Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
ERIC DEGGANSThe women behind the men of the American Revolution have their own story to tell, says journalist Cokie Roberts.
As a longtime journalist and political commentator, ABC News veteran Cokie Roberts has spent 30 years immersed in the here and now.
But she also has a history of gently pointing out women's contributions to posterity, for those who care to pay attention.
In her first book, 1998's best seller We are Our Mother's Daughters, the mother of two and grandmother of four noted how the women of past generations shape the women of today. Working with her husband, newspaper columnist Steven Roberts, she assembled From This Day Forward, a look at their 30-year marriage and other notable unions throughout history.
Now she has returned to history's archives to write Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised our Nation - a look at the women behind America's struggle for independence, who have often been overlooked, marginalized or mythologized in the rush to focus on the revolution's men.
"The women were left to do everything, . . . run the businesses, raise the families and oh, by the way, the British were coming," said Roberts, speaking by cell phone. "They did it with such courage and humor. . . . They were such devoted patriots that they were really impressive. I really loved learning about them."
With war ongoing in Iraq and a presidential election looming, this may seem an unlikely subject for a journalist who serves as a political analyst for ABC News and National Public Radio.
But Roberts stepped down from her duties co-hosting ABC's Sunday morning politics show This Week after six years in 2002, later announcing that doctors had found a small tumor in her breast and that she would begin treatments for breast cancer.
These days, she sounds fit and enthusiastic while describing the two-year process of researching Founding Mothers, a book sparked partially by material she discovered on the marriage of John and Abigail Adams for From This Day Forward and suggested by her husband, Steve.
And despite comments published earlier this month indicating that management shakeups at ABC left her "worried about the network's commitment to news," Roberts now says she "doesn't have any current concerns. My only concern is always down the pike. . . . And whenever I've had those fears in the past, things have always turned out just fine."
In the first pages, she thanks a host of other women who helped her assemble the book, from longtime researcher Ann Charnley to her daughter, editor Rebecca Roberts and niece, Abigail Roberts, who sifted through "young reader" books on the founding mothers.
It's a family effort that makes sense for a woman descended from former Mississippi Territory governor William Claiborne and whose parents, the late Hale Boggs and Corinne "Lindy" Claiborne Boggs, served in Congress for many years.
The result is a work that links the efforts of tough, powerful women from the early 1700s to about 1790. In advance of her local appearance to discuss the book, Roberts covered a few topics with the St. Petersburg Times.
Times: There's a war on during a closely contested presidential race that could shape the nation's politics for years to come. Do you wish you had written a book about that?
God, no! That's what I do every day. That's what I do for a living. I'm keenly aware of the transience of it. The truth is that you become a much better political reporter when you do go back and learn the history and learn the context. That's been one of my hallmarks as a journalist - to try to put things in a context that is beyond today. Partially because I've been doing it for so long, and partially because I grew up with it.
Times: Did you find many situations that compare to modern-day political situations?
Constantly. People trying to destroy each other's reputations. The first Washington administration's contentious relationship with the press. The need for Betsey Hamilton to stand by Alexander, when he had a notorious affair. The only way his political career was salvaged was because she stood by her man.
Times: Were there many women who remind you of the first women of today?
I mention the woman who stood by her man, Betsey Hamilton. That's a very similar circumstance. These women were all political, they were all involved. To the degree that we were able to find what they wrote, they wrote about politics. And there's every reason to believe the ones whose writings were hard to come by also talked about politics. There was never just sitting at home and doing the embroidery. They did that too, but . . . .
Times: Is that picture of the founding mothers, sitting home sewing flags and such, a modern fiction?
It's a total fiction. I've had this rant about first ladies for a long time. There's a kind of late 20th century attitude, particularly among women, I think, that everything's happening to them for the first time, and it's just not true. Martha Washington is the first first lady, and she lobbied Congress on behalf of veterans. Abigail Adams was a wildly controversial first lady. . . . Sarah Polk, she's not in my book, but she was a Cabinet secretary. I mean, the idea that all this stuff started with Hillary Clinton or even Eleanor Roosevelt is just nuts. It's just an ignorance of history.
