In her engaging Obstinate Daughters: The Rebels, Writers, and Renegade Women Who Ignited the American Revolution, Denise Kiernan (The Girls of Atomic City) takes readers on a remarkable journey to discover—and rediscover—some of the fascinating women who helped to shape the Revolutionary Era. Along the way, Kiernan challenges traditional ideas of who belongs in history and illuminates why that matters to all of us.
Usually, we need to turn to the acknowledgments section to gain insights into an author’s research process. One innovative feature of Obstinate Daughters is the inclusion of short personal essays—a kind of historian’s travelogue—in which Kiernan recounts her research travels. These essays enable the author to reflect on how American history is presented to us today, whether in the statues that grace our cities or in museum exhibitions and historical sites. For example, Kiernan visited the Boston’s Women’s Memorial to see sculptor Meredith Bergmann’s tribute to “three very different Massachusetts women whose own revolutions would coincide with that of the colonies”: Phyllis Wheatley, Abigail Adams and 19th-century suffragist Lucy Stone. Then Kiernan sets off the resting place of Sarah Bradlee Fulton, who applied makeup to disguise rebels taking part in the Boston Tea Party.
Kiernan’s narrative includes well-known historical figures like Wheatley and Adams, as well as women often relegated to a sentence or two in other histories, such as writer Mercy Otis Warren and Lucy Knox. Other figures may be less familiar, like Nanye’hi, an influential Cherokee leader also known by her English name, Nancy Ward. Thanks to research both deep and broad, Obstinate Daughters contains fascinating details and anecdotes throughout. We discover the story of Prudence Wright, who, with her neighbors, intercepted a British soldier carrying dispatches, forcing him from his horse and discovering the papers in his boot. Polly Cooper was an Oneida woman who taught soldiers at Valley Forge how to forage and cook edible plants; Esther DeBerdt Reed wrote a piece in The Pennsylvania Gazette exhorting women to embrace the cause of the revolution.
In her conclusion, Kiernan reflects on the legacy of these women, noting that, “In words and action and spirit, they brought their best to the day at hand with no thought, for better or for worse, as to how the future would—if it would—remember them for it.” Thanks to her rich, accomplished history, we can learn about and pay tribute to the many unsung women who shaped this nation.
Read our interview with Denise Kiernan, author of ‘Obstinate Daughters.’