Women Waging War in the American Revolution ed. by Holly A. Mayer (review)

Reviewed by: Women Waging War in the American Revolution ed. by Holly A. Mayer Gina M. Martino (bio) Keywords American Revolution, Revolutionary War, Women's history, British army, Continental army Women Waging War in the American Revolution. Edited by Holly A. Mayer. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2022. Pp. 296. Cloth, 42. 50; e-book, 42. 50. ) Would women have a more significant presence in the American Revolution's broader narratives if historians studied them as martial actors, "essential agents, willing and unwilling, in the dynamic theaters" of the War for Independence (16)? This is the central question that editor Holly Mayer's invaluable introduction asks and that this new anthology's thirteen essays begin to answer. The contributors, who initially presented the essays at a 2019 conference in Philadelphia, represent a refreshing mix of professional backgrounds, from early-career to established academics, independent scholars, and public historians. Scholars have made great strides toward understanding women's participation in political, social, and cultural aspects of the American Revolution. For example, we now know that despite their disenfranchisement, revolutionary- era women participated in politics in a variety of ways. And yet, due to overly narrow definitions of what constitutes martial activity, women who participated in the War for Independence remain under-studied. Perhaps the volume's most promising intervention is its invitation to historians to reconsider where martial activities occurred. In this light, farmhouses, boudoirs, and city streets all appear as significant sites of wartime contestation. In one of the book's strongest chapters, Lauren Duval explores how women who remained in British-occupied End Page 115 cities faced the threat of sexual violence and coercion. Relying on vivid testimony from sexual assault cases, Duval presents a compelling analysis of how women experienced and, when possible, resisted occupations during which no urban space remained safe. Benjamin Carp pieces together fragments from the historical record hinting that a woman, dubbed the "first Incendiary" in one account, was among the combatants who set New York City on fire as patriots ceded control of the city to the British in September 1776. In another essay, Steven Elliott examines how women in New Jersey hosted billeted soldiers, dealt with romantic advances, and labored to support the army, negotiating a martial "gray area, " neither front nor home front, that resulted from the Continental Army's extended presence in the state. For all its current popularity in the fields of Revolutionary and American women's history, biography can be a deceptively tricky genre. Scholars must go beyond simply telling a woman's story, and some of the biographical essays in this collection are more successful than others in using women's experiences to reframe the war and women's war-making. Revolutionary women's biography at its best, in the words of contributor Lorri Glover, "highlights the centrality of women and families to the War for Independence" and prods historians to rethink "longstanding assumptions about gender in the eighteenth century and the nobility of the patriot cause" (173). In the standout of the volume's biographical essays, Glover casts South Carolina's Eliza Lucas Pinckney as a "planter-patriarch, " offering a nuanced account of Lucas Pinkney as both the determined leader of a prominent southern patriot family at war and a shrewd, equally committed member of the slave-holding elite. Carin Bloom reconstructs loyalist Lucy Banbury's experience during the war, beginning with her life as an enslaved woman in Virginia through her flight to freedom behind British lines in New York and her eventual settlement in Nova Scotia and, later, Sierra Leone. J. Patrick Mullins argues that the Whig writer Mercy Otis Warren's anonymously published 1772 play, The Adulateur, represents her efforts to continue ailing brother James Otis, Jr. 's fight and rally patriots through a radical "call to arms. " Sean M. Heuvel separates fact from gendered propaganda in the case of loyalist Betsy Loring, the reputed mistress of the British general Sir William Howe, who became the subject of sensationalist representations on both sides. Finally, Martha J. King's engaging study of the American general Nathanael Green's vivacious wife, End Page 116 Catharine, reveals how one woman's "war for independence" was. . .