The Widow Washington, Martha Saxton
The Widow Washington, Martha Saxton
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The Widow Washington
The Life of Mary Washington

Author: Martha Saxton

Narrator: Laural Merlington

Unabridged: 12 hr 41 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 10/22/2019

Synopsis

The Widow Washington is the first life of Mary Ball Washington, George Washington's mother, based on archival sources. Her son's biographers have, for the most part, painted her as self-centered and crude, a trial and an obstacle to her oldest child.

But the records tell a very different story. Mary Ball, the daughter of a wealthy planter and a formerly indentured servant, was orphaned young and grew up working hard, practicing frugality and piety. Stepping into Virginia's upper class, she married an older man, the planter Augustine Washington, with whom she had five children before his death eleven years later. As a widow deprived of most of her late husband's properties, Mary struggled to raise her children, but managed to secure them places among Virginia's elite. In her later years, she and her wealthy son George had a contentious relationship, often disagreeing over money, with George dismissing as imaginary her fears of poverty and helplessness.Yet Mary Ball Washington had a greater impact on George than mothers of that time and place usually had on their sons.

Martha Saxton's The Widow Washington is a necessary and deeply insightful corrective, telling the story of Mary's long, arduous life on its own terms, and not treating her as her son's satellite.

About Martha Saxton

Martha Saxton is the author of Being Good: Women's Moral Values in Early America and biographies of Louisa May Alcott and Jayne Mansfield, among other works. She received a PhD from Columbia University before joining the faculty at Amherst College, where she taught history and women's studies for twenty years.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Teri on April 09, 2024

Martha Saxton weaves a story about the life of Mary Ball Washington, the mother of President George Washington. From the introduction, Saxton theorizes that historians have misrepresented Mary as an "...incompetent, crude, imperious, selfish, and unloving woman..." In The Widow Washington: The Life......more

Goodreads review by William on September 25, 2020

This is an outstanding book about the Father of Our Country’s mother! It shatters the impression that many George Washington admirers have of his mother: that she was mean, dirty, and uneducated. Through admirable research, the author does a wonderful job of explaining how Mary Ball, an only child o......more

Goodreads review by Betty on July 05, 2020

I chose this because my alma mater is Mary Washington College and because I felt biographies of her eldest son painted a portrait that was not flattering to a woman who chose to stay unmarried so that she could exert her rights such as they were. She was the daughter of an indentured servant and want......more

Goodreads review by Mike on February 10, 2020

More a history of the times Mary Ball Washington lived in, not so much a biography. Apparently, there isn't much in the way of source material on George Washington's mother. It's readable and informative about colonial life with its manners and mores before the Revolution, you get the basics of Mary......more

Goodreads review by Michelle on June 13, 2019

Much ink has been spilled on the life and times of George Washington, but little attention has been devoted to his mother Mary Ball Washington. When Mary Washington appears in studies of her famous son, she is labeled as a “shrew,” “illiterate,” a “helicopter parent,” and “Medea in a mob cap.” It wa......more

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