 Hi, my name's Lori Glover. I'm an historian in the 18th century. I work at St. Louis University. And I'm here today with Charlene Boyer-Lewis, who's from Kalamazoo College. Her most recent book is Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte, an American aristocrat in the early republic. And I'm also with George Boudreau, who is a Philadelphia-based historian, but coming to us from Maine. And he is the author of Independence, a Guide to Historic Philadelphia. They are together the editors of a fantastic new collection of original research essays called Women in George Washington's World. It appeared just last month with the University of Virginia Press. And we're all very excited to be together with the National Archives. Thanks so much to them for sponsoring the event. And it's particularly important that we are with the National Archives because all of the contributors to the essays worked either in manuscript holdings at the National Archives or with the digital projects sponsored by National Archives, particularly founders online. So hello George and Charlene. And we're just going to dive right into discussing the book, which brought together 10 different contributors working across different subfields. And maybe we could start with what you all learned in the process of working with so many different authors and maybe some of the challenges of working with that many different scholars. I'll start. George and I had really hoped to have a book that would have a broad range of voices. And so he and I intentionally set out to invite all the specific historians who we wanted involved. And I think it looked up to our expectations. George and I had very high expectations for this book and everybody did such a wonderful job. And what we really, what I really learned is I thought, well, everybody says, don't ever edit a book. It's a nightmare. Don't ever edit a book, right? It's like herding cats. We had the most fantastic contributors. And the thing that I learned is that they all brought the strengths that George and I had wanted them to bring. They all did. And so everybody wrote these amazing essays. They were all really committed to the project. They were all really good workers. They all paid attention to deadlines. So my lesson was editing a book is actually a good experience. Yeah, my experience, Charlene, is that you learn a lot about history that you thought you knew, but you don't really know. And you learn a lot about writing because each person brings their own emphasis and skill and nitpicky things, which make you a stronger writer. What about you, George? I've been an editor for a long time. When I started graduate school, one of the things I've said I wanted to do was edit. And I was the editor of my college paper in Manchester in Indiana and several other things. But I was struck in this that we really didn't have a major issue that everyone was very committed to the idea. And we're very lucky that we were unified in some ways around people and themes and organizations. This book grew out of a weekend that many of us spent together at Mount Vernon at the Fred W. Smith Library for the study of George Washington in a conference symposium put together by their wonderful director of programs, a man named Stephen McLeod and Kevin Butterfield, their head of the library and Doug Radburne and Susan Schulwer and others were very much a part of getting this organized and letting it form into our minds. And one of the great things about the creation of these study centers, like the Washington Center and the International Center for Jefferson Studies and others, is it's really giving people a place to come together and have conversations and see how ideas don't work well together. But more importantly, do. One of the things I thought most of in my six months living at Mount Vernon was what a great thing it is to get to have nightly or weekly conversations or lunches or periodically when someone makes a great find leaping up at a library table and running into the next table and working with the staffs. There, Mount Vernon has an unbelievable professional staff of historians and archaeologists, architects, curators, librarians, et cetera. And all of these contributed to this. And as you'll see in my contribution to the book, at one point the head guide was taking me through the house to see Martha Washington's lived experience as she arrived at the little Mount Vernon house at the time of her marriage and to really get into those experiences. So we had, as Shirley just said, we had a tremendous collection of authors, some of whom were part of that symposium, several weren't. A bunch of this book is brand new. And that we got to get for people at various stages in their careers who were all interested in telling these women's stories. So I know it began with this conference and what a privilege to be able to gather at Mount Vernon. So you all are the editors of the scholarship of 10 of your colleagues. But then at some point, Nadine Zimmerly, who's at the University of Virginia Press became your editor. When did UVA Press get involved? Well, Charlene had met her first. Nadine and I, I don't think Nadine and I have ever met face to face. And I have very fond memories of the day I called her to pitch the book. And I sat next to the river in old city Alexandria, explaining to her that I needed to be somewhere with good cell service. But Nadine's a phenomenal history editor, and was a great contributor and part of this in moving things along and getting the book. It's a very attractive volume. People keep telling us how much they love our cover, which they did this brilliant graphic of the Udo bust of George Washington in silhouette with five women's faces looking out from Washington. And so we were, I guess, if I'll brag a moment and say is we sat by the fireplace in the DeVos Scholars Residence of Mount Vernon. I said to Charlene and other women at the conference, this is a book. You know, this, these cling together. This we could read as a narrative. Someone could sit down and read this. And