Founding Mothers audiobook

With the death of Cokie Roberts this week, I checked to see if I had read all of her books. I discovered I had missed this one.The book is well written and researched. The problem is the lack of information on many of the women except for Abigail Adams. In this period women had no rights and few were educated so little information about them was recorded. The Adams’ family was an exception as they were educated, including the women, and were prolific letter writers and diary recorders. Some of the women covered in this book besides Abigail Adams are Dolly Madison, Martha Washington, Mary Barlett, Esther Burr and Sarah Livingston Jay. The book is a fast easy read and provides a glimpse of life in the 1700s.I read this as an audiobook downloaded from Audible. The book is six hours and forty-three minutes. Cokie Roberts narrated her own book. Roberts was a pioneer television broadcaster journalist.

While the men were busy founding the nation, what were the women up to? Aside from Betsy Ross, I don't remember ever hearing about women as a child (By the way, some of Ross's descendants still insist that she did, in fact, sew that first flag.) My courses in American history provided me with a glimpse of Martha Washington's bravery at Valley Forge, and gave a brief account of Dolley Madison's daring rescue of the portrait of George Washington as the British marched on the White House. When the modern feminist movement bloomed in the 1960's, women started passing around Abigail Adams's famous advice to John and his colleagues in Philadelphia to "remember the ladies." That was about it.As I read through the letters of John and Abigail Adams and became more and more fascinated with her life, I grew curious about the other women who had the ears of the Founding Fathers. These women lived through extraordinary times and must, it seemed to me, have extraordinary tales to tell. Now I know they do. It's safe to say 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. And it was the women who, by insisting that the men come together for civilized conversations at dinner parties in the early republic, helped keep the fragile new country from falling into fatal partisan discord. The women made the men behave. -Cokie RobertsI enjoyed this book more than I was expecting. Far from being a boring history book, Roberts breathes life into these great women. Not only does this talk about the women, but it fills in the details of The Revolutionary War (good, because I think I slept through this part of history class). At times hard to put down.

I really enjoyed this book. I am Canadian, and so did not know much about the events leading to American independence, and certainly the names I was familiar with were men (Jefferson, Washington, Adams, Hamilton etc.) I also am not yet on the Hamilton bandwagon, have not seen the musical or read any of the Hamilton-themed historical fiction. Now I might be interested. I enjoyed the detailed examination of what women's lives were like pre- and during independence. I loved the figures of Martha Washington, Abigail Adams and Kitty Greene in particular and (mostly) enjoyed reading their correspondence with each other and with their husbands. I did find that the book was a little quote-heavy. The letters and correspondence included was interesting, but I would have preferred fewer quotes and more analysis. This book is dense with information and so not for all readers, but I learned so much! I love how book clubs and group reads have me picking up and enjoying books I would never have chosen on my own.

This book was on my “to read” list for quite some time, but I always felt that I ought to get a better grounding in the founding fathers, ie the colonial, Revolutionary, and Constitutional period, before I took on the founding mothers. So after my recent reads of The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and A People's History of the Supreme Court, the latter of which gave a thorough picture of the Constitutional Congress, as well as a re-read of Johnny Tremain with my kids and my middle son’s report on Benedict Arnold, I felt I was finally ready.Because this was the first book I’d read after A People's History of the Supreme Court, my first reaction was almost a sigh of relief. Both are history books, but this one was a breeze by comparison, one of those histories that reads like a novel. It’s not for nothing that Cokie Roberts is one of the premier journalists in America. In addition to detailing all the heroism of famous women like Abigail Adams and Martha Washington, she told the stories of lesser known women of the day, so that you get a really complete picture of the time. And here and there, she inserts her own comments, some of which are pretty snarky. I do have one regret regarding this book, and that is that I dropped it in favor of Magic Hours: Essays on Creators and Creation, a writing book that I had on interlibrary loan. That really interrupted the flow, so my enjoyment of the second half was not quite equal to my enjoyment of the first. But that was my fault, not the fault of the book. I recommend this book to every woman in America. It’ll make you want to give a big huzzah to all our founding mothers.

I learned more from this book about the American Revolution than I did during my high school and college history classes.

I have been listening to this book on CD and it has some good stories of the early women who founded the country. The catchy, but all the women in the book weren't necessarily mothers of patriots - many were wives. Good stories of how the women ran the farm, gave birth to children, and fended off the enemy at home while the men were of talking in Philadelphia. A good quote from the book that said that if the British beat the army, they would still have the women to tangle with! Good stories of courage and independent, strong women who fought for the freedom of the country.

The women connected to the American Founding Fathers don't often receive much attention. While I had encountered women like Martha Washington and Abgail Adams in histories of the revolution, I knew next to nothing about women like Catharine Littlefield Greene (wife of Nathanael Greene) or Sarah Livingston Jay (wife of John Jay) or even Anne Randolph Morris (wife of Gouverneur Morris). Each of them deserves a full-length biography of her own, but I appreciate the themes emphasized by telling their stories together. This book has broadened my knowledge and understanding of the American Revolution and I hope to find more books about these remarkable women.