Leona Vicario

Vicario was a wealthy orphan in Mexico City, educated far beyond what was usual for a woman of her class, and she used her inheritance to supply the insurgents: money, medicine, printing type, and gunsmiths whom she paid to leave the capital and join the rebel forces. She ran messages in code to the rebel leadership under an assumed name, and when the network was uncovered in 1813 she was arrested and imprisoned in a convent.

Insurgents disguised as officers got her out; she escaped on a mule, gave birth to her first daughter in a cave during the retreat, and spent the rest of the war with the rebel congress. When independence came, the government of the day repaid her confiscated fortune. Later, when a minister publicly sneered that she had acted for love rather than patriotism, she replied in the press that women are perfectly capable of acting on conviction, and that heroism is not a male preserve — a letter still quoted in Mexico. She was declared Sweetest Mother of the Nation at her state funeral, and lies in the Rotunda of Illustrious Persons.