Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation

Published in 2004, Cokie Roberts’s Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation is a non-fiction, historical study of the role women played in establishing the United States as an independent nation. This study guide refers to the first edition of the text, published by William Morrow-HarperCollins in 2004.

In her introduction, Roberts recalls her childhood delight at hearing tales of her ancestor William Claiborne, who met the Founding Fathers. However, she recognizes that she heard next to nothing about the women of the period and, consequently, found it hard to relate to the stories. Founding Mothers is her effort to redress the balance by highlighting women’s contributions, thus making it easier for girls to engage with their history. Drawing on primary sources including published writings, journal entries, and, especially, letters, Roberts explores the lives of several key women of the period.

These women include figures like Eliza Lucas Pinckney, who, as well as raising Charles and Thomas Pinckney—central figures in the fight for independence—also ran three plantations from the age of 16, shaped the agricultural practices and economy of South Carolina, and served as a lawyer for her poor neighbors. Roberts highlights that, while Eliza was remarkable, she had access to resources, education, and male support, which were absent for most colonial women. These lower-status women’s stories are now impossible to tell, so Roberts’s “Founding Mothers” are all of relatively high-status, with at least some formal or informal education, but their stories still provide valuable insight into the lives of women during the birth of America. 

Despite their relative privilege, the Founding Mothers led difficult lives. Many endured long periods of loneliness and isolation while their husbands served their nascent nation. As well as raising a family, Deborah Read, for example, helped run Benjamin Franklin’s businesses and even the colonial postal service while her husband spent years living in London. Others struggled to maintain farms and families, often on limited incomes and frequently, like most women of the period, during repeated pregnancies, struggling through childbirth, nursing, and the deaths of their children.

Life became even tougher as tensions increased between Britain and the colonies. Rejecting British taxes and other oppressive dictates, the women of America were central to the boycott of British goods and to efforts to provide alternatives, such as the production of American “homespun” to replace imported fabric. Once war broke out, women were also a central part of life on the battlefield, cooking and cleaning for the army, tending to the wounded, and occasionally even disguising themselves as men to fight alongside their fellows. Roberts dedicates much of the discussion of the Revolutionary War to Martha Washington, who worked tirelessly to provide comfort for the troops, boosting morale and, on several occasions, preventing starving, mutinous soldiers from deserting.

Martha saw her service to her husband’s army as part of her duty as a patriotic American woman, and Roberts examines this notion of duty as a common theme in the lives of many women of the period. On the home front, Abigail Adams raised a family and ran a farm on the edge of a warzone, sometimes while heavily pregnant, and always with very little money. Adams rarely complained, and she wrote eloquently about how such sacrifices serve as a woman’s contribution to the patriotic cause. Abigail also felt a duty to womankind, frequently arguing for equal access to education and once famously reminding John to not forget women’s rights when drawing up new legislation.

Roberts examines these ideas of duty and equality as part of an overall shift in women’s roles in society. The war demonstrated that women could take on a range of tasks previously denied to them, and the view that they should be granted more rights and responsibilities was growing in popularity. Despite this shift, there was an ongoing suspicion of women in public roles, and women’s contributions largely remained behind the scenes. Nevertheless, women filled essential roles that held the fledgling nation together. Through this work, they started a process through which attitudes towards women’s roles began to change. In this sense, Roberts insists that the women of the period, the Founding Mothers, were vital to the birth of the nation and served as a starting point for feminist social change and women’s rights in America.