Home-Front Heroines
‘Founding Mothers,’ by Cokie Roberts
Ten
years ago, Cokie Roberts, the political commentator and contributor to
National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition,” published “Founding Mothers:
The Women Who Raised Our Nation.” Now she has distilled that much longer
work about women’s roles at the time of the American Revolution to
create “Founding Mothers: Remembering the Ladies,” a picture book
intended for children from 7 to 12, engagingly illustrated by Diane
Goode.
Among
the women Roberts profiles are first ladies Martha Washington, Abigail
Adams and Dolley Madison; Benjamin Franklin’s wife, Deborah, who ran the
postal service for years while Franklin was overseas; and Esther
DeBerdt Reed, an Englishwoman who, after moving with her American
husband to Boston, became so loyal to the Revolution that she wrote a
rousing newspaper article, “Sentiments of an American Woman,”
encouraging support of the troops.
Though
most of these “ladies” were from relatively elite backgrounds, Roberts
includes the prodigy-poet Phillis Wheatley, a slave who was educated and
eventually freed by the family who bought her. Roberts also writes
shorter entries on women who gained fame as “warriors” for the
Revolutionary cause, like Deborah Sampson (disguised as “Robert
Shurtleff,” she fought in the Army until a doctor discovered her secret)
and Margaret Corbin (after her husband was killed in the Battle of Fort
Washington, she manned his artillery position despite suffering gunshot
wounds).
Roberts
describes her ladies as fully as she can, given the picture-book format
and the sometimes limited historical record. As she notes, women’s
letters were rarely preserved; Martha Washington burned most of her
correspondence with her husband after his death, though John Adams’s
animated correspondence with Abigail Adams survived.
Throughout,
Roberts’s style and tone is warm and casual, bringing a feeling of
immediacy to distant 18th-century lives: “These women were feisty and
funny and flirty. And they were great patriots — completely devoted to
the American cause.” She marvels that Eliza Lucas Pinckney, who as a
teenager ran her father’s three plantations, figured out, when none of
her neighbors could, how to grow indigo, in great demand as a textile
dye. “Indigo,” Roberts says, “became the biggest money-making crop in
South Carolina before the American Revolution, and a 19-year-old girl
had made that happen.”
Much
better than contemporary paintings could do, Goode’s illustrations, in
of-the-era pen and ink, help define the spirit of the women whose lives
Roberts sketches. With their determined, amused glances and double
chins, they look well prepared for the task of nation-building. In
places, realism shifts toward fancy: Mercy Otis Warren, an influential
writer, appears sitting in the leaves of an open book, sheets of
foolscap fluttering out from under her busy quill. Goode studied her
subjects’ handwriting so thoroughly that Roberts teases, in an
afterword, “She could start a new career as a counterfeiter.” You don’t
have to be a graphologist to find interesting and suggestive the
differences between Martha Washington’s unsteady schoolgirl signature
and Phillis Wheatley’s elegant, carefully slanted one.
There’s
so much that’s entertaining and inspiring in “Founding Mothers” that
it’s too bad the book’s structure makes it less useful than it might be.
On one hand, the sophistication of the text makes it appropriate for
older children, but in general, children interested in its stories will
have grown out of reading picture books. And with no table of contents,
the ordering of the biographical entries feels haphazard and difficult
to navigate. A reader interested in Phillis Wheatley, for example, would
have no way of knowing she was included in the book without flipping
through it page by page. Roberts provides a short list of online
resources for further research, which is helpful, but a student
preparing a history project or simply curious to learn more would need
footnotes. Yet Roberts certainly succeeds in providing an accessible and
very attractive introduction to the entrepreneurial, resolute, daring
and brave ladies of the Revolution, whom George Washington attested were
“in the number of the best patriots America can boast.”