Program

Edward Lodi profiles a number of remarkable women who played major roles in King Philip's War: making history-changing decisions, performing heroic deeds, enduring hardships, chronicling their experiences, lending support in innovative ways.

            Included are Awashonks of the Sakonnets, Weetamoo of the Pocassets, and Quaiapen of the Narragansetts'”who together with Philip rose up against the English; Mary Rowlandson, taken captive in a raid against Lancaster, whose extraordinary narrative of her captivity became America's first best-selling book; Ann Brackett; Wootonekanuske; Amie; Penelope Winslow; and others whose names have been lost to history, but whose exploits have become the stuff of legend.

            Lodi rounds out his talk with accounts of what daily life was like for women in the settlements and on the frontier; the "stealth and stratagems" employed by Indian women acting as spies; restrictive laws and how some Englishwomen defied them; and the terrible vengeance wreaked by the women of Marblehead on two hapless captives.