“We
the people.” That was part of the first line of the Constitution. But
it’s not really what the writers meant. Because at that time, “We the
people,” probably meant, “We the men”. All the writers were men and many
of the important people in history were men. Because women weren’t the
generals or the politicians they were often ignored by the people of the
time and the people of today. When Cokie Roberts wrote Founding Mothers the Women Who Raised Our Nation and then turned it into a picture book for younger people, she attempted to change that.
When I got the chance to interview her, she said that one of the hardest parts of writing Founding Mothers
was finding what the important ladies of the time actually said. Lots
of them wrote journals and letters, but often times these were burned,
sometimes by the women themselves. As President Truman said to his wife
when he saw her burning their letters to each other, “Bess, what are you
doing; think of history!” She replied with, “I am.” For political
reasons, private messages that showed more than you would want the light
of day to see were destroyed.
But
even though she was not able to get as many of the actual thoughts and
words of the women of the revolution as she would have liked, Cokie
Roberts was still able to see that they were just as creative and
resourceful as the men on the scene. During the war disease killed just
as much, if not more, than actual fighting, with the biggest killer
being smallpox. There was a little prevention in the smallpox
inoculation, which was kind of like a vaccine in that if you survived
the inoculation your chances of getting smallpox decreased dramatically.
But that was a big if. To inspire the troops to get the smallpox
inoculation, Martha Washington and other officer’s wives got it
themselves, risking their own lives. George thought it was crazy. Martha
Washington is more famous for going to Valley Forge to spend that hell
of a winter with the troops and her husband. But she didn’t just go that
winter. She went every winter. Every winter she went to a camp to spend
winter in a place with little food, terrible weather, poor living
conditions, and soldiers on the point of mutiny or about to leave. It
was Martha who had a huge part in making sure the army stayed together.
If she and other wives hadn’t been there, we probably would have lost
the war due to a lack of an army. And Martha wasn’t the only lady.
Hundreds of women donated money to and made shirts for the soldiers. At
one point women raised $300,000 for soldiers, only $20,000 less than was
raised for a national bank. When George Washington finally got his way
in having it spent on materials for shirts instead of what the head of
the fundraiser, Esther de Berdt the granddaughter of Benjamin Franklin,
wanted, which was something special for the troops that was not George’s
job to make sure they had, they each sewed their names into every shirt
they made to let the soldiers know there was someone who cared for
them. With all these women, one of them should have been the most
important. To Cokie Roberts one of them wasn’t more important than any
of the others. The work of all the women, wives of remembered people or
not, helped just as much as the ideals of liberty for the men to keep
fighting against the British.
-- Lara Nott, GUEST CONTRIBUTOR