Part I: Revolution at Home — How Enlightenment Ideals Empowered Women
- Melissa
- Oct 24
- 5 min read
Updated: Nov 25
Series: Emergence of the Military Wife: How Women on the Homefront and the Battlefront Shaped the American Revolution
Author’s Note: adapted from my academic paper, “From Footnotes to the Spotlight: The Agency and Influence of Revolutionary War Military Wives.” I argue that military wives’ labor, leadership, and resilience did not merely support military efforts—they fundamentally transformed the early American military foundation and redefined the very meaning of service on the home front.
Revolution at Home:
How Enlightenment Ideals Empowered Women
When Thomas Paine declared,
“We have it in our power to begin the world over again,”
He wasn’t just being poetic — he was daring society to start over. His words rang through the American Revolutionary Era, a time when Enlightenment ideals collided with fear, hope, and chaos. Amid that upheaval, one overlooked group quietly held the Revolution together: women and the military wives.
These “unsung women” juggled households, farms, and finances while their husbands fought for independence. They kept the home front alive, fought and the Patriot cause afloat.
Take Martha Bratton, for example. While her husband fought under General Sumter, she guarded a secret cache of gunpowder in South Carolina. When Loyalists came to seize it, she didn’t flinch — she blew up the gunpowder herself! ( I will write more about her story later)
“It was I who did it,” Martha replied. “Let the consequence be what it will; I glory in having prevented the mischief contemplated by the cruel enemies of my country…”
Her defiance protected her community but nearly cost her life.
Stories like Bratton’s and so many more remind us that the Revolution wasn’t just fought with muskets on the battlefield. It was also fought with quick thinking, intellect, endurance, and the quiet courage of women who refused to remain on the margins of history.
Seeds of Change:
The Enlightenment’s Quiet Revolution
The Age of Enlightenment didn’t just rewrite philosophy — it reimagined human worth. Its ideals of reason, liberty, and equality cracked open old hierarchies, prompting women to question whether obedience was a virtue or a cage.
Enter Rebecca Motte, After her husband’s death, her South Carolina home — seized by the British and renamed Fort Motte — became a strategic stronghold. When Patriot troops needed to reclaim it, she offered to burn it down herself, even providing the flaming arrows! She burned down her own house! (I will write more about her story later)
As Elizabeth Fries Ellet recounts, Mrs. Motte declared that she was
“gratified with the opportunity of contributing to the good of her country and should view the approaching scene with delight.”
Rebecca Motte's act of sacrifice brought Enlightenment ideals—like liberty, agency, and moral conviction—to life, proving that courage and leadership were not the sole province of men.
Enlightened Sparks — Ideas That Lit a Revolution
To understand how such women emerged, we have to rewind to the Age of Enlightenment, that intellectual storm that rewrote power, faith, and reason itself.
Thinkers like John Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and later Mary Wollstonecraft championed liberty and rational thought, shaping the minds of Jefferson, Franklin, and Madison.
In 1714, a shipment of books — including works by Newton and Locke — arrived at Yale University, igniting what historians call the American Enlightenment. It emphasized religious tolerance, individual liberty, and moral reason, planting the seeds of a new political consciousness.
These ideas challenged authority—first kings and priests, then, quietly, husbands too.
Mary Wollstonecraft and the Birth of Modern Feminist Thought
In 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, tearing into the hypocrisy of a world that celebrated liberty while denying education to women. She argued that women were not naturally inferior — they were made so by lack of opportunity.
Though Wollstonecraft wrote after the American Revolution, her philosophy reflected the same Enlightenment current American women were already channeling in practice.
(I will write more about her in another post )
Across the ocean, women like Mercy Otis Warren and countless military wives embodied those ideas daily — managing estates, finances, and survival in a world built to overlook them.
The Enlightenment promised equality, though imperfectly. Yet, it laid the intellectual and moral foundation for the revolution within women themselves — the first sparks of what would become modern feminist thought.
Documenting 250 Years of Military Spouse History
Before women followed armies, they followed ideas. Revolution at Home explores how Enlightenment thought inspired colonial women to claim reason, education, and patriotism as their own — sparking a quiet revolution that reshaped the homefront and laid the groundwork for women’s civic identity.
Today’s military spouses carry the same blend of endurance and purpose — proving that the legacy of Revolutionary women lives on in every homefront generation.
To be continued: Part II — A Revolution Within a Revolution: Women, War, and the Birth of the Military Wife
#HerStoryInHistory #MilitaryWivesInHistory #AmericanRevolutionWomen #MilitarySpouseHistory #HomefrontArchives #BehindTheUniforms
Don't forget: On November 16, 2025, PBS will premiere The American Revolution, a new Ken Burns documentary reexamining the nation’s founding through untold perspectives—Burns looks at history from the bottom up, showing how the endurance of ordinary citizens also became the true test of patriotism.
Images:
Paine, T. (1776). Common Sense. In The Writings of Thomas Paine, Vol. 1, edited by Moncure Daniel Conway. G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Retrieved from https://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/1776-paine-common-sense-pamphlet
Wollstonecraft, M. (1792). A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects. London: J. Johnson. Retrieved from https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/wollstonecraft-a-vindication-of-the-rights-of-woman
References and Further Reading:
Harriet Branson Applewhite and Darline Gay Levy, Women and Politics in the Age of the Democratic Revolution (University of Michigan Press, 1990).
John Adams and Charles Francis Adams, The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States: Life of John Adams (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1856).
Elizabeth Fries Ellet, The Women of the American Revolution, vol. 1 (Williamstown, Mass: Corner House, 1980).
Elizabeth Fries Ellet, The Women of the American Revolution, vol. 2 (New York, NY: Baker and Scribner, 1848).
Heather Garrett, “Camp Followers, Nurses, Soldiers, and Spies: Women and the Modern Memory of the Revolutionary War,” History in the Making 9, no. 5 (January 2016).
Jack A. Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (University of California Press on Demand, 1991).
Sarah Josepha Buell Hale, Woman’s Record: Or, Sketches of All Distinguished Women, from the Creation to A.D. 1868. Arranged in Four Eras. With Selections from Authoresses of Each Era, 2nd ed. (1860; repr., New York, NY: Harper & Brothers, 1860).
Harvard University, “Enlightenment and Revolution,” The Pluralism Project, 2024.
Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
Lisa L. Moore, Joanna Brooks, and Caroline Wigginton, Transatlantic Feminisms in the Age of Revolutions (Oxford University Press, 2012).
Kieron O’Hara, The Enlightenment: A Beginner’s Guide (Simon and Schuster, 2012).
Robert D. Farber University Archives and Special Collections, “Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, 1776” (Brandeis University, 2015).
Esther Reed, The Sentiments of an American Woman (Philadelphia: John Dunlap, 1780).
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (Project Gutenberg eBook, 2002).