MARTHA WASHINGTON
WOMEN IN PIONEER LIFE AND ON THE BATTLE-FIELD
"If we wish to know the political and moral condition of a State, we must ask what rank women hold in it. Their influence embraces the whole of life."
—Aimé Martin
The first foot that pressed Plymouth Rock was that of Mary Chilton, a fair and delicate maiden, and there followed her eighteen women who had accompanied their husbands on the Mayflower to the bleak, unknown shore of Massachusetts. Truly the "spindle side" of the Puritan stock deserves great admiration and respect.
These women came from a civilized land to a savage one; from homes of plenty, where they had been carefully guarded and tended, to a place where their lives could be only danger, toil and privation. Often they were obliged to pound corn for their bread, and many were the times, their husbands being away fighting the Indians, when they gathered their children together, panic-stricken by the war whoops that rang out from the wilderness near by. Little wonder that four of these eighteen women died during the first winter, killed by cold, hunger, and mental anguish!
The early European settlers of America, both men and women, were of a truly heroic breed. It was spiritual as well as bodily courage they displayed—suffering as they did for a religious principle. The women often performed the duties of men, even planting the crops in their husbands' absence, and frequently using firearms to guard their children and their homes. Shoulder to shoulder with the men these women worked, and from the struggle was evolved a new type—the woman of 1776, without whose assistance the Revolutionary War could scarcely have succeeded.
One of these women, who might have lived in luxury, aloof from scenes of suffering, had she so wished, stands out prominently. This was Martha Washington, the wife of the Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army, who gathered the wives of the officers around her at Valley Forge, during the severe winter of 1777-78, and with them undertook the work of relieving the needs of the soldiers. Under her leadership the women gave up their embroidery, spinnet playing, and other light accomplishments, and knitted stockings and mittens, of which hundreds of pairs were distributed. We may regard her as the pioneer in a form of work which later developed into Sanitary Commissions and the great organization of the Red Cross.