Margaret Cochran Corbin
Margaret Cochran Corbin (1751-c.1800) fought alongside her husband in the American Revolutionary War and was the first woman to receive pension from the United States government as a disabled soldier. She was born Nov. 12, 1751 near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, U.S.A., orphaned at the age of five and was raised by relatives. When she was twenty-one she married John Corbin. John joined the Continental Army when the American Revolution started four years later and Margaret accompanied her husband. Wives of the soldiers often cooked for the men, washed their laundry and nursed wounded soldiers. They also watched the men do their drills and, no doubt, learned those drills, too.
On November 16,1776, while they were stationed in Fort Washington, New York, the fort was attacked by British and Hessian troops. John was assisting a gunner until the gunner was killed. At this point John took charge of the cannon and Margaret assisted him. Some time later, John was killed also. With no time to grieve, Margaret continued loading and firing the cannon by herself until she was wounded by grapeshot which tore her shoulder, mangled her chest and lacerated her jaw. Other soldiers moved her to the rear where she received first aid. The fort was captured by the British, but the wounded American soldiers were paroled. They were ferried across the river to Fort Lee. Margaret was then transported further in a jolting wagon all the way to Philadelphia. She never recovered fully from her wounds and was left without use of her left arm for the rest of her life.
In 1779, the Continental Congress granted her a pension ("half the pay and allowances of a soldier in service") due to her distinguished bravery. She continued to be included on regimental muster lists until the end of the war in 1783. Margaret Cochran Corbin died near West Point, New York prior to her fiftieth birthday.
In 1926, the Daughters of the American Revolution had her remains moved from an obscure grave and re-interred with other soldiers behind the Old Cadet Chapel at West Point where they also erected a monument to her.
During Margaret’s teenage years, there were many rumors circulating about her romances. The stories included one of a suitor who swallowed poison after she refused to return his affections, one of her being briefly linked to the son of President Jefferson’s treasury secretary, and one of her botched elopement to a young aide of General Winfield Scott. As the story goes, she accidentally kicked over a flowerpot during her climb down from a bedroom window, which woke her father, who promptly dragged her back inside.
In the year 1862 she left her home in Afton, New York with the intention of disguising herself as a man and gaining employment as a laborer on the Chicago canal project. She ended up enlisting in the 153rd Regiment of the New York State volunteers under the alias of Private Lyons Wakeman. This was the first step in her short but harrowing life as a female civil war soldier.
She died at Gettysburg. Here's a brief summary of what happened at the battle of Gettysburg. Lee was the general of the confederate side on the battlefield, and he was going against George Meade, who was the general on the union side at the battle. (Google)
Mary Rowlandson was an Indian captive, and also an American writer. She was born in England approximately 1637-1638. She immigrated to Lancaster, Massachusetts with her parents. Joseph Rowlandson became a minister in 1654 and two years later he married Mary. They together had four children, one whom died as an infant, but the others were Joseph, Mary, and Sarah.
One of the leading black female activists of the 20th century, during her life, Mary Church Terrell worked as a writer, lecturer and educator. She is remembered best for her contribution to the struggle for the rights of women of African descent. Mary Terrell was born in Memphis, Tennessee at the close of the Civil War. Her parents, former slaves who later became millionaires, tried to shelter her from the harsh reality of racism. However, as her awareness of the problem developed, she became an ardent supporter of civil rights. Her life was one of privilege but the wealth of her family did not prevent her from experiencing segregation and the humiliation of Jim Crow laws. While traveling on a train her family was sent to the Jim Crow car. This experience, along with others led her to realize that racial injustice was evil. She saw that racial injustice and all other forms of injustice must be fought.
“Deborah Sampson, the daughter of a poor Massachusetts farmer, disguised herself as a man and in 1782, at age twenty-one, enlisted in the Continental army. Ultimately, her commanding officer discovered her secret but kept it to himself, and she was honorably discharged at the end of the war.” She was one of the few women who fought in the Revolution. This example pictured the figure of women fighting alongside men. This encouraged the expansion of wife’s opportunities. Deborah, after the Revolution along with other known female figures, reinforced the ideology of Republican Motherhood which saw the marriage as a “voluntary union held together by affection and mutual dependency rather than male authority.” (Foner, p. 190). This ideal of “companionate” marriage changed the structure of the whole family itself, the now called Modern Family in which workers, laborers and domestic servants are now not considered member of the family anymore. However even if women thought that after the war they would have been seen from the society in a different way it never happened. The revolution haven’t changed the perception of the woman and the emancipated ideal
In the book Women in the Civil War, by Mary Massey, the author tells about how American women had an impact on the Civil War. She mentioned quite a few famous and well-known women such as, Dorothea Dix and Clara Barton, who were nurses, and Pauline Cushman and Belle Boyd, who were spies. She also mentioned black abolitionists, Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, feminist Susan B. Anthony, and many more women. Massey talks about how the concept of women changed as a result of the war. She informed the readers about the many accomplishments made by those women.
