It does not tell one woman’s story, but many, and not all of those stories end in triumph or victory. Revolutionary Mothers is neither a romantic tale nor an effort to stand traditional history on its head by making women the central players in the war for independence. In this excerpt, Berkin explains how her work fits into the larger history of the American Revolution. Berkin finds that while women of various races, classes, ages, and backgrounds experienced war differently, they each played a unique and important role in the Revolution. She corrects this “gender amnesia,” as she calls it, in her work, Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America’s Independence, in which she retells the story of the creation of the new nation through the accounts of individual women. In fact, Carol Berkin observes that just three women: Abigail Adams, “Molly Pitcher,” and Betsy Ross, are readily associated with the War. Popular understandings of the American Revolution tend to overlook the contributions of women.
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