A review of the book Dames and Daughters of Colonial Days written by Geraldine Brooks and published in the year 1900. This text was written as part of audio visual presentation featuring Martha Washington for Patriot Lessons TV, recorded in 2015.
Dames and Daughters is a book of nine chapters profiling nine different women of colonial times, both well-known and not so well-known. Among those women profiled with her own chapter is Martha Washington, the First First Lady of the United States and the wife of President George Washington.
Martha Washington was born in New Kent, Virginia on June 21, 1731 as Martha Dandridge. Martha’s first husband was the significantly older Mr. Daniel Parke Custis whom she married at when she was 18 years of age. She had four children with her husband but only two survived to young adult hood: son John, or “Jacky”, and Daughter Martha, or “Patsy”. At age 25, Martha was a widowed and was reportedly the richest widow in Virginia, living on a plantation estate known as the “White House”, named long before that now famous house in Washington, D.C.. While raising two children, she had to manage the estate on her own in a time when women were not normally in charge of such business affairs. She proved herself to be “capable, very level-headed woman.”
A few years later Martha met a young military hero. Martha married George Washington on January 6, 1959 at the White House Plantation. Their courtship leading up to marriage was marked by many “love letters” exchanged between them although few survived. The book describes their honeymoon lasting not “the proverbial six months but… truly… the forty years of their married life.”
Martha was truly the First First Lady, both in title and in the love for her husband. Martha was first and foremost her husband’s biggest supporter; and he, hers. Martha and George had an enduring relationship over the rest of their lives and were America’s First Couple, both before and after George was elected as the first President of the new United States of America. George called Martha “[t]he partner of all my domestic happiness” and together they “soften[ed]” the hours of private life” and “smooth[ed] the rugged paths” of war and home life. In her duties as First Lady, she “never allowed her discontent to appear, and performed her official duties well”. She made sure that George did not overstay his duties as President, “sav[ing] her husband from formal society as much as possible”.
Martha was a Mother to all of her children, but especially John and Patsy, after the premature deaths of her other two children Daniel (at age 3) and Frances (at age 4). She had an especially close relationship with Patsy, while residing at Mount Vernon. Patsy and Jacky both died in young adulthood: Patsy at the onset of the Revolution, and Jacky at the close of it. The couple consoled themselves over the deaths in the otherwise hard years of the War. George and Martha never had children together but later adopted and raised Jacky’s two younger children.
Away from her responsibilities and wife and mother, Martha was a Patriot in the War. As war with Great Britain loomed, Martha sometimes participated in private debates regarding the political tensions but generally quietly supported her husband, stating that her “heart is in the cause”. Martha displayed “thought and care for ‘the poor soldiers’” especially at valley Forge, traveling “over the snow to the soldiers’ huts” and “knitting socks, patching garments and making shirts” and with “basket in hand and with a single attendant, going among the huts”. Her level of personal attendance to the soldiers at Valley Forge is the subject of debate today, but she did stay with George at the encampment, as the book says, enduring “nightly alarms” with “guards at the open windows with guns loaded, ready to shoot”. The General was certainly a prize to be captured or killed, and Martha put herself in danger even in the relative comfort of the General’s Headquarters.
Much like “Rose the Riveter” of the 1940’s, Martha was a Patriot of the Home Front. Martha championed that American women “must become independent by our determination to without what we cannot make ourselves”, favoring homemade goods over British import, remarking that “[w]hilst our husbands and brothers are examples of patriotism, we must be patterns of industry”.
After the War, Martha settled back with her husband at Mount Vernon but the retirement was short lived, as in less than three years George died, and Martha followed a few years later.
Dames and Daughters, first published in the year 1900, contains narrative sketches of certain women from our early American history. Martha Washington is a well-known figure in the book along with Abigail Adams (Wife of John Adams and Mother of John Quincy Adams) Lesser known women in the book are Anne Hutchinson, of Boston (Founder of the First Woman’s Club in America, for which she was banished); Margaret Brent (the Woman Ruler of Maryland); Madam Sarah Knight (a Colonial Traveller); and Elizabeth Schuyler, of Albany (afterwards Wife of Alexander Hamilton). The book has been revised and republished since its original publication in 1900.
Author Geraldine Brooks attended Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts from 1893 to 1897. Radcliffe was a liberal arts college which functioned as a female coordinate institution to the then all-male Harvard College. Brooks then published four books including Dames and Daughters before returning to Radcliffe to obtain her degree in 1908. HN