The experiences of Grace Growden Galloway (1727– 1782) illustrate the challenges Loyalists faced when they remained in the colonies during the American Revolution. Her wartime diary, kept in Philadelphia from 1778 until 1781, reveals how the absence of male family members and the hardships of military conflict transformed women's daily lives. For Galloway, American independence meant poverty, abandonment, loss of social precedence, and the devastating disappearance of the prewar world she had known.

Galloway's father, Lawrence Growden, was a prominent businessman, landowner, and politician with considerable influence in Pennsylvania. In 1753 she married Joseph Galloway, a successful lawyer, who converted to Anglicanism from Quakerism in order to marry her. Galloway's earliest writings convey the turbulence of her marriage, as in these lines from a poem: "never get Tyed to a Man / for when once you are yoked / Tis all a Mere Joke / of...