Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation

“I came to the conclusion that there’s nothing unique about them. They did—with great hardship, courage, pluck, prayerfulness, sadness, joy, energy, and humor—what women do. They put one foot in front of the other in remarkable circumstances. They carried on. They are truly our Founding Mothers.” 

In some respects, the Founding Mothers were exceptional, both in terms of the remarkable times through which they lived and the contributions they made to American independence. However, Roberts asserts that, on another level, they are not exceptional. Rather, they accomplished the vital but unacknowledged and uncelebrated work that women have done throughout history.

“Eliza possessed money, education, and the confidence of first her father and then her husband. And because she was single or widowed most of her life, her legal rights were considerably greater than those of married women. She also carried far fewer babies than most and lost only one. All of those advantages set her apart from the vast majority of colonial women.”

Roberts is the first to acknowledge that Founding Mothers cannot tell the tales of everyday colonial women. Most women of the period left no written evidence, and accounts of their lives are rare. Instead, the book tells the stories of the remarkable women, those whose circumstances and privileges marked them out as much as their actions and whose relationships with prominent men ensured that their correspondences and other written works were preserved. 

“The men handled relations with England—deciding whether to declare independence and what kind of government should be formed; the women handled pretty much everything else.”

Historical studies of the American Revolution, perhaps understandably, focus primarily on the actions of the Founding Fathers. However, while the complex political negotiations and military engagements are certainly of great significance, Roberts asserts that it is vital that we consider what women were doing behind the scenes. After all, as she observes, that includes almost every other aspect of life in the colonies.

“[H]e had been gone ten years and was ready to remain in London indefinitely. But he didn’t stay through spring, because Deborah died in December. He had to go home to tend to all of the affairs she had managed for so long.”

A study of Deborah Read’s marriage to Benjamin Franklin reveals how her ceaseless efforts in various areas of his life allowed him to serve as one of the Founding Fathers. Had she not helped improve his finances, he would not have been able to pursue public service, and had she not continued to manage his business interests and other endeavors, he would not have been able to so readily move to London. Indeed, it was only when she died and he suddenly had to take charge of his affairs again that he returned to America after decades in Britain.  

“It would be a mistake to see Mercy Warren as some latter-day feminist; she regularly defended the ‘domestic sphere’ as the proper place for women. While she was plotting and propagandizing she was also pursuing the ‘womanly arts.’” 

The period around the Revolutionary War was a time of great change, and perceptions of women’s roles reflected this change. During the upheaval of the war, women began to take on greater responsibilities, and some called for rights and access to education. However, there were also reactionary calls for women to remain in the home and pursue traditional domestic activities. Mercy Warren represents both of these forces in one person: She moved out of the domestic sphere to act as a key propagandist for the Patriots while also insisting that the domestic sphere was a woman’s rightful place. 

“I long to hear that you have declared an independency—and by the way in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would remember the ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember all men would be tyrants if they could.” 

Abigail Adams was an ardent advocate for women’s rights and often wrote to her husband, John Adams, about this cause. In this famous extract, she reminded John of the abuse husbands often enacted against their wives and prompted him to build greater protections for women into any new legislation. Although her comment is often seen as part of a joking exchange, Roberts believes that Abigail was serious in her message, genuinely believing that John needed to be reminded to provide greater legal provision for women’s rights. 

“We dare not exert our power in its full latitude We are obliged to go fair, and softly, and in practice you know we are the subjects. We have only the name of masters, and rather than give up this, which would completely subject us to the despotism of the petticoat, I hope General Washington and all our brave heroes would fight.” 

John Adams is often seen as quite amenable to women’s rights—after all, he readily praised Abigail’s intelligence and political sense and regularly sought her advice and counsel. However, his response to Abigail’s suggestion that he should make more of an effort to ensure that women were legally, constitutionally protected from men’s abuses failed to acknowledge the scale of the difficulties women faced: He laughed the matter off with a suggestion that women hold the real power. 

“She had spent the fall and early winter back at Mount Vernon turning it into a fabric factory. In contrast to her life at camp, at home Martha had the service of many slaves, and there’s no evidence that she ever questioned the institution of slavery, though George Washington eventually did.”

