampson never read Shakespeare. She was lucky to have gotten any education at all.

Born in Massachusetts to two descendants of the Mayflower, John and Deborah Bradford Sampson, she was the fifth child of seven. Before anyone puffs their chests up over ‘descendants of the Mayflower’, the reader should know that John Sampson abandoned his wife and seven children after telling them the lie that he was going to England. Instead, he set up housekeeping with another woman in Maine and fathered three more children. So much for John Sampson–but he’s hardly the hero of this story.

Deborah Bradford Sampson couldn’t afford to support her seven children by herself, so some of them were signed into indentured servitude, including fifth child Deborah, at the age of 10. From age 10 to 17 (the years 1770 to 1777) she lived in the household of Deacon Jeremiah Thomas, doing hard physical labor in the summers, but able to attend school in the winters. One could look at this as the perfect training for her future–working out both the body and the mind.

When her servitude ended, Deborah became a teacher, though her real desire was to enlist in the Army and fight the British.? It wasn’t until near the end of the war that she got her wish. Utilizing Shakespeare’s favorite ploy–cross-dressing–Deborah bound her breasts to disguise the fact that she was a woman and enlisted, helped by her unusual height of 5 foot seven. On May 20, 1782, ‘Robert Shurtliff’–a smooth-faced boy who was teased for his lack of a beard–signed up for duty. His signature is still on record in Massachusetts.

Seven months earlier, the British had surrendered in Yorktown, VA after the war’s last great battle, but guerrilla war continued to be fought. Deborah was a skilled soldier who was twice wounded, but tended her own wounds–once digging a musketball out of her leg–in order to prevent discovery of her sex.

Due to her skill, Deborah was one of the soldiers selected to protect Congress from protesting veterans who were upset over not being paid. And so, we see that some things never change! She was honorably discharged as? ‘Robert Shurtliff’ on October 25, 1983. Her hometown of Middleborough, Massachusetts had heard rumors of her ruse, but were prevented from proving it due to her absence.? Nevertheless, the Baptist Church of Middleborough excommunicated her on the basis of the rumors. The Baptist Church certainly showed ITS true colors early on.

Deborah maintained her disguise as a man after the war, living at her aunt’s home in another town. Once she met Benjamin Gannet, a local farmer, she resumed her feminine identity, married him and had three children. The years after the war were difficult financially, so to help out, Deborah went on the lecture circuit, speaking of her time as a soldier, sometimes in a dress and sometimes in her uniform. During a lecture in 1802, she said:

I am indeed willing to acknowledge what I have done, an error and presumption. I will call it an error and presumption because I swerved from the accustomed flowery path of female delicacy, to walk upon the heroic precipice of feminine perdition!

And:

I burst the tyrant bands, which held my sex in awe.

How many women are currently having to walk the ‘heroic precipice of feminine perdition’, due to ‘the tyrant bands’ with which conservatives attempt to control them while proclaiming their intention is to ‘protect’? Let us all turn our eyes gratefully to the women of Texas and North Carolina.

In spite her efforts as a lecturer, Deborah and her family continued to struggle with poverty, often having to obtain loans from family and friends, but it’s at this point that Deborah’s true victories come. They involve Paul Revere, Congress, and the Massachusetts state legislature.

Soldiers were entitled to both pay and pensions, but the state of Massachusetts withheld Deborah’s pay when they discovered she was a woman. In 1792, she petitioned the legislature for the back pay that was owed her. In an early sign of the state’s enlightenment, her petition was approved and payment made. The General Court of Massachusetts, which verified her service, wrote:

[She] exhibited an extraordinary instance of female heroism by discharging the duties of a faithful gallant soldier, and at the same time preserving the virtue and chastity of her gender, unsuspected and unblemished.

In 1804, her friend Paul Revere went to bat for her with Congress, asking that the body do something that was unthinkable at the time: grant a military pension to a woman. In her defense, he wrote:

I have been induced to enquire her situation, and character, since she quit the male habit, and soldiers uniform; for the more decent apparel of her own gender…humanity and justice obliges me to say, that every person with whom I have conversed about her, and it is not a few, speak of her as a woman with handsome talents, good morals, a dutiful wife, and an affectionate parent.

And Congress–yes, our own U.S. Congress, or at least an early facsimile–did so, putting her on the Massachusetts Invalid Roll in 1805.

Finally, in one last act of courage, Deborah petitioned Congress herself, in 1809, asking that her pension be approved retroactively to the time of her discharge in 1783, as was the case for other veterans. The effort required two attempts, but finally, in 1816, Congress compensated her with a substantial yearly award that resolved her financial problems until her death in 1827.

Perhaps more astonishing, Deborah’s husband, Benjamin, sought U.S. pension rights as her widower. He died before succeeding, but a Congressional Act in 1838 awarded retroactive payment to their children based, for the first time in the country’s history, on a woman’s military service.

Why haven’t we heard about this amazing woman? Why isn’t her story told in history classes around the nation so as to empower our young girls? The answer, of course, has to do with ‘the tyrant bands’ that imprison the ‘flowery’ sex–and have to be broken again and again, even after 240 years.

 

edited: TW

 

 

 

I'm a lifelong liberal, a social/political activist, a writer and blogger. I've been through many incarnations, including 20 years as a psychotherapist and 10 years as an astrologer. However, writing and social justice have always been my passions. That's the way I was raised: much thanks, Dad! I look forward to many more transformations as life goes on. For more, please join me on Facebook. or Twitter @thepolitcali_1