All about our mothers
Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised our Nation
By Cokie Roberts
Morrow, 359 pp., illustrated, $24.95
I am old enough to remember this bit of feminist graffiti from the 1970s: ''Women are like jockstraps: always supporting but never quite showing."
So too with America's Founding Mothers -- and wives, sisters, and daughters -- 200 years before. The women who by accidents of birth or marriage had intimate access to the Founding Fathers have never been much in history's spotlight. And yet without their dedicated midwifery the infant American nation might not have survived.
Dozens of Revolutionary women, famous and obscure, are profiled by the broadcast journalist Cokie Roberts in the informative but ultimately frustrating ''Founding Mothers." We meet the eloquent pamphleteer Esther Reed, wife of the Pennsylvania governor, whose appeal signed, simply, ''An American woman" raised $300,000 for George Washington's army; Susan Livingston, daughter of the governor of New Jersey, who used her female wiles to distract British soldiers from a cache of sensitive papers at the governor's home; Peggy Shippen, Benedict Arnold's wife and as much a spy and traitor as he; and Kitty Greene, wife of the ''Fighting Quaker" Nathanael Greene, who flirted notoriously with General Washington and may have been the true inventor of the cotton gin.
Hovering over all are Abigail Adams and Martha Washington, both as adept at political intrigue as at nurturing the troops and lifting morale. Roberts enlivens the scene with nicely chosen details: ''The women tried to bring some lightness and laughter to Valley
The soldiers fought from sun to sun, but the women's work wasn't done with the end of the war. ''It was the women who, by insisting that the men come together for civilized conversations in the early Washington dinner parties, helped keep the fragile new country from falling into fatal partisan discord," Roberts writes in a brief introduction. ''The women made the men behave."
Roberts warns that her book is not meant to be ''a disquisition on 18th-century life," and that by definition the women she highlights led distinctly ''elite" lives. Yet learning of their sacrifices is sobering, especially to a generation that has mostly been spared wartime hardship. Readers get a picture of great trials -- hunger, disease, flights from advancing British troops, long separations from loved ones, and a steady drone of mourning, for husbands and sons killed in battle and for infants who die before their first birthdays.
The book draws heavily upon letters and diary entries, as the public record of the era did not generally feature women. Still, births are well documented, which may explain why the women in ''Founding Mothers" seem to be forever pregnant. This was not always a blessing, as pregnancy in the 18th century could be a death sentence. Henry Laurens, a South Carolina statesman and one of the Revolution's peace negotiators, lost his wife at age 39 as she was giving birth to her 13th child. Eight of them died.
Despite these often somber descriptions, the tone of ''Founding Mothers" is breezy and confidential. Some readers will find Roberts's chatty style engaging, but it made me want to return the ring. She cannot resist the witty personal aside, often wholly anachronistic, whenever she feels the need for punctuation: ''Easy for him to say," ''How's that for understatement?," ''Guess that put him in his place!" And so on. These cozy comments are no substitute for thoughtful analysis.
Also difficult is the scattershot nature of the book, loosely chronological from 1740 to the turn of the 19th century but skipping about at will. The book breezes past events -- ''Once the city of Savanah fell" -- without providing much of the grounding context. There are too many thumbnail sketches and not enough background. Not even a useful appendix of characters can fully make sense of the sprawling cast. The book is woven and patched together like a big narrative quilt, but it would have been better to have chosen the thread of a half-dozen lives and pulled them through the narrative, developing each story much more deeply.
There is something of a cottage industry developing among successful women political journalists writing books about women in American history. Just in the last year we have had ''Founding Sisters and the Nineteenth Amendment" by Newsweek magazine's Eleanor Clift on the early suffragists, and from the New York Times editorial page editor, Gail Collins, ''America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines."
Both those books and Roberts's owe a large debt to the second-wave feminists who forced women's studies into academia and have by now archived a mother lode of raw material. Roberts has polished up some gems, but ''Founding Mothers" doesn't do enough to mine that inheritance for insight and meaning.
Renee Loth is editor of the Globe's editorial page.
