That is really great. I love your emphasis on the challenge and creativity involved. And i guess it underscores a key point especially when were trying to write about enslaved women who are really known to us almost primarily either relationship to someone who enslaved them and you think about the incredible achievement of erika dunbar writing that biography of judge and letting her be an individual in her own right and letting her have her own life when you only have to point of access to her individual voice. Interviews she gave in the mid19th century describing what happened when she ran away from washington so i think you make such an important point about seeing women asindividuals and not just in their relationship to other people so thank you a lot. I want to go back to this question with martha about curvature and asking martha, i want to ask you two things although i want to ask you to be brief about them but the first one is about curvature and if you could quickly, i know your voice is strange and im giving you a curveball but if you could give us a six and description of what the law of curvature is and how it disempowers women, that is elite women, free women and how it empowers women of property when they are not married. If you could give us that little snippet i think it could be super helpful curvature when you marry you lose your legal identity and as a woman you become subsumed in the identity of your husband so nothing that you own,nothing you produce including your children are yours. This is not true before marriage. Before marriage your presumably dependent on your father and your father can pass on things you legally and make you the owner of property. When youre a woman the same thing happens. Can own things in your own life, so coverture essentially wipes out your legal this existence. You cant testify in court, all those things and we know who restores many of those abilities that men have. Thats so helpful and i think its interesting for us to think about somebody like Mary Ball Washington even though shes living in this challenging time when shes widowed she has more capacity and when shes married and although we know women do remarry we know that also when women are widowed they remarry much less quickly and frequently thanmen do. That is men who passed away more quickly again and women do and we cant i think assume that means she was in some kind of modern feminist sense claiming her authority but it may be the kind of capacity she had as a widow suited her in some ways. Do you think thats fair . She had a model in her mother and saw the difference in her mothers life between widowed and married. Its not clear to me that she enjoyed her mother very much. She never named a child after her that she certainly admired her abilities. She also, it meant she would not have to have any more children if she did not remarry which , she had six. She may not have wanted to spend her life producing more children and doing all of that. Women at the time wrote about that and thats a real reason for not wanting to marry again. She also would have possibly lost control if she married again of the property that she still had, that she had a temporary status from her husband but also property she had longterm from her father so there were many risks and she was used to going her own way and i think she preferred it that way. Thank you. I want to ask you to also mentioned very briefly for us again all these objects are big ones and compelling ones but an interesting thing you bring to your book and that craig mentioned is the fact that she leaves and theres things we can know about her from her books and her reading so i wonder if you could talk about what we can think about Mary Ball Washington as a reader. I wrote a page and a half about that my daughter will be. Is that okay . I said, i wrote a page and a half about that that she can read, is that okay . Either my light was blinking or yours wasblinking but yes, that wouldbe fine. Is the audio okay . Okay. So as mary became an adolescent she came into possession of john scotts Christian Life from the beginning. The first of a handful of devotional books that she would read duringher life. The late 17th century by english protestants , all helped with mary whose early loss of her parents left me in need of comfort and guidance. Many lessons tended to post focus on how to accept loss, the loss of fortune or her beloved people by studying understanding gods will and purpose. The excess of unhappiness and complaining challenged gods plan for the sinners in his care. This is a common belief among anglicans in virginia although many did not manage to comply with a stoical demeanor required. Mary had to start learning these lessons early and often and that their marriage august and married a booker wife had owned, matthew hills contemplations. She wrote her name in the flyleaf below her predecessors and that book became her daily companion and teaching tool. She use this example and parables to suit herself to teach her children and grandchildren. George washington latercame to own his own copy of it. These books all talk at the prevailing social and economic hierarchies were just and one should work hard. God looked most favorably on good and faithful stewards of property. A mischief or master could insist on moral behavior if someone from a lowerclass did not appreciate the complexities of christianity. For most virginia slaveholders these lessons included telling slaves not to steal and be obedient. Marys book furnished her brain with aphorisms and rules that alter navigate the stress she maintained and under unlike her wealthy contemporaries she did not read novels were beginning to be popular novels written in a friendly egalitarian tone rather than as a teacher to a student offered lessons in empathy and sympathy, sharing sorrows with otherspain. Marry because of her early losses and the precocious workload