Women's History Month Biographies: 3 Undercover Heroes
For Women's History Month, we'll be featuring biographies of women in history who may have been forgotten, neglected, or misunderstood by traditional history books. In this edition: Three women from three different wars who risked their lives to fight for their beliefs.
Patience Wright
One of colonial America’s most celebrated artists, Wright worked as a spy for the the United States during the Revolutionary War, smuggling information from England in her artwork.
Read more about her in: Patience Wright: American Sculptor and Revolutionary Spy by Pegi Deitz Shea
Sarah Edmonds
Nineteen-year-old Sarah Edmonds was one of many women who disguised themselves as men to fight in the Civil War, but that was just the beginning. Edmonds also disguised herself as a black slave to spy for the Union Army and helped tend wounded soldiers on and off the battlefield.
Read more about her in: Nurse, Soldier, Spy: The Story of Sarah Edmonds, a Civil War Hero by Marissa Moss
Irena Sendler
During World War II, Sendler helped rescue some 2,500 Jewish children in German-occupied Poland by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto with false papers and placing them with sympathetic Polish families. She was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo but survived the war, after which she tried to reunite the children she had saved with their families.
Read more about her in: Irena’s Jars of Secrets by Marcia Vaughan
This information was originally published in the winter 2015 issue of home/school/life, but Women’s History Month seemed like the perfect time to bring it to the blog. You can read the full article—with lots of other cool women included—in that issue.
