Review: Founding Mothers
I would be curious how a reader would react to Cokie Roberts’s Founding Mothers without knowing the title or author. The focus of Mothers is, well, mothers of course, but she keeps her beam wide enough to illuminate the key features of the Revolutionary period that makes these folks interesting.
One could easily read Mothers as a general history of the Revolution and only come away with two odd aspects. First, few tactical details of the battles are in here. There’s a time and a place for tactics, but so many people have written about those ideas and so little of it is relevant to anyone but military scholars (without a connection to something else that the tactics drive or influence), that I don’t miss them. The other aspect a reader would certainly notice is that Roberts gives women their due.
What I find most remarkable about Mothers is that Roberts explores the contributions and viewpoints of the distaff side while keeping the overall context of a world of men and women firmly in view. Other works that push women into the spotlight do so by making the acts that men have deleted from history or ascribed to men as bigger than they are. That upsets men, but Roberts doesn’t have to pick that fight. She tells the story of these women and their diverse positions and contributions without preaching about it. These folks speak well for themselves when Roberts voices them; they don’t need any additional cheering from the sidelines of a modern agenda.
It’s a powerful approach, well executed.
Strongly Recommended.