The Widow Washington: The Life of Mary Washington

by Martha Saxton Narrated by Laural Merlington

Overview

The Widow Washington is the first life of Mary Ball Washington, George Washington's mother, based on archival sources. Her son's biographers have, for the most part, painted her as self-centered and crude, a trial and an obstacle to her oldest child.

But the records tell a very different story. Mary Ball, the daughter of a wealthy planter and a formerly indentured servant, was orphaned young and grew up working hard, practicing frugality and piety. Stepping into Virginia's upper class, she married an older man, the planter Augustine Washington, with whom she had five children before his death 11 years later. As a widow deprived of most of her late husband's properties, Mary struggled to raise her children, but managed to secure them places among Virginia's elite. In her later years, she and her wealthy son George had a contentious relationship, often disagreeing over money, with George dismissing as imaginary her fears of poverty and helplessness. Yet Mary Ball Washington had a greater impact on George than mothers of that time and place usually had on their sons.

Martha Saxton's The Widow Washington is a necessary and deeply insightful corrective, telling the story of Mary's long, arduous life on its own terms, and not treating her as her son's satellite.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

05/06/2019

Saxton (Being Good: Women’s Moral Values in Early America), a professor of history at Amherst, serves up an accessible and vivid exploration of the life of George Washington’s mother. Her perspective is sympathetic without ignoring Washington’s moral failings; she makes clear from the outset that Washington was a slaveholder who did not have an enlightened attitude towards the people she considered her property. Born in Virginia in either 1708 or 1709, by adolescence Washington had already lost both parents, a stepfather, and a half-brother; after she was widowed in 1743, she struggled to care for five children. Saxton documents Washington’s hard work ethic and devotion to her children, even when she disagreed with them (as when she thwarted 14-year-old George’s desire to join the British Navy). And she brings to life the social context of the time, in which, under Virginia law, women were plunged underwater if their husbands did not pay fines for their supposed slander and slavery was rampant (“Orphaned by the deaths and sales of parents, slave children lived in a culture in which... grief was everywhere and comfort rare.”). Although the absence of much primary source material forces Saxton to qualify many statements, she comes as close as anyone is likely to in accurately recounting Washington’s life. This complex, warts-and-all portrait brings a fresh angle to colonial American history. (June)

From the Publisher

Brilliant and gripping . . . Drawing on local histories and archaeology as well as letters, diaries and a broad knowledge of related historiography, The Widow Washington is a clear-eyed biography of the mother of our first president and a fascinating window into the generation before the American Revolution’s founding fathers and mothers. Ms. Saxton’s vivid storytelling transforms the considerable genealogical work behind this history into poignant drama.” —Kathleen DuVal, The Wall Street Journal

“Saxton creates a sensitive and plausible . . . picture that richly evokes Mary’s interior life and the world of a slaveholding widow and planter in eighteenth-century Virginia . . . In Saxton’s able hands, Mary Washington’s story vividly illuminates the role white women played in the creation and transmission of wealth in early America, the frictions that patriarchal inheritance created between mothers and sons, and the tremendous price paid by the enslaved people who made much of Virginia’s wealth possible.” —Marjoleine Kars, The Washington Post

“Saxton offers a sensitive, sharply drawn portrait of a resourceful woman whose early losses made her anxious and fearful for life . . . A sympathetic look at George Washington’s mother [and] a fresh perspective on Colonial America.” —Kirkus Reviews

“An accessible and vivid exploration of the life of George Washington’s mother . . . [Saxton] brings to life the social context of the time . . . [Despite] the absence of much primary source material . . . [Saxton] comes as close as anyone is likely to in accurately recounting [Mary] Washington’s life. This complex, warts-and-all portrait brings a fresh angle to colonial American history.” —Publishers Weekly

Product Details

BN ID:	2940174017184
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	10/22/2019
Edition description:	Unabridged

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