as she said, she called a few days later to volunteer. And as I've confessed, I would spend days trying to think of a way to nag her into being my co editor. I prefer to work collaboratively. So she has the great expertise in early American women, something I still feel I'm a bit of a novice at. But why did I learn a lot from my contributors in this book? Deviling back a second, it is a beautifully put together book. I always think that old saying that you can't judge a book by its cover. It's really inaccurate. You can learn quite a lot from a book about its cover, a bias cover. And there's that sort of beautiful design on the front of your book. What it doesn't convey is the intention you all had of bringing together both academic historians and public historians and you two in your own scholarly careers reflect that trajectory. But I think one of the signal achievements and the unique part of the collection is that interweaving of public historians' writings with academic historians' writings. And I wondered if you might just reflect for a moment with the audience about what value you found that added to the collection overall. Well, George and I were both very intentional about this. And it's also the fact that the public historians who are involved in the volume are the experts on the women about who they wrote. So it wasn't even that difficult to say, well, do we want a professor at a university like me or do we want a public historian that George is currently? It's just that these were the experts. And so when George and I were thinking about the historical female figures we wanted in the volume, I knew immediately who it was who had to get involved. And so it ended up about half the contributors of public historians and about half our academics. And I think it'd be a challenge for people to figure out who's who, right? Because they're all wonderfully written. That was another goal of the volume that George and I had. We wanted this to be incredibly readable, lively. Just everybody wanted to tell a good story and they did. And so the storytelling aspect is something that George and I really focused on. And public historians, just by the very nature of their job, know how to tell good stories. They have to tell good stories to get people to come to their historic sites or to read their public volumes, like the Atlas Papers or the Papers of Martha Washington. They have to be good at that. As you and I know, academics don't always have to be good at storytelling. But the academics that we got involved were also like Cynthia Perner, right? A very, very, very Kate Holman, very committed to telling really good stories. So I don't, I mean, we did want to go with an academic press. We wanted this to be peer reviewed. We wanted it to be able to stand right up there with any academic scholarly work. We wanted this to be scholarly book, but with a public audience and the public historians we brought in were phenomenal. So let me just reintroduce if people are joining. I'm with Charlene Boyer-Lewis and George Boudreau, who are the editors of the new volume Women in George Washington's World out last month with the University of Virginia Press. And so, you know, let's sort of dive into who are those women on the cover? Who are the women in Washington's World that we might not expect? I mean, I think most people know there's going to be a chapter about Martha Washington. There's going to be a chapter about Ona Judge. But who are some of the other I guess sort of more surprising women that readers are going to meet when they buy the volume? One of the things that I'm really pleased about is we did bring in authors from a spectrum of moments in careers. And one of the exciting things for me was Samantha Snyder's extremely new work on Elizabeth Willing Powell, who is sort of Tim. She is George Washington's nose on the front of the cover. But she's a woman that I thought I knew a great deal about, excuse me, because I used to be the second director of her house in Philadelphia. But Sam Snyder, who has been promoted down to Mount Vernon's Reference Library, has done phenomenal research, including digging in where sources we didn't think we had them. And really looking at this woman, who was a major political player in the founding of the nation, whose house was confiscated by the British during the occupation of Philadelphia, and who becomes what one visitor calls La Doma Figura of the federal city. And really, if we talk about women just being in backgrounds or in corners or tea parties, Elizabeth Powell used what she had available and did so in brilliant ways. And maybe I don't think she would hit me too hard for saying this. Ann Bay, who is significantly further along in her career, did phenomenal work on the woman who really, I think is the reason not only that we have Mount Vernon now, but that we know George Washington. And that's Ann Pamela Cunningham. I'm sorry, Pamela Ann Cunningham. I always do that, get her name scrambled. Who was in every way a woman who was supposed to not be a player. She was an invalid. She was a single woman. She was a Southern matroness she liked to call herself, whose mother saw Mount Vernon literally about to tumble down the hill in the Potomac. And Miss Cunningham stepped in and created the first national preservation movement in the United States of America. And she had no children, but her daughters thrive. The Mount Vernon Ladies Association is a group of incredibly committed, dedicated, hardworking women, still a group of women, who save Mount Vernon and raise money for it. And I think have funded both Charlene's research and my own during our times as Mount Vernon fellows. And it is a really exciting thing to see this. I would, when I'd be having lunch in the cafeteria at Mount Vernon periodically, you'd run into one of the ladies with their very impressive harrowing on there on the front of their outfits. And I would go up and thank them for their contributions. They're always very nice and very much fun to the receptions and parties. But these are women from around