Reviewed by Martha Saxton | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.3

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Reviewed by Martha Saxton | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.3 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Martha Saxton, Amherst College

Masquerade: The Life and Times of Deborah Sampson, Continental Soldier. By Alfred F. Young. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. 370 pages. $26.95 (cloth), $16.00 (paper).
Alfred F. Young has written a richly satisfying account of incidents in, if not the entirety of, the life of Deborah Sampson, who famously managed to serve undetected in the Continental army for some seventeen months. She went on to petition with partial success for her military pension and to conduct an extended speaking tour about her military experience, making her the new nation's first female public speaker. Young's wide-ranging and creative research brings Sampson's world to life, and, despite the scarcity of her own testimony—she left only two letters, a brief travel diary, and a dress—readers come away with a sense of the woman herself. Young conveys movingly the aging Sampson's increasingly mixed feelings about her feat as her exploits slowly tarnished in the stale air of Massachusetts provincialism. Finally, he discusses those few historical moments that have favored the recovery of stories such as Sampson's. Not surprisingly, they occurred during or in the immediate half-life of feminist explosions, including that of the turn of the twentieth century and the second wave of the 1970s.	1
Young's narrative bears out a theory that Margaret R. and Patrice L. R. Higonnet developed to describe the effects of war and peace on gender. They imagined a system in which men and women are positioned as if they were opposing ribbons of a double helix, which, no matter the circumstances, always maintain a constant distance from each other. Society, if not biology, has always defined the men's strand as superior. In peacetime men do the significant jobs. Though many women take over this work in wartime, men fight, performing an activity given greater importance. And when war ends, women leave the important jobs and men retake them, thus preserving the same interval between male and female activities.¹ Sampson's story is so intriguing because she actually experienced both sides of the double helix.	2
Though poverty and gender shaped Sampson's early years, motherlessness apparently transmitted to her only a loose approximation of the era's expectations for women. Sampson's mother, whose husband deserted her, indentured the five-year-old girl in Middleborough, Massachusetts, in 1765. She grew up doing housework, looking after boys little younger than herself, and acquiring many skills, some typed female but others, like whittling, marked male. She yearned for the educational opportunities her male charges enjoyed. This deprivation emerged from the greater utility of girls in the home. Having a girl to help around the house was a better deal than having a boy because girls could work inside the house and outside as well, whereas a boy would not learn women's work. With a poor girl to help out, boys (and wealthy girls) could be "spared" for education. Though kept from much formal schooling, Sampson read voraciously. Young makes it clear that reading counted in the imaginative leaps Sampson made throughout her life, opening vistas for her ambitions. Her life demonstrates Cathy N. Davidson's contention that reading could subvert the status quo.²	3
Partly from necessity but also from preference, Sampson determined early to engage her world head-on. Young supplies generous context to Sampson's important passages in these years. She made herself economically independent, teaching herself to be a teacher and a weaver. After becoming a "masterless woman" (48), Sampson searched for an awakened congregation that would receive her with more warmth than the Congregational church of her childhood. She joined the Baptists, who appeared to accept the forlorn and to promise women some authority over their spiritual lives. But when the men of her congregation refused women members the right to vote on the new minister, Sampson decided to move on. It was in this moment of disappointment that she enlisted in the Continental army, precipitated by the Baptists' humiliating public rejection of her and initiating her most direct and improbable encounter with her society: as a citizen-soldier.	. . .

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