Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation

Cokie Roberts was an award-winning journalist and best-selling author whose books mainly provide a women’s history of the United States. In 2001, she published From this Day Forward, a book about American marriages through the ages, co-written with her husband, journalist Steven V. Roberts. Among the relationships discussed was the romance of John and Abigail Adams, which served as a starting point for Roberts’s investigation of other key women of colonial America. Roberts has a personal connection to this particular period of American history: Her ancestor William Claiborne met the Founding Fathers in Congress in 1790, and Roberts heard tales of this illustrious forebear as a child. Although she enjoyed the stories of Claiborne, she realized that she knew nothing about her female ancestors from this time, and little of women in general from the same period. This disconnection left her feeling alienated from her own history and disengaged with the topic more broadly, prompting her to ask, “While the men were busy founding the nation, what were the women up to?” (xvi). She wrote Founding Mothers in an effort to prevent other young girls from feeling disconnected from the legacy of great American women and their vital contributions to the nation.