the nation who still do this. Who say, you know, as Miss Cunningham said, the men of America have let Mount Vernon fall to ruin. The women must save it. And I think that's the beginning of historic preservation. You show me a, you know, show me a house museum in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and it was probably founded and maintained by women. The Powell House, where I used to live and work, was founded. What about you, Charlene? What women do you think will be most surprising to readers? Well, what I really liked is, I'll say two things here, right? So we added an important category for us was not to just have women who loved George Washington or admired George Washington, right? So, you know, there's a chapter on Martha Washington who loved him and Elizabeth Willing Powell who loved him and admired him and Anne Pamela Cunningham who did. But we also included women who frustrated him and challenged him. So George has written an essay about not just don't a judge, but a number of the enslaved women in the presidential household in Philadelphia. And I wrote a chapter on Peggy Shippen Arnold and how she committed treason and perhaps tried to get George Washington kidnapped by the British, right? And we had, you know, Jim Basker did a wonderful essay on Phyllis Wheatley. And I'm not sure Phyllis Wheatley would automatically come to people's minds when they think about women in George Washington's world, but she wrote these amazing poems about George Washington. George Washington read her poems, he exchanged letters with her. She may possibly have even visited George Washington. So we felt Phyllis Wheatley certainly belonged in the book, right? I think Peggy Shippen Arnold belongs in the book. And then the second thing I'll say is even the women you might expect to be in the volume. Yes, there's a chapter on Martha Washington. Yes, there's a chapter on Abigail Adams. Yes, there's a chapter on Mary Fall Washington as mother. But what these chapters did, it's a new way to look at these women. So Lynn Price Robbins, her chapter on Martha Washington, you learn about Martha Washington well beyond just being a wife to Washington, but being a symbol of the American Revolution and a symbol to the Revolutionary War soldiers at what they were fighting for, and an infatigable fundraiser for it. Sarah Georgini at the Adams papers, her portrait of Abigail Adams and her relationship with George Washington, I think reveals lots of new information, new insights about both of those figures, both George and Abigail. And in how to use Sarah Georgini's words, they with John Adams and Martha constructed the new presidency. So, you know, I think I think Georgini and Price are perfect examples of the point you made to begin with about you picking the exact right scholar to write the essay, you know, sort of irrespective of whether they were working in applied history, public history, or academic history. And I think, Charlene, to that point about new insights into these women, I think the collection achieves that. And I think it goes beyond that because it offers new insights into the 18th century and the Revolutionary Age, which is so often so masculine, you know, like the iconography, you know, the narratives of the Revolutionary Era are about, you know, like dashing war heroes and intellectuals and, you know, like men in Velvet Knee Bridges. And that we've assumed is where the power resides and where the important stories unfold. But readers of this collection are going to discover a very different kind of narrative. And I wondered if you all might, like, just give us a summary of what happens when you look at the 18th century and the Revolutionary Age from the point of view, points of view of diverse women, rather than, you know, the mythology of the founding fathers. You know, maybe I can jump in a little on that. In the time since I started graduate school over 30 years ago now, I'm always reminded of an interview I watched with one of my favorite historians, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, who has said that when she started her book Good Wives about women in early New England, that when she went to archives, a lot around, I'm not far from where Martha Ballard, the famous midwife she lived right now, and she said people would say to her, well, you won't find much. And I actually passed my doctoral exams the morning, she won the Pulitzer Prize for a midwifestale. I had no impact on that book. But I still remember one of my professors sitting reading the Chicago Tribune and another saying, who won the prize in history? And my advisor said, Laurel Ulrich for a midwifestale and this very old, very traditional historian said, must not have been much published last year. And I was mortified and said, Oh, it's a great book, you know, it's a shower of work has always inspired me a great deal. And I think a lot of women like Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Mary Maples Dunn, Mary Beth Norton, Linda Kerber and others really looked out over a wasteland and helped us discover these incredible stories, these lives, these voices. If the role of a historian is to make us smarter about the past than we were when we started, then they really laid cornerstones. And I was very fortunate to get to work with each of those at some point in my time at the McNeil Center. I think Charlene is probably far better versed on what's coming next, although I've certainly had an education in the couple years of producing this book. Well, I mean, what I think readers will learn from the volume about women is that you can't tell the story of the revolution without them. You can't talk about the founding of the nation without considering women's experiences. And so women and Laurel has heard me say this innumerable times, and she agrees, and her own work shows it, right? Women work passive spectators were just occasionally showing up, like Betsy Ross or Molly Pitcher, right? Women were everywhere, and it seems really obvious to say that. But the kind of ideas of how we think about the