...and other soldiers created a fund to help her receive payment. Francis Clayton’s heroic life as a woman soldier became very popular with the newspapers of the time.
Unlike other significant women of the Revolutionary War, Reed was born and raised in London, England. Esther De Berdt, at that time, met her future husband, Joseph Reed, in England while completing his studies. The two were married and traveled back to the American colonies where Joseph worked as a lawyer. Even as America and Britain were on the edge of war, Reed grew to support American independence as her husband worked his way into the military. When Joseph became governor of Pennsylvania, Esther formed the Ladies of Philadelphia and wrote “The Sentiments of an American Woman.” She asked for women to help her actions, and together the organization raised three hundred thousand dollars through donations for the soldiers of the war. Reed wrote to General Washington with her plan to give the soldiers the money the women had raised, yet he denied her plan, proposing that the women use the money to create clothing for the men instead. The women began to buy linen and create shirts for the American soldiers. Reed’s organization was one of many similar groups across the nation, yet hers raised the most donations and thus influenced other women in other areas to do the same. When Esther passed away quite young, Benjamin Franklin’s daughter Sarah, took over and finished the amazing venture. Despite her hometown roots, Esther Reed grew into an American Patriot that influenced and motivated women to follow her
Subsequently, women volunteered through national or local associations or by getting permission from a commanding officer (“Nursing”). In April 1861, Dorothea Dix assembled a collection of volunteer female nurses which staged a march on Washington, demanding that the government distinguish their desire to assist the Union’s wounded soldiers. She organized military hospitals for the care of all sick and wounded soldiers, aiding the head surgeons by supplying nurses and considerable means for the ease and aid of the suffering. After she recruited nurses; nursing was greatly improved and her nurses were taken care of under her supervision (Buhler-Wilkerson). During the Civil war, most nurses were women who took care of the ill and injured soldiers. Both male and female nurses have cared for the soldiers in every American war. The majority of nurses were recruited soldiers pressed into duty. Civil war nurses worked in hospitals, on the battlefield, and in their homes (Post). The first carnage of the war made it possible for nursing to become a professional occupation. The women who proved themselves as capable volunteers established nursing as an acceptable field of employment for women after the war. The contributions of the thousands of female nurses helped to alter the image of the professional nurse and changed American nursing from a male-dominated to a largely female profession (Woodworth). Clara Barton, one of the nurses who contributed to the Civil War, founded the American Red Cross, brought supplies and helped the battlefronts before formal relief organizations could take shape to administer such shipments (Buhler-Wilkerson). The religious orders given responded to the new opportunity for servicing the injured by sending t...
The soldiers settled for winter in Valley Forge in Philadelphia, the perfect spot to keep an eye on the British and close to Quakers for food. They were ready to face the winter. After the winter started to come to an end, most of the army survived. “ On April 13, 1778, word reached camp that the French would join the Americans in the war. It was a huge turning point.”
Sarah Breedlove “Madam C.J Walker” was born in Louisiana to former slaves on December 23, 1867. She was the first member of her family to be born “free,” and used this opportunity to have a better life. She married Moses McWilliams and gave birth to her first daughter, Lelia, on June 6, 1885. Unfortunately, soon after her daughter’s second birthday her husband was killed in an accident. She found a job as a laundress in St. Louis, Missouri and thus provided her daughter with an education that she never had the chance to get.
Background Known today as Madam CJ Walker that was not the name she was given on December 23, 1867. Sarah was orphaned at the young age of seven and was able to survive by working in the cotton fields of Delta and Mississippi. In an attempt to escape abuse from her sisters, (Louvenia sisters name) husband she married at the age of 14 (married Moses McWilliams). She has one daughter names Lelia, currently known as A'Lelia Walker.
Ruth Benedict’s anthropological book, Patterns of Culture explores the dualism of culture and personality. Benedict studies different cultures such as the Zuni tribe and the Dobu Indians. Each culture she finds is so different and distinctive in relation to the norm of our society. Each difference is what makes it unique. Benedict compares the likenesses of culture and individuality, “A culture, like an individual, is a more or less consistent pattern of thought or action” (46), but note, they are not the same by use of the word, “like.” Benedict is saying that figuratively, cultures are like personalities. Culture and individuality are intertwined and dependent upon each other for survival.
In 1942, Margaret Walker won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award for her poem For My People. This accomplishment heralded the beginning of Margaret Walker’s literary career which spanned from the brink of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1930s to the cusp of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s (Gates and McKay 1619). Through her fiction and poetry, Walker became a prominent voice in the African-American community. Her writing, especially her signature novel, Jubilee, exposes her readers to the plight of her race by accounting the struggles of African Americans from the pre-Civil War period to the present and ultimately keeps this awareness relevant to contemporary American society.