250 and Counting

Category: Women in the Revolution

  • Martha Comes to Cambridge–December 11, 1775

    Cover art for December 11, 1775: Portrait of Martha Dandridge Custis, 1757 by John Wollaston. This was the year her first husband died.

    Most of the portraits we see of Martha Washington were made when she was older, so we have (I think) this image of her as a bit of a crabby old frump.

    And maybe she was, by the time her husband got to be President. She didn’t really love the life of the public spouse and charming party hostess. But it turned out she was good at it, and if it made her crabby, nobody who mattered knew about it on a firsthand basis.

    In fact, Martha Washington was known to be fashionable, calm, outgoing and easy to get along with. And because Boston was rather straitlaced compared to Virginia, she gave off a bit of an exotic air during her time in Cambridge.

    Frump, indeed.

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  • May 2, 1775: Meet Rachel Revere

    Cover art for May 2, 1775: portrait of Rachel Walker Revere by Gilbert Stuart, 1812.

    Rachel Walker Revere was Paul Revere’s second wife. When he married her, he’d only been a widower for a few months, so clearly she made a big impression on him, especially since they remained together until her death in 1813 (one year after the portrait in today’s artwork was painted), and he didn’t remarry after that.

    Rachel was a very supportive wife to Paul, by most accounts, but she was also willing to give him grief when he deserved it, as you’ll learn in today’s episode.

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  • March 31, 1775: Mercy Otis Warren, Ignoring the Rules

    Cover art for March 31, 1775: photo of the statue of Mercy Otis Warren that stands outside the County Courthouse in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Photo by Kenneth C. Zirkel,. Other than cropping to fit, used without changes under the Creative Commons License.

    Today’s episode marks the end of Women’s History Month. We’ve noted a few episodes since this adventure first started that involved women taking political action as groups, but Mercy Otis Warren was one of the most influential individual women to take a political stand in the Revolution era.

    She was self-educated, and married a man who was both enlightened and politically active himself, and she used her position as her husband’s hostess to develop and maintain connections of her own. She was also able to use what she learned to develop some of the pieces she wrote, whether they were factual or thinly-disguised fiction pieces.

    Claude and his wife Shannon did the extra-touristy thing of visiting Plymouth, Massachusetts during Thanksgiving weekend several years ago, and we did see the Mercy Otis Warren statue, but frankly at that time we still had a lot to learn about her. (If you go, be warned that Plymouth Rock is even more disappointing than everyone tells you it is.)

    And because it’s an episode celebrating Mercy Warren, we talked Shannon into recording the episode. Enjoy.

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