Founding Mothers

by Cokie Roberts

Overview

While the "fathers" were off founding the country, what were the women doing? Running their husband’s businesses, raising their children plus providing political information and advice. At least that’s what Abigail Adams did for John, starting when he went off to the Continental Congress, which eventually declared the independence of the American colonies from the British. While the men were writing the rebellious words, the women were living the revolution, with the Redcoats on their doorsteps. John’s advice to Abigail as the soldiers approached Braintree: if necessary "fly to the woods with our children." That was it, she was on her own, as she was for most of the next ten years while Adams represented the newly independent nation abroad.

Abigail Adams is the best known of the women who influenced the founders, but there are many more, starting with Martha Washington, who once referred to herself as a “prisoner of state” for the constraints placed on her as the first First Lady. She was the one charged with balancing the demands of a Republic of the "common man" on the one hand, while insisting on some modicum of courtliness and protocol so that the former colonies would be taken seriously by Europe. She also took political heat in the press from the president’s political opponents when he was too popular to criticize.

And there are women like Esther Reed, married to the president of Pennsylvania, who, with Benjamin Franklin’s daughter Sarah Bache, organized a drive to raise money for Washington’s troops at Valley Forge. In 1780 the women raised more than three hundred thousand dollars. Reed wrote a famous patriotic broadside titled The Sentiments of an American Woman, calling on women to wear simpler clothing and hairstyles in order to save money to contribute to the cause. It worked! The women who ran the boarding houses of Philadelphia where the men stayed while writing the now sacred documents of America had their quite considerable say about the affairs of state as well.

This will be the story of some of those women, as learned through their seldom seen letters and diaries, and the letters from the men to them. It will be a story of the beginnings of the nation as viewed from the distaff side.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062152039
Publisher:	Harper Perennial
Publication date:	06/13/2016
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.96(d)

About the Author

Cokie Roberts is a political commentator for ABC News and a senior news analyst for NPR. In addition to broadcasting, Roberts, along with her husband, Steven V. Roberts, writes a weekly column syndicated in newspapers across the country by United Media. She is the bestselling author of From This Day Forward, Founding Mothers, and Ladies of Liberty, and she lives with her husband in Bethesda, Maryland.

Read an Excerpt

Founding Mothers
The Women Who Raised Our Nation

Chapter One

Before 1775:
The Road to Revolution

Stirrings of Discontent

When you hear of a family with two brothers who fought heroically in the Revolutionary War, served their state in high office, and emerged as key figures in the new American nation, don't you immediately think, "They must have had a remarkable mother"? And so Charles Cotesworth Pinckney and Thomas Pinckney did. Today Eliza Lucas Pinckney would be the subject of talkshow gabfests and made-for-TV movies, a child prodigy turned into a celebrity. In the eighteenth century she was seen as just a considerate young woman performing her duty, with maybe a bit too much brainpower for her own good.

George Lucas brought his English wife and daughters to South Carolina in 1734 to claim three plantations left to him by his father. Before long, however, Lucas left for Antigua to rejoin his regiment in fighting the war against Spain, leaving his sixteen-year-old daughter in charge of all the properties, plus her ailing mother and toddler sister. (The Lucas sons were at school in England.) Can you imagine a sixteen-year-old girl today being handed those responsibilities? Eliza Lucas willingly took them on. Because she reported to her father on her management decisions and developed the habit of copying her letters, Eliza's writings are some of the few from colonial women that have survived.

The South Carolina Low Country, where Eliza was left to fend for the family, was known for its abundance of rice and mosquitoes. Rice supported the plantation owners and their hundreds of slaves; mosquitoes sent the owners into Charleston (then Charles Town) for summer months of social activities. Though Wappoo Plantation, the Lucas home, was only six miles from the city by water, seventeen by land, Eliza was far too busy, and far too interested in her agricultural experiments, to enjoy the luxuries of the city during the planting months.

