Women at War in the Borderlands of the Early American Northeast

By Gina M. Martino

Women at War in the Borderlands of the Early American Northeast View Inside

232 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 3 halftones, 4 maps

  • Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-4099-0
    Published: April 2018
  • eBook ISBN: 978-1-4696-4100-3
    Published: March 2018
  • Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-6877-2
    Published: November 2021

David J. Weber Series in the New Borderlands History

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Across the borderlands of the early American northeast, New England, New France, and Native nations deployed women with surprising frequency to the front lines of wars that determined control of North America. Far from serving as passive helpmates in a private, domestic sphere, women assumed wartime roles as essential public actors, wielding muskets, hatchets, and makeshift weapons while fighting for their families, communities, and nations. Revealing the fundamental importance of martial womanhood in this era, Gina M. Martino places borderlands women in a broad context of empire, cultural exchange, violence, and nation building, demonstrating how women's war making was embedded in national and imperial strategies of expansion and resistance. As Martino shows, women's participation in warfare was not considered transgressive; rather it was integral to traditional gender ideologies of the period, supporting rather than subverting established systems of gender difference.

In returning these forgotten women to the history of the northeastern borderlands, this study challenges scholars to reconsider the flexibility of gender roles and reveals how women's participation in transatlantic systems of warfare shaped institutions, polities, and ideologies in the early modern period and the centuries that followed.

Published with support provided by the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas

About the Author

Gina M. Martino is assistant professor of history at the University of Akron.
For more information about Gina M. Martino, visit the Author Page.

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Colonial, Revolutionary Era & Early American History

Women's Studies

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