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marny_h96Title: Founding Mothers – The Women Who Raised Our Nation
Author: Cokie Roberts
Number of Pages: 384 pages
Book Number/Goal: 53/75
My Rating: 3.5/5
Review: Founding Mothers is about the mothers, wifes and sisters of the Founding Fathers and their contribution to the founding of the United States of America.
Cokie Roberts does a good job with describing the lives of women like Martha Washington, Abigail Adams, Mercy Otis Warren, Eliza Pinckney etc. She uses the women's correspondence and diaries to let them "speak" for themselves and one gets a feeling for how hard life must have been back then and how frustrated the women were about the complete lack of consideration society of the time had for them.
While I enjoyed the book a lot, I was a bit unhappy with it as well. One of the things that made me unhappy is the structure of the book. Each section is devoted to a certain time period (e. g. pre-Revolution, the Revolutionary War, Adoption of the Constitution etc.) and the featured women show up multiple times throughout the book. Showing the women in the context of the events is not necessarily a bad thing but here some of the women get "lost" in the huge amount of information.
My second "complaint" is that Ms. Roberts tries to hard to prove her point that the Founding Mothers played an important role in building the nation. Women and their contributions to history are often overlooked and books like this are definitely important. Still, I felt that some of the evidence the author presented is a bit too far-fetched to be convincing.
All in all, though, the book is an interesting read and I recommend it to everyone who's interested in American History and/or Women's History.
Author: Cokie Roberts
Number of Pages: 384 pages
Book Number/Goal: 53/75
My Rating: 3.5/5
Review: Founding Mothers is about the mothers, wifes and sisters of the Founding Fathers and their contribution to the founding of the United States of America.
Cokie Roberts does a good job with describing the lives of women like Martha Washington, Abigail Adams, Mercy Otis Warren, Eliza Pinckney etc. She uses the women's correspondence and diaries to let them "speak" for themselves and one gets a feeling for how hard life must have been back then and how frustrated the women were about the complete lack of consideration society of the time had for them.
While I enjoyed the book a lot, I was a bit unhappy with it as well. One of the things that made me unhappy is the structure of the book. Each section is devoted to a certain time period (e. g. pre-Revolution, the Revolutionary War, Adoption of the Constitution etc.) and the featured women show up multiple times throughout the book. Showing the women in the context of the events is not necessarily a bad thing but here some of the women get "lost" in the huge amount of information.
My second "complaint" is that Ms. Roberts tries to hard to prove her point that the Founding Mothers played an important role in building the nation. Women and their contributions to history are often overlooked and books like this are definitely important. Still, I felt that some of the evidence the author presented is a bit too far-fetched to be convincing.
All in all, though, the book is an interesting read and I recommend it to everyone who's interested in American History and/or Women's History.