The decision about where to live was entirely hers (again, can you imagine leaving that kind of decision to a sixteen-year-old?), as Eliza wrote to a friend in England in 1740: "My Papa and Mama's great indulgence to me leaves it to me to choose our place of residence either in town or country." She went on to describe her arduous life: "I have the business of three plantations to transact, which requires much writing and more business and fatigue of other sorts than you can imagine. But least you should imagine it too burdensome to a girl at my early time of life, give me leave to answer you: I assure you I think myself happy that I can be useful to so good a father, and by rising very early I find I can go through much business." And she did. Not only did she oversee the planting and harvesting of the crops on the plantations, but she also taught her sister and some of the slave children, pursued her own intellectual education in French and English, and even took to lawyering to help poor neighbors. Eliza seemed to know that her legal activities were a bit over the line, as she told a friend: "If you will not laugh immoderately at me I'll trust you with a secret. I have made two wills already." She then defended herself, explaining that she'd studied carefully what was required in will making, adding: "After all what can I do if a poor creature lies a dying and their family taken it into their head that I can serve them. I can't refuse; but when they are well and able to employ a lawyer, I always shall." The teenager had clearly made quite an impression in the Low Country.

The Lucases were land-rich but cash-poor, so Eliza's father scouted out some wealthy prospects as husband material for his delightful daughter. The young woman was having none of it. Her father's attempts to marry her off to a man who could help pay the mortgage were completely and charmingly rebuffed in a letter written when she was eighteen. "As you propose Mr. L. to me, I am sorry I can't have sentiments favorable enough of him to take time to think on the subject ... and beg leave to say to you that the riches of Peru and Chile if he had them put together could not purchase a sufficient esteem for him to make him my husband." So much for her father's plan to bring some money into the family. She then dismissed another suggestion for a mate: "I have so slight a knowledge of him I can form no judgment of him." Eliza insisted that "a single life is my only choice ... as I am yet but eighteen." Of course, many women her age were married, and few would have brushed off their fathers so emphatically, but the feisty Miss Lucas was, despite the workload, having too much fun to settle down with some rich old coot.

Eliza loved "the vegetable world," as she put it, and experimented with different kinds of crops, always with a mind toward commerce. She was keenly aware that the only cash crop South Carolina exported to England was rice, and she was determined to find something else to bring currency into the colony and to make the plantations profitable. When she was nineteen, she wrote that she had planted a large fig orchard "with design to dry and export them." She was always on the lookout for something that would grow well in the southern soil. Reading her Virgil,she was happily surprised to find herself "instructed in agriculture ... for I am persuaded though he wrote in and for Italy, it will in many instances suit Carolina."

By her own account, Eliza was always cooking up schemes. She wrote to her friend Mary Bartlett: "I am making a large plantation of oaks which I look upon as my own property, whether my father gives me the land or not."

Founding Mothers
The Women Who Raised Our Nation. Copyright © by Cokie Roberts. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Reading Group Guide

Introduction

"While the men were busy founding the nation, what were the women up to?" Cokie Roberts answers this question in Founding Mothers, a revealing and remarkable book that chronicles the American Revolution through the eyes of its unsung heroes.

They were wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters. They were patriots, politicians, and philosophers. Though their signatures don't appear on the Declaration of Independence, their influence on the founding of the nation was as instrumental as that of the men whose names are inked in history.

From Abigail Adams and Martha Washington to lesser-known figures like Catharine Littlefield Greene and Sally Livingston Jay, Roberts unfolds the stories of our Founding Mothers -- the women who tended home and hearth often under dire circumstances, ran farms and businesses, fought on the front lines of battle, wrote propaganda that called a nation to arms, acted as spies, and raised money for the troops. In many instances, their political and social sentiments proved more insightful than those of the men in the Continental Congress.

In Founding Mothers, Roberts gives voice to women who faced an uncertain future, believed in the revolutionary concept of a democratic society, and offered a steady hand to guide the fledgling nation. She weaves together anecdotes, diary excerpts, and correspondence; draws on military records, newspaper accounts, songs, and poetry; and intersperses her own insightful commentary throughout.

In a letter to her husband, Abigail Adams pondered whether future generations would care about the personal sacrifices they and others had made on behalf of the nation. "Posterity who are to reap the blessings," she wrote, "will scarcely be able to conceive the hardships and sufferings of their ancestors." More than two hundred years after she penned these words, Founding Mothers makes it clear that the nation we know today would not exist without the bravery, foresight, and steadfastness of Abigail Adams and her compatriots. These are the women who raised our nation.

Questions for Discussion

1. What inspired you to read Founding Mothers? Why do you suppose the contributions of women in the Revolutionary era have been largely overlooked by historians? Would the founding of the nation have occurred without these women?


2. Which woman would you say had the single greatest impact during the Revolution? How about during the first years of the new government?


3. Despite a lack of legal and social rights, including the right to own property and receive a formal education, how did the women presented in Founding Mothers assert their authority and exercise their intelligence?


