The Woman Who Organized — Esther DeBerdt Reed

The heat in Philadelphia is already heavy in June 1780. The Continental currency is nearly worthless. Washington’s army has not been paid. A woman sits at a desk by an open window and writes a broadside she will sign with no name but her country.

It is 1780.

She does not just express sympathy for the cause. She organizes. She writes a call to action, sends women door to door across the city, and raises more than three hundred thousand dollars in Continental currency when the men’s money has failed.

She does not just raise the money. She delivers it. When Washington asks that the funds become shirts rather than cash, she and Sarah Franklin Bache organize the sewing of 2,200 linen shirts. Each one is signed inside with the name of the woman who made it.

She does not just do the work. She disappears before it is finished. She dies of dysentery on September 18, 1780, at the age of thirty-three. The shirts are delivered in December. She never sees them arrive.

Her Spark of Liberty was the door she knocked on. The absolute refusal to wait for someone else to act when the army needed shirts and the women of Philadelphia had hands.

Now, “Where History Comes to Life.”

She was born in London on October 22, 1746, and spent her adult life in Philadelphia. She published her broadside on June 10, 1780, signed only “An American Woman.” She organized the first large-scale women’s fundraising effort in American history, was thirty-three years old when she died, and never saw the work she set in motion reach the men it was meant for. The shirts arrived in December. Her name was on none of them. The women who sewed them put their own names inside.

Her name was Esther DeBerdt Reed.

Now We Know Em
by Christopher B. Gordon

The Speedwell’s Confession, Book One of the Sparks of Liberty series, is live on Amazon Kindle and free with Kindle Unlimited. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GZ5QH7L8

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