about the little of these qualities at the 18thcentury elite came to value highly. Thank you, i think thats helpful and it also amplifies the point you are making about her thinking about her role and her thinking about her sort of place in society. So i want to go back to craig and talk, craig had mentioned this point about Mary Ball Washington as this is against reader understanding her as a person of letters was important for your sense of rewriting the biography of Mary Ball Washington and im going to ask you a slightly unfairpoint question now. Which is we were just talking about how important it is to think about women as these independent people as full individuals and not in relation to someone else but i still want to ask you because you write about this in the book and you mention this at what is the significance of understanding Mary Ball Washington for understandingGeorge Washington . Thats a driving question for a lot of people and it is something you address so can you help us think about that a little bit . Sure. Listening to marthas daughter talk about her scholarship and the books she was reading and i cover the same territory in my book but it reminded me and im sure i know martha much the same thing. I guess this addresses the larger question is the scholarship on Mary Ball Washington is the scholarship probablyof all women in the 18th century. I equate it to going to the hobby store and buying thousand piece puzzle and breaking it out and dumping it on your table and finding 300 piecesmissing. And it was like that in trying to piece together. My other books, youd work long and hard enough and you know where to look and the pieces fall together but with mary again a woman of the 18thcentury it is difficult to find out these things. Just to illustrate, we dont even know exactly when she was born. We dont know, George Washingtons mother, we do not know where she isburied. It might be where she used to go to pray. It might be near a cottage in fredericksburg but the fact is nobody knows where shes buried today but i think she did from the time she was raised and then the values that she grew up with, obviously she was, it was a difficult time i think also she was ultimately a very good woman and who interceded at times and at an important time in georges life, to make sure that he followed the straight and narrow and when he was 12 years old he wanted to become a british cabin boy. She wrote a letter to her brotherinlaw and london and get it came back quickly speaking of letters and told mary, that under no circumstances can george be allowed to become a cabin boy. There was a system in the british navy as you can imagine. And it was just as severe among cabin boys as it was among the officers. Officer before and the first sons of british royalty, they got for reference and treatment and british subjects and then wait down at the bottom even below jamaican slaves were americans. And this is at a time to read the british admiralty very good records and Something Like one third of all cabin boys died of scurvy, washed overboard. Battle and plus, they were in with the cruise. Who were far from impressed gangs, they went to the brothels and bars oflondon. You know, that really the worst sort of people to enforce them to become stairs. They might be drunk in a bar and then wake up and all of a sudden there hundreds of miles out to sea and new england has been for three or four years and these are rough men so putting a boy in that circumstance doesnt really, this disheveled, tawdry semen was not always verygood. So george, she interceded to make sure that george didnt go into the british navy. She encouraged him in his reading. She got him tutors. She encouraged him to becomea surveyor. She didnt want him to go to ohio valley which he did twice just to get frenchmen in the wars and that was the time he was a man and striking out on his own but he was very many times, not all the time but he did look after her affairs so the idea of responsibility to his mother, that he obviously had learned from his mother. The idea of responsibility as a citizen, as a son, as a human being. All these qualities as i mentioned before that we associate with the George Washington had to have come from her. Shes the one who instilled that in him. I was just remembering and i quickly flipped through my book to find a place where i marked it but i turned down too many pages but when you wrote about hernot wanting him to go to see i thought that was moving. Thats not just i think previous biographers have said she was trying to tie him too closely to her Apron Strings which of course the whole notion of Apron Strings is very peculiar notion but you said no, she has a realistic sense of what that would mean. And why she thought that would have just been a positive outcome for him. I think i just lost you, craig. Now youre back. Excellent. Great. I thought that was really a great point that you make and the other thing i wanted to mention and i wondered if you could say one more word about this because this is striking in your first comment, you talk about her as brave. You said shes a brave woman and washingtons bravery, if we think about him as a brave person we can force that to her. Can you say more about that is i think thats quite powerful. I think probably all women of that century and that time and that era had to be brave. Because its just difficult circumstances. Mortality was very high. Children died in infancy at tremendously high percentages. Everything was a danger and disease was all around you. Infection was a killer. You died of influenza, you died of dysentery, you died of rheumatic fever so and to be a single woman raising six children, i think that i remember de tocqueville wrote about the singularity of american women and he perceived american women were different from european and and theywere far more , stood up for themselves. They were all good attributes he wrote