The widow Washington The life of Mary Washington

George Washington's mother has not fared well at the hands of historians, who have depicted her as a scold and nag of the Virginia gentleman who defeated the British and founded the US. But Saxton (formerly, Amherst College) demolishes that view in this richly detailed biography of Mary Ball Washington (c. 1707--89). In reality, the author uses Mary's status as "mother of George" as a hook to a story that beautifully resurrects an entire social history of the small planter class (and some rich planters) in 18th-century Virginia. Mary lost her father when young, and later her husband, and (as Saxton puts it), "found herself in the mid--1740s with five young children, ranging in age from five to eleven, living on a medium-sized farm on mediocre soil." Throughout, the author reinterprets incidents and letters that have been used against Mary in the past. Saxton's empathy for her subject is balanced with a recognition of the brutality of the slave regime in which Mary played an unrepentant part. This fine book is reminiscent of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785--1812 (1990); both authors use the life of an ordinary woman to illuminate an entire society through a past that is both strange and familiar. Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. --Paul Harvey, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs

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's point of view, which she goes to great lengths to substantiate, is that Mary has been unfairly maligned by historians, who have generally regarded her as crude, overbearing, and prone to whining. Copious research has convinced Saxton that despite having been orphaned at an early age, raised in poverty, and left to cope as a widow with five children denied her late husband's holdings, Mary ultimately became a picture of respectability. 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.--Brad Hooper Copyright 2019 Booklist

Saxton (Being Good: Women's Moral Values in Early America), 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; she makes clear from the outset that Washington was a slaveholder who did not have an enlightened attitude towards the people she considered her property. Born in Virginia in either 1708 or 1709, by adolescence Washington had already lost both parents, a stepfather, and a half-brother; after she was widowed in 1743, she struggled to care for five children. Saxton documents Washington's hard work ethic and devotion to her children, even when she disagreed with them (as when she thwarted 14-year-old George's desire to join the British Navy). 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 ("Orphaned by the deaths and sales of parents, slave children lived in a culture in which... grief was everywhere and comfort rare."). 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. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.