Sisterhood at Lexington
In the wee hours of April 19, 1775, long before dawn’s first glimmer, Jonathan Harrington of Lexington, Massachusetts, woke suddenly at his mother’s insistence. “Jonathan, Jonathan,” Abigail Harrington cried, rousting her 16-year-old. “The reg’lars are coming and something must be done!”
“I dressed quickly, slung my light gun over my shoulder, took my fife from a chair, and hurried to the parade near the meeting house, where about 50 men had gathered,” the grown Jonathan said years later. “Others were arriving every minute.”
Decades on, famous as the last survivor of the American Revolution’s opening battle, Jonathan Harrington often heard requests to recount the day’s events. What he recalled was his impassioned mother, urging her husband and first-born son to battle. To his dying day Harrington praised his mother as “one of the most patriotic women who ever lived.”
The resolution and bravery the Lexington militia showed on the town green that morning against veteran units of the world’s most powerful army are well enshrined. But Jonathan Harrington had in mind something more: the role of Lexington’s women. Long before sending their men into combat that April 19, the town’s wives and sisters and mothers had been protesting actively against Crown infringements on colonial rights.
By 18th-century norms, proper female behavior excluded political engagement. Society considered it unnatural for a woman to speak or to act in public; rather, she was to sequester herself in the domestic sphere. Yet women in Lexington embraced and acted on the revolutionary rhetoric of liberty—for much of that rhetoric was aimed directly at them. For 10 years before war broke out, Lexington’s women had been hearing exhortations to apply their domestic skills to political protest and resistance. In the name of tradition, they were being urged to rebel. And they answered that call in the affirmative.
Their main inciter was the town’s popular and influential Whig minister. Jonas Clarke shared the providential Puritan view that everything in life had a divine cause and meaning. As political unrest was mushrooming in the 1760s, Clarke preached of what