about and i remember reading that in democracy in america and reading it and thinking he didnt have Mary Ball Washington in mind but i did, he wrote that in 1832 i believe. But it struck me that one of the things we dont look into enough is that the personal qualities of the people of that time. Its not just names and dates and places but these were real human beings with real emotion and especially at the end. She had to be very brave in that regard. She knew she was dying. George knew she was dyingand there was nothing that could be done about it. It had to be terribly painful for her but by all accounts and their thin but the accountsthat were made , she , her last year was important to her in bravery. I guess one last thing i would notice is that when martha was talking about mary as, you know , she manages and enslaves a pretty decent number of people. She has a kind of commanding presence. George washington also has a commanding presence and i guess we can see that in two ways. These are people who are in charge and that maybe thats a parallel to. I would agree with that. Look at his conduct during the revolutionary war. Maybe George Washingtons greatest achievement in the revolutionary war was not winning it. Obviously winning it but Holding Together a ragtag army for seven years and moving that from battle to battle, losing more battles than the one but he definitely one of the more important battles and that type of bravery truly has to come fromsomeplace. Im going to flip over here and ask charlene one last question before we go to questionsfrom the audience. Theres been a wonderful wealth of questions and i want to thank all of you for them as ive been surreptitiously reading them. I want to thank you all very much but we will get to some of them here. Charlene, i was wondering if you could help him across Mary Ball Washington in the context of women in british america and can we draw any larger lessons here . Greg gestured towards this and so did martha had some valuable insights here i wonder if you could frame that for us out a little bit. I think Mary Ball Washington of course is extraordinary and then shes also ordinary and i think shes illuminating on a number of points. To tell us more about women in the 18th century and first of all its just how much she really is the 18th century. This is a woman who was born at the beginning of it and died at the end of it. We dont have very many women who are 18th centuryand mary ball is and thats wonderful. Shes ordinary as some ordinary elite white woman. This is a woman born into a whiteslaveholding family. Helps rule virginia. Her descendents will continue to help rule virginia. This is a woman of privilege in spite of many losses and many sufferings. She still gets to enjoy privileges that lots of other women black or white in virginia and elsewhere and not get toenjoy. Shes a faithful, devout christian. And i do think we need to spend more time looking at the centrality of religion in womens lives in the 18th century, i dont think that gets enough attention so thats one good way Mary Ball Washington illuminates more about 18th century women but while shes this devout faithful christian she is convinced in her right to own and control people. That she has a right to be in control of these other people and she has a right to own them even though she is this devout christian so i think she gets at some of the paradoxes of the 18th century in that way. Her sufferings are sad they are also ordinary. Lots of women lost parents. Lost of women lost their husbands but shes unusual in the fact that she doesnt remarry. That is unusual in the 18th century. Lots of women because of how hard life is did not make the choice to go it alone even though there are really good reasons to choose to go it alone soshes extraordinary in that. She also i think demonstrates through us the limitations women had. Here is a woman, a single woman after her husband died who controlled a large plantation, owns a number of people and pays a lot of taxes and yet she does not have the political power, the social power that a man would have in the 18th century will i think she also helps illuminate the limitations of womens lives. On the other hand when you read marthas book or craigs book you see this is an elite woman who understood she needed to learn what all young ladies needed to learn, how to ride, how to read, how to write to attract a wealthy husband and she did. Augustine washington was quite a catch. So she kind of is usual in that sense to. I also think she shows some of the choices women made. I think people who read about Mary Ball Washington will be surprised at that independence and be surprised that she chose to not remarry. That she chose to kind of control the legacy of her children, to protect that so she can pass it on to them. She showed the importance of motherhood, what we were mentioning before. Shebecomes known as the mother. So she really emphasizesthat to. But i also think she shows us how complicated and complex womens lives are red shes been amplified to the mother of George Washington. This is what i was saying earlier and shes a much more complex figure than that. And she brings to me more questions about the 18th century. She makes me think how would she have characterized herself, how would Mary Ball Washington characterized herself, how would she have donethat . What did motherhood mean to her . We can kind of guess at what it might have meant but in what mattered most to her maybe it wasnt being George Washingtons mother mattered most. So she is illuminating and gives us lots of answers for womens lives in the 18th century but i also think she leaves us with some questions to simply because the evidence is there and we just dont always know what these women were thinking and i know you said there are good questions out there so ill leave it at that. Thank you so much. Thank you everyone. Such goodquestions