The Jewish people were redeemed from Egypt because of the righteous women. According to Sotah 11b, Rav Avira taught that while the men had given up hope under Pharaoh's slavery, the women sustained the nation through ingenuity, devotion, and defiance.
When the women went to draw water from the river, God sent small fish into their pitchers—half water, half fish. They heated two pots: one of warm water to bathe their husbands, one of fish to feed them. Then they went to the fields where the men labored, washed them, anointed them with oil, fed them, and lay with them between the sheepfolds.
The proof text is (Psalms 68:14): "When you lie among the sheepfolds, the wings of the dove are covered with silver." The intimate acts between husband and wife in the fields—defying Pharaoh's design to separate families and break the people's will—earned Israel the plunder of Egypt. Silver and gold for silver and gold.
When these women became pregnant, they returned home. When the time came to give birth, they went to the fields and delivered beneath the apple trees. God Himself sent angels to tend the newborns—washing them, oiling them, providing them with honey and oil, as it says (Deuteronomy 32:13): "He suckled them with honey from the rock and oil from the flinty stone."
When the Egyptians discovered the children, they tried to kill them by plowing the fields. But God hid the babies underground, and they emerged later like the grass of the field (Ezekiel 16:7). When they grew, they came home in flocks. And when God appeared at the Red Sea, these same children recognized Him first: "This is my God, and I will glorify Him" (Exodus 15:2). They knew God because God had nursed them in the dirt.