Several of the Founding Mothers had access to slaves owned by their husbands or fathers. Many of their more impressive feats, such as Martha Washington’s production of fabric for soldiers’ clothing or Eliza Pinckney’s revolutionizing of South Carolina’s economy and agricultural practices, relied on the labor of enslaved people who worked their plantations and maintained their homes.

“Cold, hungry, sick, and dirty men threatened desertion, chanting, ‘No bread, no soldier.’ Washington’s position as commander in chief was threatened as well, so Martha had her work cut out for her when she arrived on the scene.” 

Although George Washington is widely celebrated for his military campaigns, Martha’s essential work in boosting the morale of the soldiers is often overlooked. In organizing sewing circles and traveling to military camps to provide care for needy soldiers, she brought traditionally feminine forms of support to the masculine world of the military camps, pushing on the boundaries of women’s roles.  

“It was not just that they were making it all work at home, they were also passionate patriots themselves, engaged in government and the war just as their husbands, sons, brothers, fathers, and friends were.” 

The behind-the-scenes work women undertook every day was essential to maintaining normal life under exceptional circumstances. In some respects, they carried out this work out of a traditional sense of duty to the family and the home, but, beyond that, women were motivated by a sense of patriotic duty and a commitment to the struggle for independence that was just as fervent as that of the men in their lives.

“‘I have just received…the account of my losses and your almost ruined fortunes by the enemy, a severe blow!’ The British had gutted Eliza’s house, burned Thomas’s place, and taken the slaves.”

British troops regularly looted and even took over colonists’ houses and properties. However, Roberts offers us a particularly striking example by returning to Eliza Pinckney, first introduced as a fiercely independent 16-year-old girl in the first chapter. Having continued to run three plantations and having now been widowed for 20 years, Eliza has her whole life turned over by the British Army, leaving us with a sorry ending to her story. 

“It was a call to action. In remembering female heroines of the past, the broadside exhorted women of the present to sacrifice some luxuries for the ‘armies which defend our lives, our possessions, our liberty.’” 

Esther DeBerdt’s 1780 article “The Sentiments of an America Woman” provides a key example of women feeling a sense of duty to the fledgling nation and the struggle for independence. Calling for women to forgo luxuries to raise money to provide a morale-boosting treat for the troops, it represents one of the many ways women found to support a cause they believed in as passionately as their men. 

“I think the cause in which he is engaged so just, so glorious, and I hope so victorious that private interest and pleasure may and ought to be given up, without a murmur.” 

Esther DeBerdt’s letter to her brother also provides a key example of women’s sense of patriotic duty. Discussing losing out on her husband’s considerable income while he was serving as an officer in the army, she passionately declared that she believed the cause entirely justified such sacrifices, a sentiment that other women widely shared. 

“I can hear of the brilliant accomplishment of any of my sex with pleasure…. At the same I regret the trifling narrow contracted education of the females of my own country.” 

Despite knowing that his wife had long called for greater education for American women, John Adams wrote to Abigail from Paris celebrating French women’s education. Understandably frustrated by his inability to recognize the contradictions of his statement, she declares her joy at French women’s liberty before somewhat acerbically reminding him that she still wishes American women could enjoy the same rights, something over which he actually has some power. 

“Deprived of a voice in legislation, obliged to submit to those laws which are imposed upon us, is it not sufficient to make us indifferent to the public welfare? Yet all history and every age exhibit instance of patriotic virtue in the female sex; which considering our situation equals the most heroic of yours.” 

Abigail Adams frequently presented the not inconsiderable sacrifices she made for the republican cause as a matter of duty, suggesting that holding things together and maintaining normal life without her husband’s support was a key way in which women could contribute to the revolution. She went further to suggest that such actions were at least as patriotic as the more widely celebrated acts of men because women were sacrificing so much for a country that still did not grant them basic rights. 

“Though some women expressed their distress at the repeated pregnancies, it was what women expected, and the men didn’t seem willing to do anything about it. That started to change at the end of the eighteenth century, perhaps as a result of women feeling somewhat more in charge of family decisions after their wartime experience forced them to take charge of so much else.” 

During the Revolutionary War, with so many men absent from their homes, women took on far more responsibilities. Just as during the Second World War, when women’s involvement in wartime industries helped boost a call for greater access to work and other opportunities, this dynamic resulted in a call for more independence and autonomy. One of the many ways this manifested was in women taking more control of reproductive decisions and moving away from the dangerous and exhausting cycle of pregnancy and childrearing that had previously been the norm.