Times: Why are Americans so ignorant of our history?
My theory is that America's great strength and weakness is our phenomenal ignorance of history. It's a great strength because we do not nurture and nourish these hundreds- and thousands-of-years-old enmities that you see around the rest of the world. The bad thing is we don't know a thing about our own history. We always think everything is happening for the first time, and don't understand why it's happening, or how we got out of it before . . . any of those things.
Times: Describe the process of researching this book.
Most of their letters and journals, to the extent they existed, . . . some of them had been published, some of them were in other books. But many of them were in historical societies, libraries. I'd find them through footnotes in scholarly works. I would find 19th century books that would give me clues. I had a researcher working with me, who is an old friend of mine, who is a history teacher. And she would track things down. It was real detective work. We were at it up until the last week I was writing. We were still finding stuff.
Times: It seems astounding that no one has done this sooner.
It is astonishing. There are biographies of Martha Washington and Dolly Madison; many biographies of Abigail Adams. There are some 19th century biographies of some of the other women. But . . . there's not anything that says, Here's these women, here's what they were doing, . . . taking it from the lead-up to the war to the election of Adams, which is where I stopped. By then, the country was safe. We had had the first peaceful transfer of power to someone who was not a relative. No one had sort of taken the women through that period, all together and connected them to each other, and done it as a history. I don't know why.
Times: What did you learn from connecting them all together that way?
First, I was really surprised - because it was woman after woman - how much they were alone and how hard their lives were. I mean, the war was fought for eight years on our soil. And the women were on the home front - they were the refugees. One was imprisoned. And they didn't have anything to gain from independence and a new government. As Abigail Adams wrote to John at one point: "I think women are the greatest patriots, because we won't hold office - we won't even be able to vote. And we're still fighting as hard as you are." Their just undying devotion to the cause, given how hard it was for them and how little they would be able to derive from it, is really just inspiring.
Times: Can you look at anything in our national psyche today and say, This is the legacy of these women's struggles?
I think that we always build on what came before us. I've always been of the strong belief that women do what was done from time out of mind. My first book was We are Our Mothers' Daughters, making that point. Women had always been doing much of what they're doing now, and I went back in (American) history and traced a lot of it. I guess we are what we are now because of the men writing the documents and doing what they did. But the men couldn't have done it without the women. They're not just out-of-proportion, larger-than life figures. They did what most women do; they put one foot in front of the other. They dealt with whatever circumstance came their way because they had to, out of duty. I even put recipes in the book, just to have a sense of connectedness.
Times: But some women might look at that and say, "Why put recipes in a history book just because it's about women?"
That's what's nuts. Women are whole women - they're not one little slice, cut off over here called "political women." Our politics are informed by our lives, thank God. We are mothers, daughters, grandmothers, wives . . . citizens of the community. All of those things, and among those things is that we cook, and always have. The recipes from Martha Washington that are in there were from a cookbook that her mother-in-law gave her, her first mother-in-law. It must have been written in the 17th century.
Times: We're at a point when people are trying to come to terms with what it means to be an American right now. Are there any lessons in this book for how to handle that struggle?
Well, we were nothing like a superpower at the time - we were a fragile, very new group of colonies. But it was a country formed on an ideal that is what makes us what we are today. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are essentially our forming principles. They're displayed in the archives of the United States in a room that looks like a church. And that's completely appropriate, because that is our common religion. The Constitution and the institutions that it created are the only thing that provide us with nationhood. We don't have a common ethnicity, religion, history or even a language. All we have is that document and the institutions it created.
Eric Deggans can be reached at 727 893-8521 or deggans@sptimes.com
AT A GLANCE: Cokie Roberts appears for a lecture and book signing today at Ruth Eckerd Hall, 1111 McMullen-Booth Road, Clearwater. Tickets to the 8 p.m. lecture are $50 each ($75 per couple). Tickets to the 6 p.m. VIP reception are $100 each ($175 per couple). Call (727) 791-7400.