In this episode, you will meet Jane Cuyler, a Savannah widow, business owner, and Patriot whose home supported the Liberty Boys during the American Revolution. Host Andrew Iden speaks with historians Lorri Glover and Cynthia A. Kierner about women in Revolutionary Georgia, the power and burdens of widowhood, and how historians recover lives that survive only in fragments.

Jane Cuyler Marker

Credit: Georgia Historical Society

 

In January 1781, Savannah remained under British control, and Royal Governor James Wright was pursuing residents accused of supporting the Patriot cause. Among those facing arrest was Jane Cuyler, a widow and boarding house operator whose home had provided a gathering place for the Liberty Boys. By the time authorities came looking for her, Cuyler had already left Georgia. She never returned, but a historical marker in Savannah’s Emmet Park still preserves her name.

Historians Lorri Glover and Cynthia A. Kierner join host Andrew Iden to place Cuyler’s life within the wider experiences of women in colonial and Revolutionary America. They examine how widowhood could give a woman legal authority while also bringing new financial and family responsibilities. They also explore the work women performed as business owners, consumers, political organizers, military support workers, and civilians living amid violence that often reached directly into their homes and communities.

Cuyler’s story also raises questions about who appears in the historical record and who remains outside it. Political papers, property documents, and official collections tend to preserve the lives of powerful men, while the experiences of many women, enslaved people, and Indigenous communities survive only in scattered references. By looking closely at what remains, and acknowledging what was never preserved, the episode presents the American Revolution as something lived not only in legislatures and battles, but also in homes, businesses, families, and private acts of resistance.