Necessary to Abide

This chapter explores how colonists in seventeenth-century New England used gender ideologies about women’s roles as actors in public spheres to frame their understanding of women who fought in the region’s wars. The chapter explores this idea from three different angles. First, it examines how New England’s colonies incorporated women’s martial activities into their colonization strategy, sometimes even requiring women to remain in remote fortified towns, living in garrison houses that simultaneously served as military and household spaces. Second, it looks at how Native women participated in the region’s wars as leaders (sachems), spies, combatants, and in ritual torture. The chapter investigates how English politicians used their own concepts about women’s public roles to shape their ideas about Native female combatants. This section also features a case study of Weetamoo of the Pocasset, a prominent female sachem who died while leading an anti-colonial coalition in King Philip’s War (1675-76). Third, the chapter explores how English women attempted to shape military and colonial policy through mob violence.

Resolute Motherhood

Chapter 5 explores how local and regional historians in eighteenth and nineteenth-century New England appropriated memories of colonial women’s war making to help shape new gender ideologies, national identities, and westward expansion policies in the first decades of the American republic. As part of a larger trend that saw many Americans embrace ideas of separate, gendered public and private spheres and roles for women as republican mothers, historians writing a new national history for a new nation drew on stories of colonial heroines. To better fit their stories into increasingly popular ideas about women’s place in a private, domestic sphere, these authors reworked accounts of colonial women’s war making, transforming essential martial public actors into resolute mothers who served as the last line of defense of the home in historical memory.

Introduction

The introduction sets out the book’s major topics and arguments and discusses its methodology, sources, and organization. It states that seventeenth and eighteenth-century women living in the borderlands of the northeastern America participated as essential, martial actors in wars fought by New England, New France, and Native polities. English, French, and Native societies’ existing gender ideologies included space for women to act as combatants, spies, and leaders. Women made war with the approval of their societies, and their presence in remote towns, holding the line in fortified communities was essential to polities’ strategies of expansion and colonization. In English and French colonies, European ideas that supported women taking on substantial roles as public actors in the early modern period are significant throughout the book and are introduced here. Although the book argues that these were centuries of almost continuous war, conflicts that receive particular attention include: the Beaver Wars (mid-seventeenth-century), King Philip’s War (1675-1676), King William’s War (1688-1697), Queen Anne’s War (1702-1713), Dummer’s War (1723-1726), King George’s War (1744-1748), and the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763).

Appropriate Combatants

This chapter marks the beginning of the book’s study of the second phase of these conflicts. Beginning around 1700, Britain and France became increasingly involved in their colonies’ affairs. This growing imperial control resulted in the increased militarization of New England and New France, as regular troops joined provincial forces with greater frequency. These imperial military societies also depended more on highly fortified structures to defend their colonial territory. The chapter examines how these changes influenced women’s participation in war and how colonists and imperial officials perceived women’s war making. In New England, women received land grants and compensation as veterans even as changes in ideas about women’s gender roles as private, rather than public, actors in separate spheres resulted in colonists describing women as inhabitants of an emerging homefront. At the same time, officials in New France worried about the potential for treasonous activities between Canadian women and French soldiers involved in sex scandals in the crowded fortified towns along the coast. Despite these fears, Canadian women continued to serve in the colony’s growing military bureaucracy, financing fortifications and supporting the war effort through commerce.

Epilogue

The book’s epilogue considers how and why early American women’s war making has been remembered and forgotten by historians and members of the public in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In particular, the epilogue explores why the few women who are remembered are considered anomalies. It suggests that late-nineteenth-century nationalists encouraged Canada and the United States to “claim” their remembered heroines and commemorate their war making by erecting monuments and reusing their names for natural features. At the same time, creating national heroines and placing them within the borders of nation-states resulted in Canadians and Americans forgetting that those women—and many others—fought in a larger, fluid borderlands context. Finally, the epilogue returns to the central premise of the book: that women were active, invested participants in expansionist and colonialist wars in the northeastern borderlands of North America.

Deploying Amazons

Chapter 3 explores the relationship between women’s war making in the northeastern borderlands and propaganda. It argues that political and religious leaders used accounts of women’s martial activities to improve morale and influence policy at local, colonial, and imperial levels. Images of Amazons and other mythical and historical women warriors often appeared in this propaganda, establishing a precedent for women’s actions in North America and adding excitement and familiar literary figures that resonated with readers. In New France, Jesuit missionaries used the figure of the Amazon to positively portray Native female combatants as well as brave nuns who traveled to Canada. They also used their published reports, the Jesuit Relations, to urge wealthy French women to be brave like Canada’s Amazon-nuns and donate to the mission. In New England, officials held up women who made war (such as Hannah Dustan) as positive, Christian role models when morale was low, and writers such as the Rev. Cotton Mather sent accounts of women’s war making to England in attempts to shape imperial policy.

Everyone Ran to Help

This chapter focuses on women’s military roles in France’s attempts to colonize Canada and Acadia. It argues that political and religious officials in New France were more likely than their counterparts in New England to incorporate women’s social rank into their understanding of those women’s martial activities. Elite French and some Indigenous women were seen as performing roles similar to those of a lady defending a castle or a woman of high rank acting as a diplomat. (Prominent examples include Madeleine de Verchères, Jeanne Mance, and Marie de l’Incarnation.) Jesuit and Ursuline missionaries’ accounts of nonelite French and (allied) Native women more often described those women as informally joining battles with the blessing of their husband or God.