Women Fought at Bunker Hill

Abstract

B UNKER HILL MONUMENT commemorates two battles. There is the one the school-books tell about, of scared rustics and city prentices who, on a June day of 1775, fired the first American shots at British eye-balls. This article will tell of another, fifty-five years later, when the minutewomen of the 1830's fought and overcame post-revolutionary lethargy. This latter combat raged until 1840, when the women finally won, after much time had been taken out for teas and banquets. In a New Hampshire village in 1825 Sarah Josepha Hale, a widow whose husband had left her the easily provided legacy of five children, was putting new life into the decrepit bonnets of charitable neighbors. No radio brought to her, as she stitched, the stentorian periods of an orator who, from Bunker Hill, threw sonorous sentences like bouquets at the multitude. It was the fiftieth anniversary of the battle, and the noise was inspired by the laying of the corner-stone of an obelisk to which children and maiden teachers might repair on vacation tours. Patriotic burghers having decided that the nation owed two hundred and twenty vertical feet of local granite to the cause of national homicide, Webster struck his godlike pose, 467