Obstinate Daughters: A roundup of women who figured in the Revolutionary era — but not always in depth

The useful part

The Rebels, Writers, and Renegade Women Who Ignited the American Revolution. An attempt to leave a little less of this unwritten, the book includes women of various stations, statuses, and sympathies navigating the drama—military, political, and domestic—of the Revolutionary War. There is Mary Katharine Goddard, the newspaper publisher whose name is the only woman's to grace the Declaration of Independence, since she printed it.

How it works

• Wives, writers, fighters, spies, sex workers, tavern owners, instigators of British tea and fashion boycotts all make an appearance.
• There is Phillis Wheatley, an enslaved poet who won the admiration of George Washington and many others.
• There is Prudence Wright, who led a women's militia in Pepperell, Massachusetts, while the town's men were off fighting elsewhere.
• It feels like the author wanted to write a broader history of people who were not white or male during this era.
• It's a fine concept, but it sometimes feels a bit jarring given that the book positions itself as a women's history.

What to take from it

Instead, it reads more like a general and chronological war history with women and nonwhite men peppered in. That's understandable, since source material about women's lives during this period is scarce. It makes this more a "record of the female experience during this era" than a compendium of dramatic tales or detailed explorations of any particular women.

Example or evidence

• For America's 250th, Get 2 Years of Reason for $17.76 Celebrate your independence with a subscription to Reason magazine, your most trusted source of honest, insightful news and analysis.

Details worth keeping

Review: 'Obstinate Daughters' covers women of the American Revolution "In a canon rife with the contributions of white males to the creation of our nation, most of us know there is more left unsaid and unwritten," writes Denise Kiernan about midway through Obstinate Daughters: There's a lot of material on enslaved or indigenous men as well. Obstinate Daughters left me wanting more about the women it chronicles.

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