The Widow Washington: The Life of Mary Washington

Saxton (Being Good: Women’s Moral Values in Early America), a professor of history at Amherst, serves up an accessible and vivid exploration of the life of George Washington’s mother. Her perspective is sympathetic without ignoring Washington’s moral failings; she makes clear from the outset that Washington was a slaveholder who did not have an enlightened attitude towards the people she considered her property. Born in Virginia in either 1708 or 1709, by adolescence Washington had already lost both parents, a stepfather, and a half-brother; after she was widowed in 1743, she struggled to care for five children. Saxton documents Washington’s hard work ethic and devotion to her children, even when she disagreed with them (as when she thwarted 14-year-old George’s desire to join the British Navy). And she brings to life the social context of the time, in which, under Virginia law, women were plunged underwater if their husbands did not pay fines for their supposed slander and slavery was rampant (“Orphaned by the deaths and sales of parents, slave children lived in a culture in which... grief was everywhere and comfort rare.”). Although the absence of much primary source material forces Saxton to qualify many statements, she comes as close as anyone is likely to in accurately recounting Washington’s life. This complex, warts-and-all portrait brings a fresh angle to colonial American history. (June)