Remember the Ladies

Six women. One revolution. And 250 years of forgetting their names.

By Kimberly Curtis · Future Focus Female

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I have to admit something to you.

Sitting down to write this piece for the 250th anniversary of our country, I could not name three women from the American Revolution. Not off the top of my head. Not without stopping to look them up.

I can name Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Hamilton, Madison, Monroe, Paine, Revere, Henry, and probably ten more before I hit my second cup of coffee. My daughters can name them too. We were taught. We were taught early and taught often and told these names mattered — and they do. Their courage built the framework of the country we live in.

But somewhere in the same textbook chapters, the women were footnotes. Or absent entirely. And I take full responsibility for not having noticed sooner.

We celebrate the men. We have national holidays for the men. We have monuments to the men. We have our children memorize the men’s speeches every February.

And I want you to sit with this question, because I sat with it:

Can you imagine what our world would look like if we elevated the same reverence for women as we do for men?

How extraordinary that world would be.

The Woman We Chose to Remember

Here is the irony that hit me the moment I started reading.

The one woman we have collectively agreed to celebrate at monumental American scale is not a real woman.

She is an allegory. She is cast in copper. She stands seven stories tall on an island in New York Harbor. Her name is Liberty, and she was designed by a French sculptor. Her face is idealized, her posture inviting, her form composed to evoke welcome and light and freedom.

We built her a national monument.

This is not a criticism of the statue. She is a masterpiece. What she represents matters.

But she is the exception that proves the pattern.

We have found room in our national iconography for exactly one woman — and she is fictional.

The real women who made the country she symbolizes possible? Most of us cannot name them.

Let me tell you six.

Mary Katherine Goddard

In January of 1777, the Continental Congress ordered the first official printing of the Declaration of Independence — the first version to list the names of the signers.

The printer who set the type, ran the press, and put her own name at the bottom of the sheet was Mary Katherine Goddard.

Read that again.

On the very first officially signed printing of the founding document of the United States, one woman’s name appeared alongside the fifty-six men who signed it. Hers was the name of the printer. She stood by it. She published it. She distributed it, in an era when publishing revolutionary material could have cost her everything.

She was also the first woman postmaster in the United States.

Most Americans have never heard her name.

Sybil Ludington

She was sixteen years old.

On the night of April 26, 1777, she rode alone through the darkness of Putnam County, New York, for approximately forty miles — roughly twice the distance Paul Revere covered — to alert Colonial militia that the British had burned Danbury and were advancing.

She was sixteen. She rode through the night. She rode farther than the man whose ride every American schoolchild memorizes.

She saved a militia and possibly a battle.

There is no Sybil Ludington Day.

Mercy Otis Warren

She was a playwright.

In an era when women were not permitted to write for the stage under their own names, Mercy Otis Warren wrote political satires that mocked British colonial rule with such precision that the Founding Fathers themselves — John Adams among them — sought her counsel on how to advance revolutionary sentiment.

After the war, she wrote a three-volume history of the American Revolution — one of the earliest ever published, based partly on her firsthand correspondence with the men who fought it.

She was one of the first American historians. She happened to be a woman, so we did not treat her that way.

Abigail Adams

In March of 1776, while her husband John was in Philadelphia helping draft the framework of the new nation, Abigail Adams wrote him a letter that included this line:

Remember the Ladies. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember, all Men would be tyrants if they could.

She was asking, in the year of American independence itself, that the founders write women into the framework of the country they were creating.

They did not.

She kept writing anyway. For decades. Thousands of letters. A body of correspondence that historians now consider one of the most important firsthand accounts of the founding era.

She was right about all of it.

Deborah Sampson

She wanted to fight for her country.

In 1782, at the age of twenty-one, Deborah Sampson bound her chest, cut her hair, put on men’s clothing, and enlisted in the Continental Army under the name Robert Shurtliff. She served for a year and a half. She was wounded in combat, dug the musket ball out of her own thigh with a penknife to avoid being discovered by an army surgeon, and returned to duty.

When her identity was eventually discovered, she was honorably discharged. Massachusetts later recognized her service and granted her a military pension. She spent her later years lecturing about her service, sometimes appearing on stage in her old uniform.

She fought for a country that had told her she could not.

Phillis Wheatley

She was born in West Africa, sold into slavery as a child, and brought to Boston.

By her early twenties, she had become the first African American — and one of the first American women of any background — to publish a book of poetry. Her work was celebrated in colonial society. George Washington himself wrote to her, praising her verse.

She published during the American Revolution. While enslaved. Writing in a language that was not her first. Producing work that argued, in verse, for the ethical impossibility of a nation founded on liberty continuing to tolerate the institution of slavery.

She died at thirty-one, in poverty, largely alone.

We should know her name.

What Their Courage Built

Later this summer, my youngest daughter Roslyn walks into a lecture hall at Baylor University for her first semester of college.

She will sit down in a room that Mary Katherine Goddard could not have entered.

She will study subjects that women were, for most of American history, actively barred from studying. She will hold a bank account under her own name. She will manage her own money. She will vote in her first presidential election in 2028. She will, if she chooses, sign a lease, take out a loan, marry someone she loves, or not marry at all — and no one will stop her.

None of that was accidental.

Every one of those freedoms is a direct inheritance from women whose names most of us cannot recall — women who wrote, rode, printed, argued, fought, and published while the country we now live in was still deciding whether they counted.

We forget how recent these freedoms are. American women could not open a bank account without a husband’s signature until 1974. Our mothers were already alive.

We forget how fragile these freedoms are. Millions of women in the world today cannot drive to their jobs. Cannot walk into a classroom. Cannot control their own money. Cannot choose whether to become mothers. Cannot leave their homes without covering themselves. In many places, girls are still married off before they are even teenagers.

The women I just named did not stop to ask whether they had permission.

They contributed anyway.

And they were minimized anyway.

Not just for women. For everyone. The freedoms they helped set in motion belong to all of us — our sons and our daughters, our fathers and our brothers, every American who walks freely into a voting booth or a bank or a university lecture hall.

That is what they built. That is what we inherit.

For My Daughters

My three daughters will know these names.

Dana. Jillian. Roslyn.

They will know that a sixteen-year-old rode farther than Paul Revere. They will know that a printer put her name on the first signed Declaration. They will know that a woman fought in the Continental Army and dug a musket ball out of her own thigh with a penknife. They will know that a Black woman wrote poetry during the Revolution that has outlived most of the men celebrated alongside her.

They will know that they were given something priceless by women whose sacrifice has never been fully honored — and that the least any of us can do is remember.

A Note From Future Focus Female

Future Focus Female is a keto-Ayurvedic wellness brand for women 40+ founded by Kimberly Curtis. Kimberly is a Certified Ayurvedic Life Coach, iPEC Energy Leadership Coach, Certified Yoga Instructor, Culinary Chef, Integrative Wellness Educator, and Perimenopause Protocol Designer. She is not a licensed medical practitioner. All content is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Please consult a qualified healthcare provider for individual guidance.

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Author

Kimberly Curtis is the Founder & CEO of Future Focus Female. She lives in Corpus Christi, Texas, and has three daughters — Dana, Jillian, and Roslyn. This is a bonus reflection in the “Why Women Are Still Waiting” series, published for America’s 250th anniversary.