“Military spouse” usually implies holding the home front together while the military member deploys to the war zone. Historically, though, that line could get blurry fast. Before there were TRICARE cards and TDY became a calendar staple, spouses followed armies, worked the camps, and sometimes found themselves in the kind of “do something or die” moment that would turn anyone into a combatant.
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Some of these milspouses may not have been official soldiers when they fought, but the battlefield didn’t care about paperwork.
1. Margaret Corbin
When the Revolutionary War came to Fort Washington in 1776, Margaret Corbin was there with her husband, John Corbin, who served in the Pennsylvania artillery. During the fighting, John was killed or incapacitated, and Margaret stepped in, helping not only operate the cannon, but doing it so well that her rate of fire turned her crew into a target for the British. She fought on until she was severely wounded, her arm and face shredded by shrapnel.
She later became the first woman known to receive a military pension from the United States, which is about as close as the early republic got to saying, “Yeah, you earned it.”
2. Mary Ludwig Hays McCauley
You’ve heard the legend: “Molly Pitcher” hauls water to overheated gunners at the Battle of Monmouth in 1778, then takes a place on the gun crew when her husband collapses. The truth is messier (history usually is). Molly Pitcher appears to be a folk name that may have blended more than one real woman’s story, but Mary Ludwig Hays McCauley is one of the strongest candidates linked to the Monmouth cannon tale.
She was married to artilleryman William Hays and present with the army that day. Even allowing for myth-making, what’s clear is that camp followers were in the blast radius, and some of them did take up the work of the gun line.
3. Sarah A. Bowman
The Mexican-American War had its own brand of hard living, and even harder fighting, and Sarah Bowman (also known as Sarah Borginnis) lived right in it. She attached herself to the U.S. Army after her husband Charles enlisted, working as a laundress and camp follower. But even after he fell ill and was evacuated, she went on to Fort Brown in the Nueces Strip, the disputed area between the U.S. and Mexico,
When the Mexican Army bombarded the 7th Infantry at Fort Brown, Sarah didn’t take cover with the other women. She kept right on cooking for the defenders and even had her bonnet shot off for her trouble. When Gen. Zachary Taylor crossed into Mexico, she went along with them, delivering food and water in the middle of combat. Even after the war ended, she became known as the “roughest fighter on the Rio Grande.”
4. Agustina de Aragón
In 1808, during the Peninsular War, Zaragoza became the scene of a grinding street fight against Napoleon’s invading forces. Agustina de Aragón, the 22-year-old wife of an artilleryman, became famous for stepping into the breach at the Portillo gate. She was there to deliver bread to the men fighting to defend the gateway to the city.
When she arrived at the Portillo, the scene she saw was her comrades being cut down by French troops. Instead of breaking away from the melee, she climbed over the corpses of her friends, loaded a cannon, and fired it point-blank into the oncoming French. Agustina was decorated for her actions but was also painted by the famous Romantic Francisco de Goya.
5. Anita Garibaldi
Anita Garibaldi (born Ana Maria de Jesus Ribeiro) is a hero to both Brazil and Italy—for good reason. She was married to the legendary Giuseppe Garibaldi, a military leader who was later dubbed the “hero of two worlds.” First married at 14, to a different man, that husband abandoned her to join Brazil’s Imperial Army. Seven years later, she met Garibaldi. A month later, she was fighting alongside him.
Anita earned a similar honorific over the seven years with her husband because she wasn’t a mere spectator to his wars; she rode, fought, escaped capture, and followed campaigns across South America and into Italy’s revolutions, just as he did. She even gave birth along the way. She died in her husband’s arms after retreating from the French siege of Rome.
6. Mariya Oktyabrskaya
Mariya Oktyabrskaya was a Soviet military spouse who wasn’t a soldier at first. After learning her husband had been killed by the Nazis near Kiev, she sold her possessions and used her savings to buy her own tank, requesting that she be allowed to drive it herself.
She trained and went to the front as a driver and mechanic in her own T-34, which she famously nicknamed “Fighting Girlfriend,” and fought with the Red Army. She was mortally wounded (also near Kiev) and died after being evacuated. She was later honored as a Hero of the Soviet Union, the Red Army’s highest award.
