Susanna Willard Johnson was a historian, writer, mother, and survivor who made a home on the New Hampshire frontier despite war, captivity, and poverty. Her Indian captivity narrative is one of the most thoroughly detailed, politically astute, and historically accurate of the genre. Writing her narrative in 1796, almost forty years after her captivity among the Abenaki and French in New France at a time when the new republic was just testing its federal powers, Johnson exposed the injustice of women's social and political disenfranchisement, speaking for the thousands of American women who could not speak for themselves.

Born in Groton, Massachusetts, on 20 February 1730, Susanna Willard was the daughter of Lt. Moses Willard and Susanna Hastings Willard. Lieutenant Willard was descended from Maj. Simon Willard, the original purchaser of Concord, Massachusetts, from the Indians. In 1742 Moses Willard moved his family to the sparsely settled wilderness where stockade Fort Number...