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Across the borderlands of the early American northeast, New England, New France, and Native nations deployed women with surprising frequency to the front lines of wars that determined control of North America. Far from serving as passive helpmates in a private, domestic sphere, women assumed wartime roles as essential public actors, wielding muskets, hatchets, and makeshift weapons while fighting for their families, communities, and nations. Revealing the fundamental importance of martial womanhood in this era, Gina M. Martino places borderlands women in a broad context of empire, cultural exchange, violence, and nation building, demonstrating how women's war making was embedded in national and imperial strategies of expansion and resistance. As Martino shows, women's participation in warfare was not considered transgressive; rather it was integral to traditional gender ideologies of the period, supporting rather than subverting established systems of gender difference.

In returning these forgotten women to the history of the northeastern borderlands, this study challenges scholars to reconsider the flexibility of gender roles and reveals how women's participation in transatlantic systems of warfare shaped institutions, polities, and ideologies in the early modern period and the centuries that followed.

Table of Contents

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  1. Cover
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  1. Title Page, Series Page, Copyright, Dedication
  2. pp. i-vi
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  1. Contents
  2. pp. vii-x
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  1. Acknowledgments
  2. pp. xi-xvi
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  1. Introduction: Among the Vanguard
  2. pp. 1-16
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  1. Part I: ​Encountering Martial Women
  1. 1. Necessary to Abide: Gendered Spheres and Spaces in New England’s Wars
  2. pp. 19-57
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  1. 2. Everyone Ran to Help: Rank and Gender in the Wars of New France
  2. pp. 58-79
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  1. 3. Deploying Amazons: Women and Wartime Propaganda
  2. pp. 80-102
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  1. Part II: ​Redrafting Martial Women
  1. 4. Appropriate Combatants: Women in the New Imperial Military Societies of the Northeastern Borderlands
  2. pp. 105-134
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  1. 5. Resolute Motherhood: Memories of Women’s War Making in New England
  2. pp. 135-157
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  1. Epilogue: Heroines, Saviors, and Curiosities
  2. pp. 158-162
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  1. Notes
  2. pp. 163-188
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  1. Bibliography
  2. pp. 189-204
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  1. Index
  2. pp. 205-216
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