Rejecting facile judgements, Amherst College historian Martha Saxton’s brilliant and gripping book instead helps readers understand Mary Ball Washington within her own place and time. Drawing on local histories and archaeology as well as letters, diaries and a broad knowledge of related historiography, The Widow Washington is a clear-eyed biography of the mother of our first president and a fascinating window into the generation before the American Revolution’s founding fathers and mothers ...The book’s stark picture of Mary Ball’s upbringing leaves little room to view her as a woman of comfortable privilege ... There is so much marriage, childbearing, and death in Mary’s story that I started making a chart. I soon gave up, though...mostly because Ms. Saxton guides the reader so carefully through all of these details that her portraits remain memorable ... There is no romanticizing of colonial Virginia in this book. Ms. Saxton places the hardships of women like Mary firmly within the context of a society based on slavery, acknowledging that enslaved women and men had it far worse ... Mary Ball Washington was the matriarch of a successful family in a patriarchal world—a world that Ms. Saxton memorably recreates, and the world from which our country was born.
... by piecing together and reinterpreting insights from family correspondence, from the books Mary treasured and especially from her eldest son’s obsessive records, Saxton creates a sensitive and plausible, if at times speculative, picture that richly evokes Mary’s interior life and the world of a slaveholding widow and planter in 18th-century Virginia ... In the able hands of Saxton, Mary Washington’s story vividly illuminates the role white women played in the creation and transmission of wealth in early America, the frictions that patriarchal inheritance created between mothers and sons, and the tremendous price paid by the enslaved people who made much of Virginia’s wealth possible.
Beginning with the premise that George’s prominence framed only a fraction of Mary’s experience, Saxton leverages her expertise as a scholar of early American and women’s history to expand this evidentiary base and more fully reconstruct Mary’s life. Deeds, wills, and litigation reveal Mary’s family’s concerns, while the meticulous accounting of her close relations and archaeological work from her longtime home, Ferry Farm, reveal the contours of her material world ...[a] sympathetic, renewed portrait ... Saxton revisits moments other authors have used to characterize Mary, suggesting that Mary has often been misunderstood because she bridged two very different eras and navigated them as a widow ... an accessible, informative biography of Mary Ball Washington, a woman of colonial Virginia.
The Widow Washington represents an engaging, although not a necessarily convincing new portrait of George Washington’s mother ... Saxton can’t quite make up her mind whether she admires or just feels sorry for Mary, living as she did in an era when slavery dominated as an accepted labor system in Virginia ... The author bounces around in presenting her findings, with topics often abruptly changing from paragraph to paragraph. Moreover, the text is full of speculation as to what Mary was doing and thinking at any given moment ... readers may question whether Mary was nothing more than a victim of an insensitive patriarchal social order or an irritable woman full of agency who deeply loved her famous son but felt starved for more attention from him. The proper answer is still waiting to be determined.
The subject of historian and women’s studies expert Saxton’s solid and edifying biography is not the iconic wife of our first president but, rather, his relatively little-known yet complexly influential mother, Mary Ball Washington ... Saxton explores her relationship with and profound hold on George, who shared aspects of her temperament, in frank detail, This much-needed biography not only resuscitates and corrects an interesting figure’s reputation and illuminates her role in shaping America’s founding president, it also provides a colorfully detailed depiction of colonial American social life. For readers fascinated by early American and women’s history.
By recounting the known details of Mary's life from the few remaining family letters and legal documents, Saxon skillfully fills in the gaps, relating Mary's story in the context of legal, economic, and social realities of 18th-century Virginia planter society ... All readers will value this vivid account that corrects Mary's record and reveals the dilemmas and distorted sensibility of Virginian slave-holding white women, along with the devastation caused by the Revolutionary War
Saxton offers a sensitive, sharply drawn portrait of a resourceful woman whose early losses made her anxious and fearful for life ... Besides closely examining Mary’s relationships with various members of her extended family, Saxton mostly succeeds in the challenge of treating fairly Mary’s role as a demanding, often cruel, slaveholder ... A fresh perspective on Colonial America.
Saxton...a professor of history at Amherst, serves up an accessible and vivid exploration of the life of George Washington’s mother. Her perspective is sympathetic without ignoring Washington’s moral failings ... And she brings to life the social context of the time, in which, under Virginia law, women were plunged underwater if their husbands did not pay fines for their supposed slander and slavery was rampant ... Although the absence of much primary source material forces Saxton to qualify many statements, she comes as close as anyone is likely to in accurately recounting Washington’s life. This complex, warts-and-all portrait brings a fresh angle to colonial American history.
