Founding Mothers: the women who raised our nation

Founding Mothers: the women who raised our nation by Cokie Roberts

I have been reading or rather “listening to” Cokie Roberts book Founding Mothers. I have always found my history classes boring.  A litany of arguments, wars, generals, and dates.  And of course, there are always few women mentioned even though women went to war with their husbands, cooking, cleaning, tending to the wounded or disguised as men and fighting.  Our nation would have not been here without all these women whether going to war with their husbands as Martha Washington did year after year, or staying home and managing plantations like young Eliza Pinckney whose father left her in charge of the plantations, her mother and sister at age16.  I thought it a big deal when my parents went off on vacation for a mere 2 weeks and left me to take care of my siblings 12, 7 & 4 when I was just 16.

While women were usually not as formally educated as the men, they were often highly intelligent and self-educated. They kept their husbands in touch with local situations and politics all the while taking care of children, family members, business enterprises, farms and plantations.  Many would then leave and go and take care of their husbands at the battlefronts especially during the winter when the armies were more stationary.  They would then often return home pregnant once again.  Familes of 5 to 12 children were common with maybe 3 or 4 living to adulthood as dysentery, yellow fever or small pox came through towns and cities.

Somehow it was comforting to read that even at our inception there were still the vigorous disagreements in how our country should be run. There were good people and bad people involved.  Some men were brilliant politicians and still very bad people.  The country was even then divided north and south.  Women were already fighting for their rights and men were denying them. People are people for good and bad.  I recommend this book.

A Paradise Built in Hell

WE ARE READING:

A Paradise Built in Hell: the Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, by Rebecca Solnit

Kerouac asked a favorite question of social psychologists: Under what conditions are people willing to help others: Every so often comes moment when the normal rules of life are suspended, when some kind of force brings suffering, deprivation or, at the very least, extreme inconvenience.

Bill McKibben describes Solnit's book as the freshest, deepest, most optimistic account of human nature that he has come across in years. Please come joing us to discuss democracy of community.

Anne Shirako will lead the discussion.  We will meet on the following 2 dates.

Tuesday evening at 7 pm on July 10th and August 14th at the Ukiah Library.

Questions? 463-4580

Sponsored by the Mendocino County Library, this program is part of a grant from Cal Humanities, "Searching for Democracy", California READS and in partnership with California Center for the Book.