Ladies of Liberty
The Women Who Shaped Our Nation
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4.4 • 8 Ratings
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
In Founding Mothers, New York Times bestselling author Cokie Roberts paid homage to the women who helped establish our nation. Its sequel, Ladies of Liberty, focuses on the women who helped define the country during the second half of the founding era, from 1796 to 1825. Roberts presents a colorful blend of biographical portraits and behind-the-scenes vignettes chronicling women’s public roles and private responsibilities.
Roberts focuses on the many changes taking place in America at this time, as explorers and settlers moved to the West and South and the nation became more multi-cultural. Abigail Adams, Dolley Madison, Rebecca Gratz and Sacajawea are just a few of the figures profiled in this fascinating tribute to the women who contributed to the rise of a new nation.
Cokie Roberts is a New York Times bestselling author, a political commentator for ABC News and a senior news analyst for National Public Radio. From 1996 to 2002, she and Sam Donaldson co-anchored the weekly ABC interview program This Week. Her books include This Day Forward (with her husband Steven V. Roberts), We Are Our Mothers’ Daughters and Founding Mothers. The mother of two and grandmother of six, she lives with her husband in Bethesda, Maryland.
“Roberts has uncovered hundreds of personal anecdotes and woven them together in a single, suspenseful narrative with great skill.” — Washington Post Book World
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this entertaining follow-up to 2004's Founding Mothers: The Women who Raised Our Nation, Roberts recounts the lives of first ladies, and their associates, from the John and Abigail Adams White House up through Monroe's 1818-1825 term. Though it's well known women at the time couldn't vote or own property, it's surprising how respected, and influential, Roberts's subjects were. As sitting President, Thomas Jefferson "urged all the 'heads of departments' in Washington" to read Mercy Warren's history of the American Revolution, which prompted Alexander Hamilton to declare, "female genius in the United States has outstripped the male." Other intriguing figures include Louisa Catherine Adams, wife to John Quincy, whose story takes her into the court-life of Russia and Austria; the sociable Dolley Payne Madison, known affectionately as "Queen Dolley"; Elizabeth Monroe, a staid (and sickly) return to formality; and a host of children, acquaintances, advisors and socialites (including Federalist Rosalie Stier Calvert and Republican Margaret Bayard Smith, whose letters "often read as a political point counterpoint").While Roberts' aim is to see the period from her subjects' point of view, she is not uncritical; for instance, Roberts casts blame on Mrs. Adams's uncompromising partisanship "in the undoing of her husband." With a little-seen perspective and fascinating insight into the culture of the day, this is popular history done right.
