Women Sustaining the Tradition of Service.

• Author: Matarese, Hailey
• Position: Perspective

* Women serve. Throughout history, women have impacted combat and contingencies in many ways, as they worked to support their nations and their families. Among their most important contributions include fostering unity, promoting hope, and rallying to motivate others to support the fight and the fighters.

From foraging and laundering uniforms to healing wounds and alerting troops, from fundraising, to combat support to today's women filling combat positions across the services, women have served the United States with honor and distinction.

Before the colonial and British forces exchanged the first shots of the Revolutionary War on April 19, 1775, in Lexington, Massachusetts, and before the Minutemen assembled, policies barred women from combat operations, but those policies didn't prevent women from serving the American cause in a myriad of other ways.

Women of all ages traveled to perform support functions to help soldiers fight effectively. These dedicated women cooked, cleaned, nursed troops back to health, farmed and foraged for food. Some accounts claim women followed their husbands into combat, where they performed tasks including providing water to soldiers, cooling cannons and actively firing cannons after the soldiers manning them fell in action.

Supporting artillery was not the only combat support role played by women during the Revolutionary War. Sybil Ludington played a key role in a battle by serving as a messenger. On April 26, 1777, a rider arrived at the Ludington home to ask Col. Henry Ludington to assemble his regiment to repel a British attack on Danbury, Connecticut.

Unfortunately, the regiment had disbanded for planting season. With the rider too exhausted to continue, 16-year-old Sybil rode through the night to alert the regiment and urge them to fight to protect Danbury. She rode more than 20 miles, through dark woods and rain, encouraging the soldiers to muster and fight. While the British forces appeared to be departing Danbury upon the regiment's arrival, the unit's actions helped ensure the safety of a key city.

Women also served in later conflicts. Cathay Williams was born to an enslaved mother and a free father, making her a slave in Jefferson City, Missouri. At the start of the Civil War, Union forces occupied Jefferson City and forced captured slaves to serve the Union Army. Cathay's forced service included work as a cook and washerwoman. In these roles, she traveled with infantrymen as they fought across the...