Book #20: Founding Mothers

Title: Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation


Author: Cokie Roberts


I've been trying to gear myself up to read Founding Mothers for a couple of months now. Biographies aren't my favorite genre, but I pulled it from the shelf at my mother-in-law's house a few months ago when I was visiting and felt sort of duty-bound to read it (especially being Memorial Day and all). So I did. It's a series of vignettes about the wives and mothers of the politicians who were influential in the latter half of the eighteenth century.


So how did I feel about the book? I appreciate that it would be hard to write full-length works about most of the women in the book (with the exception of Martha Washington, Abigail Adams, Dolley Madison and possibly Mercy Otis Warren). I loved hearing about some of the stories of these women, like Kitty Greene, who spent a winter at Valley Forge and later lived with her lover (in sin!) so she wouldn't have to relinquish her rights to her property. But I felt like the book was sort of jumbled. It was arranged chronologically, so we'd hear about Kitty Greene, for example, in the early 1770s section, then might not hear about her again for 100 pages, so I'd hardly remember who she was by the time I got back to her. I also felt like Cokie Roberts made too many snide sort of asides-- too much modern commentary about how she'd throttle John Adams for not being romantic enough in his letters and things like that.


But after I send this book back to my mother-in-law and forget all about Kitty Greene, what I'll remember most about my experience reading Founding Mothers is that I'm so grateful for modern maternal and fetal medicine. Roberts said at one point that women could expect to become pregnant between five and fifteen times over the course of a marriage, resulting in an average of somewhere between five and ten live births. But it seemed that the women in the book raised, on average, somewhere between three and five children to adulthood. I'm in awe of what these women accomplished. But I'm even more in awe of what they accomplished while managing years of serial pregnancies and the loss of children. In our modern era, I'm so thankful for education (a main emphasis of Roberts's book), but I'm also thankful for birth control.


--originally published 5/28/07