Remember the Ladies: Women of the Revolution opens with a charge that was equal parts plea and warning. In 1776, Abigail Adams wrote to her husband John: “remember the ladies.” The founding documents did not. But the women Abigail was speaking of—educated, well-connected, and operating almost entirely outside the formal structures of government and law — did not stop acting because they were not formally recognized.

This exhibition gathers their portraits into a single room at the Webb Deane Stevens Museum: a place already inseparable from the story of the Revolution, where Colonel Samuel Blachley Webb was born and lived, and where Washington and Rochambeau planned the campaign that would end the war. The portraits are the window. The women are the subject. Betty Washington Lewis, George Washington’s sister and a formidable patriot in her own right. Margaret Beekman Livingston, matriarch of one of New York’s most powerful political families, rendered in a celebrated portrait by Gilbert Stuart. Queen Charlotte, who called herself “political despite myself” as the empire she steadied from behind the throne fractured across an ocean. Grace Sexias Nathan, a woman of keen intellect and wide correspondence in Philadelphia’s Sephardic Jewish community. And Elizabeth Saltonstall Deane, whose 1762 portrait by Joseph Blackburn is part of the Museum’s own permanent collection. Deane organized the women of Wethersfield to provision General Putnam’s army while her husband negotiated the French alliance in Paris, and died at thirty-four without knowing the outcome of the war she had quietly helped sustain. This is not a story told from a single side. It includes Patriots and Loyalists alike, because the common thread is not allegiance but agency: the ways in which each of these women used the position she occupied to effect remarkable change.

Curator TR Revella-Hamilton notes “We have gathered a small but diverse collection of portraiture that is intended to literally put faces to names that are often glazed over in history. Their stories are powerful and extraordinary but at their core exceedingly human.”

During their own lifetimes, some of these women knew each other’s worlds and moved through overlapping social circles. Brought together now for the first time, their individual stories illuminate one another in ways no single portrait can accomplish alone. The result is something greater than the sum of its parts: a universe of women who were indispensable to the creation of the United States of America.

On view May through December.