Pocahontas
Alice Proctor
Abigail Adams
Mercy Otis Warren
Catherine Moore Barry
Sybil Ludington
Nancy Hart
Esther de Berdt Reed
Margaret Cochran Corbin
Molly Pitcher
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Sacagawea
Any of those would work for me.
I’m partial to the first two, because I know I’m a direct descendent of number two, and according to family tradition, officially unproven, the first.
I doubt anyone here has heard of Alice Proctor, but in the earliest days at Jamestown, in the absence of her husband, who was in England on business, for many days she and her household held off the March 1622 Powhatan Indian attacks that killed a third of the white Virginians in the colony.
When the British officers finally arrived they told her she had to leave her plantation and go back to Jamestown, which could be defended. She told them NO. Finally they forced her to go by threatening to burn the place to the ground.
“We’re from the government and we’re here to help.”
Bah.
The natives/terrorists would never go anywhere near where she lived ever after, by the way. The Proctor family always had a reputation of being “well-armed.”
I’d go with Abigail Adams