Women and the Revolution
US History
This year in History class, I have grown in my ability to teach about women during the American Revolution to others.
In class we were talking about the American Revolutionary war and events that led up to it. Like the Boston Tea Party for example, colonists were furious that they were now being taxed on everyday necessities, like tea. So, a group of men known as the Sons of Liberty dressed up as natives and boarded a British ship and poured out over 90,000 pounds of tea into the Boston harbor. Another event was the Boston Massacre. Some teens were fooling with a soldier, throwing snowballs, and a club. The soldier shot one of the boys in the arm signaling to stop, but the teens thought that he was starting something. The boys then got angry and started a fight which got the town scurrying about.
Although all of this was interesting to learn about, I kept getting distracted by a question. Where are all the women? No one ever really said anything about women.
We didn’t learn much about the women until after we started the comic book project. For this project, we chose a perspective (revolutionary leaders, patriots- minutemen & Sons of Liberty, loyalists in the colonies, women patriots or loyalists, and African American colonists). Then based on the perspective that we chose, our teacher paired us up with a partner if we wanted one.
My partner, Athena, and I chose to do the women perspective because we were both very curious about the topic. The only woman we had learned about was Abigail Adams, who was Samuel Adams wife. Samuel Adams was a part of the Sons of liberty during the Boston Massacre.
When the project started all we really knew was that the women stayed home while the men left, or they went with them and stayed at the camps to help with cooking, laundry, dishes, small stuff like that. Using the little information that we knew, we had to write a comic using mainly words to plan out the comic that we would be creating in Comic Life 3 (a digital application). If you look through the images above you can see an artifact for this endeavor, a black and white handwritten draft of our comic.
If you read through it, you can see that all of our information about women was very vague. We got some teacher and peer feedback that helped us a little more with using what we had to the best or our ability. After that feedback we put the paper draft into our first Comic Life draft, and printed it out, but this time we got feedback from a professional, Dr. McIlvenna (Dr. No). She told us that we were doing great job capturing what the women did, and she told us some other things that the women did like being nurses for the wounded or sick, some were left to take care of the farm when their husbands and sometimes even children left.
Once that feedback session was over, we took her helpful tips and information and added a scene about our main character thinking about her poor mother being left home all alone to take care of the farm because her father and brother came to fight and she came to help at the camp.
Back to the artifacts up at the top again, if you look at the other set, it is our color, final comic book. After many rounds of feedback and critique. The project didn’t start out smoothly even though it ended well.
At the beginning, I had no clue how to use Comic Life and I didn’t want to ask my partner for help. I ended up wasting a ton of time trying to do it myself before I asked Athena for help. Once I advocated for myself, it all made sense and went great!
Even though the unit is over, and we have stopped learning about it, I would still love to learn more about the topic.
