During the war, many women demonstrated their loyalty to the patriot cause by shouldering the burdens of absent husbands. They managed farms and businesses. First in Philadelphia, and then in other cities, women went from door to door collecting money for the Continental Army. Some accompanied husbands to the battlefront, where they tended to the material needs of soldiers. A very few disguised themselves as men and joined the army, exposing as a lie the notion that only men had the capacity to sacrifice their lives for the good of the country. Loyalist women continued to express their political views, even though doing so brought them little more than physical suffering and emotional pain. African American women took advantage of wartime chaos to run away from their masters and forge new, independent lives for themselves.

After the war, women marched in parades, lobbied and petitioned legislators, attended sessions of Congress, and participated in political rallies—lending their support to particular candidates or factions. Elite women published novels, poems, and plays. Some hosted salons where men and women gathered to discuss political issues. In New Jersey, single property-owning women voted.

Mike Pence and Franklin Graham at the 2017 World Summit in Defense of Persecuted Christians. AP Photo / Cliff Owen

Well before special counsel Robert Mueller started investigating possible illegal collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, American evangelicals had formed an odd alliance of their own with leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church. American evangelicals are led to make common cause with Russian Orthodoxy—and with Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin—because of a deep and shared suspicion of Western liberal elites.