Founding Mothers Summary

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The wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters of America’s Founding Fathers played a major role in shaping the nation. This is the main idea in the book Founding Mothers by Cokie Roberts published by William Morrows in 2004. Cokie Roberts’ book is full of stories of the contributions of the women who fought the Revolution as fearlessly and valiantly as the men. The stories of these founding mothers are told in their personal correlation, private journals, registries, and lists. She writes about the tales of interesting women such as Deborah Read Franklin, Mercy Otis Warren, Catharine Littlefield Greene, Abigail Adams, Eliza Lucas Pinckney, Esther DeBerdt Reed, and Martha Washington. “The extraordinary triumphs of these women created a shared…show more content…
The book was full of informative and interesting tales about the wives, daughters and relations of our Founding Fathers. I learned a lot of new and fascinating stories and it filled me in on the events from the late 1700s. Her writing style was more on the casual side and she often trailed off topic. For me, some parts of the book were dull and I had to force myself to pick it up, but I get that way with many books. The book is divided into historical time periods, which was helpful. What was not so helpful for me, was how I often I felt the narration jumped around. She would jump either from person to person or past to present. For example she would be in the middle of talking about Abigail Adam’s life and then suddenly get off topic and switch to talking about another woman, who either had relations with Abigail Adams or participated in something a bit similar to the event she (Abigail Adams) had a part in, and then go back to talking about Abigail Adams. There were so many people and names that when we kept jumping back and forth I had a really hard time keeping everyone and their story straight. This made the book hard to follow unless you were familiar with the women in this book. To me, it seemed like Roberts was trying to pack in all the information she had, instead of paying more attention to creating a story. From what I have said so far, I made it sound like she was a terrible author, which is not true. What…show more content…
I never really had thought about what the women did while the men were away. I knew some information about the colonial women but I never knew that they ran businesses, controlled farms, and defended their very own doorsteps all while taking care of the children and home. One of the very first stories in the book was about a sixteen year old named Eliza Lucas Pinckney, who was put in charge of all of her father’s properties, plus her sick mother and toddler sister, when he rejoined his regiment in fighting in the war against Spain. This is cool to be because I could never think of having to take on this much responsibility at such a young age, but she took this task on willingly. Another interesting story from the book was when one of the women who took water to the men on the battlefields saw a man get shot, she immediately stopped what she was doing and took his place at the cannon. I don’t know if I could ever do that. What I took from this book was that the a good part of what our country is today is a result of these women’s opinions and their courageous efforts both during the Revolution and while our country was being slowly pieced together. Though this book was hard to read at sometimes I would still recommend it to other people to read. The book is filled with many fabulous stories and does a good job of informing you about the events of the Revolution. I would not
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