and i cant read them fast enough. Theresone , im going to toss this one to craig first because okay, theres so many good questions here. Craig, this is something i knowyou addressed. Im not going to be able to find it because im strolling here. I wont attribute these questions, everyone. The person asks this will just know that this is your question. One has asked about her feelings about the American Revolution so she is born as a british subject. George washington does as a subject of britain, do we have any about her feelings about the American Revolution . I know in that book martha does too. There are kits that she was a tory sympathizer but nothing really out and out to say yes , she had to be very conflicted. She grew up a subject, a british subject. She grew up in under the thumb of king george the third. She attended the anglican church, the safe church of england and sheread english literature. She bowed to english fashion, she dressed in english fashion and from every way until childhood to 1776 shes a british subject. And i was thinking to that i tried to immerse myself in that time period is what would it be like to say to an individual everything youve learned for the first 50 some odd years of your life is wrong. That you dont have a king, youre not a britishsubject. You dont have to do this. You dont have to go to a state church. We have a new government, and theres some way to make that lifestyle change, that psychological and personal, the french have a word which is to rip it out by theroots. To rip somebody out by the roots of what their culture is had to be had been very difficult to her that there is no evidence that she supported george either. There is no sense that she darned his socks for the colonial troops. There was a reference to french troops going to fredericksburg and several french troops or at least one of them made reference to her being a tory sympathizer but it was very thin and so is really that she was probably fairly agnostic about the wholething. Theres one other thing to that and i think martha talked about this to read there was a time when she was working in her garden and horseman comes up with a message restlessly at to tell her that george has won an important battle and she is dismissive and says thats what hesupposed to do. It was no joy at her sons success or the success of the American Revolution against the british empire, nothing like that whatsoever. So i think that, i dont think she thought about that deeply. Theres nothing in her letters, nothing in any biographies , nothing to suggest that she took a position one way or another. And i guess to be fair, even if we go by john adams old quantification of support for the revolution maybe one third of people who are ardent patriots, one third were arctic tories and one third were well see how things go. We would expect the mother of George Washington to be a patriot but she lived her life as a british subject. Her historians will tell you that maybe more than a third of american, or americans were loyal tothe crowd. His own son was imprisoned as a tory spine. Hes the governor of new jersey, he had to be a tory. The king gave him a good job. So we got at least three people of our two dozen questions have asked about how, what mary about martha. So i want to ask you martha, if you have something to tell us about what Mary Ball Washington about her daughter in law martha washington. Its complicated and i think at mount vernon i think they didnt get along at all. And then mary and martha really didnt like each other. They were both very powerful women. I think mary was pleased that george married martha and that if there was discomfort, it was probably on martha and georges side because mary, one of thethings we havent talked about is the clash issue. Mary really grew up much less elite than the circles her son ended uptraveling in. He wasnt rustic. That very pinnacle but shesnot in the super elite. Right. She wasnt polished. She didnt make conversation necessarily to be amusing and charming. She had things to say and she was a very utilitarian person i imagine and i think that she represented many values that martha had trouble with like frugality. Martha was very lavish and so was george, he would just spend money and went into debt up to their eyeballs before the revolution. Mary although she asked for little bits of money from george now and then didnt do that and did not dress up and did not worship the highlife. So i think there was a clash of values and i think martha didnt really enjoy whatever remaining control mary had over her son. Its interesting to are different generations and those generations really matter in that period in virginia. So heres the question. Do we know if she had, someone asks a bunch of people have asked questions about why she didnt remarry and weve talked about that a bit but do we know anything about her ever considering remarriage . Abel have questions about did she have any other suitors, did we know anything about that . Theres no evidence of any suitors whatsoever. I agree with martha that she didnt see another man after lawrence but also it may be that there is evidence she did have a prickly reputation and it may be that suitors didnt see her either. But whatever it was, there was no desire to remarry. There was some discussion of a doctor. He visited a lot but he also had professional reasons do you that. So i think this is something that Ethel Freeman suggests. Nobody knows. Nobody actually knows. Charlene, somebody asked a question about women as slaveholders and what is the dynamic there when a man is enslaving people. He has a certain level of authority, what is the situation of women . The question is about which he have had to be archer or tupper or something and we had some recent scholarship on exactly this question about white women slaveholders which is pretty powerful. The recent scholarship opens up a picture of slaveholding