Leading Ladies LP American Trailblazers Chapter One The Good Fight Women in the Military Captain, I shall not go into that cellar should the enemy come. I will take a spear which I can use as well as any man and help defend the fort. -- Mary Hagidorn (American, late eighteenth century) In my time in the Senate, I have seen the role women play in the military transformed from limited support to full-fledged participation. Women throughout our history have shown great bravery--as spies for the American cause, as volunteers in hospitals, as ferry pilots--but full recognition has been slow to arrive. Women received general officer status for the first time in 1970, and there are still no women with four stars--the highest peacetime rank. Several of our top military leaders have daughters who have attended the prestigious military academies. Once while listening to a four-star general's briefing about women's roles in military conflict, I said to him, "I just want your daughter to be able to have enough experience to succeed you--if she earns the right."In other words, if we expect to attract the best women to military careers, they must know they have a chance of reaching the top. To do that, women must have enough time in combat zones to allow them to earn the credibility essential to leading a branch of the armed services. There have been many issues to address, and we are addressing them. There were early concerns about fraternization between the sexes and about sexual harassment. There have been problems in this area, but there is zero tolerance for misconduct, and I believe the professionalism in our military is second to none in the world. Women have proven themselves in our elite service academies and are gaining combat experience, flying fighter and carrier airplanes in war zones, and participating in many ground missions as well. This has been the traditional route to the top for men, and women are now in the pipeline. Though this is relatively new for the armed services, American women on the front lines in war is not. In the Revolutionary War, our first war for freedom, women participated when they could, sometimes even disguising themselves as men in order to join the battle. Sybil Ludington In many ways, Sybil Ludington was a typical child of colonial America. Born in Connecticut in 1761, Sybil had eleven brothers and sisters by the time she reached her early teens. For more than a decade, Henry and Abigail Ludington had been farming over two hundred acres of land in Fredericksburgh, now Putnam County, New York, where Henry Ludington became a prosperous farmer and mill owner, was involved in the political and religious life of his region, and served in local militias. He joined his first militia in 1756, when he was just seventeen, as a loyal British subject, but by the early 1770s he had transferred his allegiance to the independence movement. As colonel of a four-hundred-man regiment in Dutchess County, New York, Henry Ludington so effectively helped stymie British efforts to supply their troops that British General William Howe offered a reward of 300 English guineas to whoever captured or killed him. One of the Ludington family's neighbors, Ichabod Prosser, thought he could surprise the colonel at home and collect the reward. He and a group of loyalists surrounded the Ludingtons' farmhouse one spring night, hoping to catch the colonel unawares. But Henry Ludington, who knew the rich reward would prove irresistible to someone, had drilled his children to keep watch over the house at night. When Sybil caught sight of Ichabod Prosser's men, she quickly roused four or five of her oldest brothers and sisters. The youngest was about six, but by lighting candles in the rooms visible to the Prosser band and marching back and forth in front of the windows, they gave the impression that a sizable armed guard was protecting the place from within. The Prosser group didn't dare storm the house. Instead, they hid until dawn and then withdrew. By the time the American Revolution reached the Ludingtons' doorstep in 1777, Sybil was sixteen. On April 24, two thousand British troops, under General William Tryon's command, landed on the coast of Connecticut and headed for Danbury to seize the supplies the Continental Army stored there. A number of American soldiers were in the area, serving under Generals David Wooster, Benedict Arnold, and Gold Selleck Silliman, but they couldn't prevent the British from occupying Danbury. The British destroyed the supplies they found in town and burned nineteen houses, a meetinghouse, and twenty-two barns and storehouses, all of them belonging to people who sided with the revolutionaries. On the farms around Fredericksburgh, seventeen miles from Danbury, the members of Colonel Ludington's militia were busy with spring planting. Colonel Ludington called on Sybil, an expert rider, to sound the alarm while he readied his regiment to pursue the British in Connecticut. Sybil rode all night in a hard rain, making a forty-mile circuit through the heart of Putnam County, from Carmel and Mahopac in the south as far north as Stormville, in Dutchess County. Early the next morning, the colonel led his four hundred men toward Connecticut to join forces with the twelve hundred troops already pursuing General Tryon's soldiers, who were hurrying back to their ships on Long Island Sound. Sybil's ride earned her the nickname "the female Paul Revere." In fact, her more famous predecessor rode only half as far as she did, on a clear, moonlit night--and he was forty years old, not sixteen. Besides the lost supplies, the Americans suffered some casualties, among them General David Wooster, who was mortally wounded while attacking the British at North Salem, New York. But the Americans counted Danbury and its aftermath as a success. "The stores destroyed there have been purchased at a high price to the enemy," wrote Alexander Hamilton. "The spirit of the people on the occasion does them great honor--is a pleasing proof that they have lost nothing of that primitive zeal with which they began that contest, and will be a galling discouragement to the enemy of repeating attempts of the kind." Leading Ladies LP American Trailblazers . Copyright © by Kay Hutchison. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Leading Ladies: American Trailblazers by Kay Bailey Hutchison All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
