Poor Richard's Women

Name: Poor Richard's Women: Deborah Read Franklin and the Other Women Behind the Founding Father
Price: 18.74 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: Nancy Rubin Stuart
ISBN: 9780807011300

Deborah Read Franklin and the Other Women Behind the Founding Father

Everyone knows Benjamin Franklin — the thrifty inventor-statesman of the Revolutionary era — but not about the long-neglected voices of the women he loved and lost during his lifelong struggle between passion and prudence. The most prominent among them was Deborah Read Franklin, his common-law wife and partner for 44 years. Long dismissed by historians, she was an independent, politically savvy woman and devoted wife who raised their children, managed his finances, and fought off angry mobs at gunpoint while he traipsed about England.

But Nancy Rubin Stuart also introduces us to Margaret Stevenson, the widowed landlady who managed Ben’s life in London; Catherine Ray, the 23-year-old New Englander with whom he traveled overnight and later exchanged passionate letters; Madame Brillon, the beautiful French musician who flirted shamelessly with him, and the witty Madame Helvetius, who befriended the philosophes of pre-Revolutionary France and brought Ben to his knees.

What emerges from Stuart’s pen is a colorful and poignant portrait of women in the age of revolution. Set two centuries before the rise of feminism, Poor Richard’s Women depicts the feisty, often-forgotten women dear to Ben’s heart who, despite obstacles, achieved an independence rarely enjoyed by their peers in that era.