The Home Front

What was it like to live in a city experiencing occupation by a foreign army? What did it mean when a family had to quarter an officer in their home? More specifically, how did military occupation affect the women and men who lived in those cities, and alter the gender system?

Lauren Duval’s The Home Front: Revolutionary Households, Military Occupation, and the Making of American Independence (Omohundro Institute and the University of North Carolina Press, 2025) tackles the these questions by looking at the experiences of a wide range of Americans, Black and white, in the cities occupied by the British during the American Revolution. Why the household? Because this was the primary social and economic unit of the day, a site where people during the war encountered unprecedented threats to their sense of social order. By looking at households, we gain not only an intimate view of the experience of war, but also a sweeping interpretation of the effects of war on American understandings of gender and power.

Some Americans saw military occupation as a threat, full stop. It challenged men’s senses of power and authority over their families, and the ever-present threat of rape hovered over women and girls. But because occupation could loosen some of the patriarchal control in the household, it could also offer tempting new opportunities. Free and enslaved Black people could take advantage of the disruptions to make calculated moves to gain freedom—or more freedom than they currently enjoyed. Black and white women could hope for a different kind of freedom when they forged relationships with military men. In all, The Home Front reveals entire worlds of young women, British officers, anxious patriarchs, enslaved Black women, German soldiers, and wives struggling to survive while their husbands or sons languished in prison or served in the military. And when the book turns to the postwar era, it reveals a stunning assessment of how those experiences of military occupation altered Americans’ views of household social order. As a result, Duval’s book does something unusual: it threads the needle between military history and the history of gender, women, and sexuality.

Join us for this conversation between Lauren Duval and Carolyn Eastman (The Strange Genius of Mr. O and President of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic) and get a glimpse into the experience of living during wartime.