The Revolutionary Life and Marriage of Lucy Knox

Never afraid to show strength, judgment, and endurance in a time when such character traits were deemed to be masculine, Lucy Flucker rejected the cultural narrative of "father knows best" to marry Henry Knox, a young bookseller who would become one of the great heroes of the American Revolution. Forsaking the prospect of a large inheritance from her Tory parents, she shared the dangers of life in rebel military camps to be near a husband who became George Washington's right hand. When Abigail Adams asked her husband to "remember the ladies," she was merely asking that women be given some mercy from the harsh legal rules that governed relations between men and women in the late 18th century. When Lucy Knox told her husband she expected "equal command," she asserted an idea that was almost never said out loud at the time--that women deserved and were capable of equal decision making power in their marriages. This biography is a new take on a woman who was determined to assert her full humanity while overcoming the hardships of war, while she moved in the highest circles of the Washington administration as the wife of America's first Secretary of War. Read more