women that i think really goes against what kind of a 19th century gone with the wind sense of slaveholding women were reared its increasingly clear that slaveholding white women were more violent often. Not in terms of winning but kind of personal, oneonone violence. Just clogging somebody on the head, stabbing them with a sewing needle. Using a kitchen implement. So we probably dont know a lot about how Mary Ball Washington was as a slave mistress but we know enough about other virginia slaveholding women to know that violence was a regular daytoday occurrence in these households. Because women didnt have as much authority they also had a harder time interacting with overseers and that made for a more frustrating, tense, more violent environment. Thats helpful. So i have another question here which i just love. This is directly for you, martha and this goes straight to our historians happy heart. This is a question about documents and the question for you is are you aware of Mary Ball Washingtons papers being included in the washington family papers project which the George Washington papers project on the uva and with support from mount vernon publishing. Im not aware of that. I saw a few and its just heartbreaking. I think when martha went through papers and burned an awful lot of stuff after georges death i wouldnt be surprised that agreat many of the notes that mary has written went with that. So whats left i think our five or six letters. There are a couple of ones at the Morgan Library in new york. I dont know whats going to happen other than that but just to speak of marys papers, its a beautiful dream. Theres another wonderful question here i was going to ask with you and frank but i think weve lost franks connection but i was going to ask both of you because someone also asks do you think theres a mysterious cache of papers out there somewhere like we all dream about that. Do you think theres a cash of papers somewhere . I have no idea. Maybe gregson. We were just getting back to this, my favorite line of questioning is about whether there are more papers to be found. The question of is there a cash of Mary Ball Washington papers yet to be found . No, you dont think so . I think craig is muted still. Okay. I think you are muted still. Jeanette, can you unmute him or hes got to meet there. I want to give him a chance to answer this. I think you have to hit your unmute buttonbecause jeanette cant do it for you. Maybe. All right, number this is sad because this is such a great question. Maybe you can give us him hand gestures. There we go, now i can hear you. Do you think theres a cashof papers out there waiting to be found . We all know that martha destroyed her letters or at least that was the story that george wrote her. I think that scholarship is always available. Its remarkable the things you found. Up in the Union College and in new york some but he was going through the library and they pulled out a book and they found a lock of hair George Washington had and its just a stunning thing astonishing the amount of scholarship that is stillon found out there. When i was working on my book on december 1941, we did a lot of research obviously at the library and my son is as a researcher was going through, he passed by documents from world war ii and he found a memo from the office of Naval Intelligence marked topsecret and it was to the president of the United States and senior staff at the white house and it was stamped topsecret and it hadbeen declassified in the 70s and yet nobody had ever found it. And it was written three days before december 7, 1941 and the office of Naval Intelligence attacked including the panama canal, philippines, blonde, and Something Like 27 times this memo and now im not suggesting there was any conspiracy, i think thats all nonsense but this memo and laid out the Roosevelt Library four years unclassified in the 70s and nobody ever came across it so i think theres always new scholarship out there to be discovered and uncovered. I think thats great and i think that so important. What your work shows, all three of you really is the power of locating more information and bringing fresh perspectives, new interpretations and sometimes we talk about revisionist history as if its a bad thing but the truth is, i borrow this from a civil war historian is we all like revisionist medicine. You get no perspectives and thats what were doing here is scholarship brings us new information, new perspectives and we understand this critical period of the american past and i hope youll join us in recognizing the 18th century is the most significant in American History and okay. Im going to let you guys have the last word here and just going to end right there. And to say thank you all so much for joining us this evening and thank all of you. I appreciate all of your questions. There are a few questions im going to ask the folks mount vernon to give us contact information. Im going to email you as you got Great Questions and i dont want them to go unanswered. Thanks to kevin, thanks to jeanette and jim. Dont forget what kevin said about how mount vernon is open for visiting the Important Role mount vernon plays in sponsoring scholarship. Thanks everyone. Georgetown universitys ben buchanan talked about the normalizing of cyber warfare is a geopolitical tool. Heres a portion of his talk. The way i like to phrase it is the United States has the nicest rocks but we still live in a very classy house so when it comes to intricate , i dont use this word lightly, beautiful cyber offense american capabilities are truly extraordinary. Theres this extraordinary intricate operation against the Iranian Nuclear program but just because we can do that doesnt mean we can defend very well and we got this long tail of vulnerability our adversaries have not been shy about exploiting. No better example of that than the recent
comparemela.com © 2020. All Rights Reserved.