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Featured every Sunday in the
Living Section of the San Bernardino SUN
March 27, 2005 Issue

Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation
By Cokie Roberts, William Morrow
an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 2004

The Great Women Behind the Founding Fathers
It is fitting to end Women's History Month with making known the stories of the extraordinary women who made it possible for the Founding Fathers to make revolutions and write constitutions and well, to found this country.

Using journals and correspondence, political commentator Cokie Roberts uncovers in her bestseller, "Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation" the stories of the wives, mothers, daughters and sisters of the men who created the young United States.

With the exception of the stories of a few notorious women and women rulers like Catherine the Great of Russia and Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen off England, history books, being written from a male perspective, have ignored the role women have played in shaping pivotal historical events.

My personal quibble is with communist revolutionaries who in theory professed gender blindness and a belief that the only division of humanity is based on the class struggle; yet in reality engaged in diabolical destruction of the contributions of women revolutionaries like Alexandra Kollontai and Rosa Luxemburg.

But if we dig deeper, we find that without women, none of these men could have achieved the greatness for which they are remembered. The same is true with the women behind the men of the American Revolution.

"While the men were busy founding the nation, what were the women up to?" Roberts asked herself. And she started to dig into archives, journals, letters and even recipes. "It's safe to say," she states in the Introduction of "Founding Mothers," that most of the men who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, fought the Revolution, and formed the government couldn't have done it without the women."

Here are some of the stories of these women of resilience and business and organizational acumen much greater than that of the men who got credit for it.

While John Adams was off in Philadelphia philosophizing, Abigail was doing the practical stuff - running the farm, his law practice, fighting off British soldiers and in general taking care of business. Had she lived today, she might have been a CEO of a corporation, but back then she was only the backbone of a great man.

Eliza Pinckney, mother of two of the Founders, was another CEO material. At sixteen she found herself in charge of three South Carolina plantations and a persistent and successful indigo grower.

Of all the stories of these remarkable women, the story of Deborah Read Franklin, Benjamin Franklin's wife, stands out the most. She made it possible for him to travel, write, invent, participate in political and philosophical discourse, slay Continental women with his American charm and even philander. She did this by producing steady income for him. With determination and endurance she tended business from Home Unavailable, sending money regularly to Franklin cavorting about Europe. She made it possible for him to spend away from home sixteen of the last seventeen years of their married life. Only her death forced him to return to America to tend to all those income-producing endeavors that she had managed so well. That is when he realized the magnitude of his loss. He did not grieve for the wife that he had abandoned; he grieved for the loss of a business manager.

Roberts tells of a story Franklin wrote sometime after Deborah's death in which he goes to heaven to try and get her but she refuses to go with him saying: "I have been your good wife ... almost half a century. Be content with that."

There are many more stories in "Founding Mothers" of women who endured hardships and losses and who fought illnesses and British soldiers with equal valor. Were these women unique? Not so, concludes the author. "They did," Roberts writes, "- what women do."

Ophelia Georgiev Roop
Library Director
San Bernardino Public Library

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