“The plan of reading which I have formed for her is considerably different from what I think would be most proper for her sex in any other country than America. I am obliged in it to…consider her as possibly the head of a little family of her own. The chance that in marriage she will draw a blockhead I calculate at about fourteen to one.”

Defying conventions of the period, Thomas Jefferson drew up a detailed educational curriculum for his daughter Patsy, including English, French, drawing, letter writing, music, and dancing. A key motivation for this was to empower her to take on more responsibilities than women were traditionally expected to adopt, albeit because he was worried that she would marry an unintelligent man who could not serve as head of her family.

“Patsy’s father also instructed her in personal appearance: ‘Nothing is so disgusting to our sex as a want of cleanliness and delicacy in yours. I hope therefore the moment you rise from bed, your first work will be to dress yourself in such a style that you be seen by any gentleman without his being able to discover a pin amiss.’”

Although Jefferson appeared to be trying to empower his daughter to take on greater responsibilities, he also insisted on her conforming to the expectation that she appear physically perfect at all times. To modern eyes, Jefferson’s approach may seem contradictory, but it can also be seen as reflecting a difficult period of transition around women’s roles and the combination of revolutionary and reactionary attitudes present at the time. 

“It lashed out at the very idea of representative government, saying of the legislators, ‘the people have an undoubted right to reject their decisions, to call for a revision of their conduct, to depute others in their room.’ The Old Patriot echoed the words of the Declaration of Independence in her assertion of ‘unalienable rights’ and insisted that ‘the origin of all power is in the people, and that they have an incontestable right to check the creatures of their own creation,’ meaning the elected officials.” 

Although Mercy Warren disappeared from public life at the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, taking her husband with her, she returned to political life at the time of the Constitutional Convention. However, now she was opposing many of her friends and correspondents, questioning the practice of meeting behind closed doors and, ultimately, critiquing the content of the Constitution itself. Always an outspoken advocate for the freedoms and rights of “the people,” she believed that a centralized government would be an imposition on a continent as vast as America and that the new government set out by her old comrades would result in an easily corrupted oligarchy, providing too few people with too much power. 

“But she didn’t need lessons in political savvy—the wealthy Mrs. Washington arrived wearing a homespun gown, a forerunner of Pat Nixon’s good Republican cloth coat.”

When Martha Washington became the first First Lady, her style of dress took on even more significance than women’s appearances usually did. To convey a sense of modesty, egalitarianism, and dedicated patriotic republicanism, she had to ensure that she dressed in homespun rather than expensive imported fabrics, so that she appeared suitably humble and deeply American. 

“Though much of it sounds silly, these weekly events served a purpose. Their formality seemed appropriate to diplomats and dignitaries accustomed to royal courts abroad. But they were open to all well-dressed comers, lending a democratic air to what came to be called the republican court.”

Martha Washington and the other women of court had to host and attend regular social events and to maintain appearances at all times. However, they were maintaining not only their own appearances but the appearance of the American government: The new American court had to strike a balance between appearing dignified and respectable for visiting diplomats and egalitarian and republican for American citizens, and Martha and the others help achieve this by setting a careful example through their social events. 

“‘They call me First Lady in the land and think I must be extremely happy,’ she would say almost bitterly at times and add, ‘They might more properly call me the Chief State Prisoner.’” 

Martha Washington not only had to host and attend ceaseless social events and be constantly aware of her appearance in public but also had to bow to Congress’s rules about not entertaining private guests or showing favoritism or prejudice. The rules proved so restrictive that she often complained of being more a prisoner of the nation than the First Lady. 

“In his account of the presidential years, George Washington Parke Custis recalled that veterans stopped by the house almost every day. His grandmother would greet the old soldiers, give them some food and maybe some money, and reminisce with them about old times.”

Just as she had back at the military camps, Martha Washington continued to support the soldiers of the Revolutionary War during her time as First Lady, and again this was a distinctly political act of great significance. Her support for the troops during the war had helped to stop them deserting or mutinying. Now, it helped to placate old soldiers who were angry with Congress for refusing to give them backpay. Once again, she was providing crucial, behind-the-scenes support for the cause.