4. How did life differ for women depending on where they lived—the North versus the South, the city versus rural areas? How else did geographical circumstances impact their lives?


5. Women often accompanied their husbands to army camps during the war, including Martha Washington, Kitty Greene, and Lucy Knox. Were you surprised they chose to do this? How did these three women in particular contribute to the often harsh life of a military camp and foster the war efforts?


6. By telling the stories of our Founding Mothers, this book also sheds light on the men of the time. Did you learn anything new about these men, including Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton, seeing them from the perspective of their female contemporaries?


7. How important was the "civilizing" role that women played in the years leading up to, during, and after the Revolution? Can you reference examples from the book that show how integral it was for the women to be able to step in and "calm down the men," or even to act as intermediaries, as Abigail Adams did in the dispute between her husband and James Madison?


8. Catharine Macaulay supported the American Revolution and was a vocal proponent of democratic governments in general. Why did Macaulay, an Englishwoman, take such an interest in the American cause? How did she contribute to it?


9. How did Martha Washington define the role of First Lady? Are her influences still evident today? Her political savvy was remarkable, but is there anything that can be learned from Martha Washington on a personal level?


10. Only a limited number of women could have accomplished what Abigail Adams and Mercy Otis Warren did -- those who had access to the men shaping the future of the nation. What about the women who didn't have the advantage of providing direct counsel or publishing their discourses? How did they contribute to the Revolutionary War and the founding of the nation?


11. Cokie Roberts intersperses her thoughts and commentary throughout the book. Does this enhance the narrative? In what ways?

About the Author

Cokie Roberts, author of We Are Our Mothers' Daughters, is the political commentator for ABC News and serves as Senior News Analyst for National Public Radio. From 1996-2002 she and Sam Donaldson co-anchored the weekly ABC interview program This Week. Roberts co-authored From This Day Forward with her husband Steven V. Roberts, and together they write a weekly column syndicated in newspapers around the country by United Media and serve as contributing editors to USA Weekend.

Editorial Reviews

Exploiting a wide range of historical evidence from military records to recipes, private correspondence, pamphlets and songs, Roberts succeeds in presenting something entirely new on a topic seemingly otherwise exhausted … Founding Mothers is a welcome addition to American Revolution biography, which is saturated by the lives of the Founding Fathers. It fills in blanks and adds substance, detail and dimension to what until now has seemed a strangely distant and utterly masculine mythology.
— USA Today

Maria Fish

Founding Mothers is essentially a series of entertaining mini-biographies and engaging vignettes. Roberts fleshes out familiar textbook figures like Abigail Adams or Dolley Madison, and rescues more obscure women from the footnotes of academic dissertations.
— The New York Times

Amanda Fortini

With Founding Mothers, Roberts fills a gap in our coverage of the era without straying far from the familiar story of colonial resistance, the struggle for independence and the climactic writing of the U.S. Constitution. We don't lose sight of the white male titans who built the nation; we just see them from the vantage point of the women they wooed and the families they worried about -- usually at a distance -- during America's longest war. — Joyce Appleby

The Washington Post

Finally, an account of the essential roles American Colonial women played as 13 British colonies became the United States of America. The author’s unique political background and her political reporting expertise--her mother and father were members of Congress, and her sister was mayor of Princeton, New Jersey--serve her well. Combining new and invaluable historical information with wry asides (no one conveys more with a one-word commentary), Roberts makes historical figures become real people, sometimes flawed but immensely heroic. Abigail Adams stars, and Martha Washington shines as an admirable woman whose financial and emotional support of her husband just may have made all the difference. While the Colonial music at each CD’s beginning becomes annoying, this audiobook delights as it increases our historical knowledge of this crucially important era. L.C. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine

AUG/ SEP 04 - AudioFile

Finally, an account of the essential roles American Colonial women played as 13 British colonies became the United States of America. The author’s unique political background and her political reporting expertise--her mother and father were members of Congress, and her sister was mayor of Princeton, New Jersey--serve her well. Combining new and invaluable historical information with wry asides (no one conveys more with a one-word commentary), Roberts makes historical figures become real people, sometimes flawed but immensely heroic. Abigail Adams stars, and Martha Washington shines as an admirable woman whose financial and emotional support of her husband just may have made all the difference. While the Colonial music at each CD’s beginning becomes annoying, this audiobook delights as it increases our historical knowledge of this crucially important era. L.C. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine

AUG/SEP 04 - AudioFile