While the Wo-men Only Wept: Loyalist Refugee Women in Eastern Ontario

Terry A. Crowley is an associate professor of history at the University
of Guelph and author of Agnes Macphail and the Politics of Equality.

Although historians have stressed the ethnic diversity among the
Loyalists, until Janice Potter-MacKinnon’s superb study of Loyalist
refugee women in eastern Ontario no one studied gender differences
consistently. Immigration is a sex-selective process experienced
differently by men and women. Potter-MacKinnon shows how the American
Revolution called on women to assume new roles when men left their homes
to fight or to secure their families’ incomes. Loyalist women like
Mohawk Molly Brant played a prominent part in encouraging loyalty to the
British during the upheaval. Yet the very nature of the Loyalist cause
separated the experience of Loyalist women from that of the victorious
Patriot women to the south. Much like the world wars of the 20th
century, the American War of Independence created an emergency that cast
convention aside. Once the military conflict had subsided, Loyalist
women returned to living within a patriarchal hierarchy. In petitioning
the Crown for grants, Loyalist women assumed the language of
enfeeblement that led historians to ignore their importance for two
centuries.

This admirable study ensures that these women will no longer be
overlooked in future discussions of Loyalism.