revolution in spite of Linda Kerber's work, in spite of Mary Beth Norton's book, still wants us to think of the velvet knee-bridged men in Philadelphia, signing the Declaration of Independence, or the soldiers who fought for the British. And we don't want to set all of that aside with our volumes. What we want to do is bring women into that central story, make them strong actors, which they were, right? Every single contributor to this volume, and Cynthia Kerner's brilliant introduction about the women at Trenton welcoming George Washington, make it abundantly clear how strong of actors women were, both in terms of being committed to the war effort, either as loyalists or as patriots, both making all these women make choices about what to do for themselves, what to do for their family. They were all active. None of them just sat there and watched the revolution go by. And the other thing that's really important when you bring women into the center of the story, and you're essentially rewriting the history of the revolution, and this is the thing I learned a lot working with this volume, is that freedom and independence mean lots of different things when you look at women than when you look at men, and at the men's experiences and the stories that have been told by men. And so we get a much more complicated view of history. I always tell my students history is complex and messy. And this volume does that. It makes the history of the revolution more complex and more messy, you know, just like your recent work, Laurie, on Eliza Lucas Pinkney. You know, I think of Laurie when you describe Eliza Lucas Pinkney as a planter patriarch, right, using those male terms to describe a woman, you know, that's the reality of her life. And that's what we're all trying to do with this work as well. Right. So Eliza was an 18th century South Carolinian. And I did make the interpretation in the biography that she was, for all practical purposes, a planter patriarch. I got some push back from other scholars about that. But in every way that mattered in 18th century South Carolina society, she exercised power. She, you know, she was a commercial planter on a sort of international scale. She enslaved scores of people. She managed multiple estates. She was a contemporary of George and Martha Washington. And when I read Martha Washington's writings about those sort of brief writings between the death of her first husband and her remarriage to George Washington. And when I read Len Price's work, I see a lot of connections between Eliza Lucas Pinkney and Martha Dandridge Custis. Like she was a very confident self-possessed, capable leader of a complicated estate. And that's not often the image that we have of Martha Washington or of 18th century women more generally. Right. And if you add Mary Thompson's chapter that looks at Martha Washington and other of her kinswomen, her white kinswomen, and their interactions with their enslaved people in Mount Vernon. Again, you get another picture, another different kind of picture about Martha Washington to think of her, not just as the wife of the founding father. Right. But as somebody who was skillful in her negotiations with her enslaved people and certainly every bit a part of that plantation as George Washington was. Sometimes hard people say that Washington, maybe because of the relationship with his mother, was drawn to particularly strong, capable women like Martha Dandridge Custis, like Abigail Adams, like Elizabeth Willing Powell. And that might be true. But then I also wonder if there are just more confident, strong, capable 18th century women than we've been willing to accept. Let me back up for a second and ask about something that George brought up when he talked about Law Works work. And that's the amount of material that's available. So the National Archives has for decades funded major papers projects for the leading male figures in the Revolutionary Era. And those are now available through founders.archive.gov, which your contributors all used. So there are tens of thousands of letters on that website to and from Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, Adams, you know, all the time and so forth. But your contributors for the most part did not have that kind of wealth of material to draw on like firsthand accounts from individuals about their lives or the sort of historical context. So can you talk a little bit about the imaginative research that was done in some of the essays and how women's lives get pieced together in the 18th century? It's still amazing to me from my generation that the bound volumes have now become the founders papers are online, the male founders papers are online. And I think we all have a responsibility now to get organizations pushing and backing women's papers projects. One of my public history roles is as the director of the remember the women project in Philadelphia and raising historical markers to notable women when where they have been for you. The next one that will go up this fall will be the about owner judges escape from the president's house. But fortunately Elaine Forman Crane years ago, decades ago now edited and published the papers of Oh, I'm having I'm having this Elizabeth will Elizabeth drinker, which is a phenomenal resource. And I don't think you can write about Philadelphia in the revolutionary period without going to Mrs. Drinker's diary. We need to get if it's local historical organizations of the or the daughters of the revolution or whoever behind these and get a good grants person involved and raise the funds. And it's a great way to employ some graduate students. The way Mary and Richard Dunn did the papers of William Penn starting in the 80s. But I think this is something we have to say, okay, we're at that moment now, we have to get these more accessible. Our authors in this volume, I think in many ways, we're still doing work that required slogging into archives, small, and sometimes very large like the US National Archives and getting to their papers. I have tease Charlene a great deal because she has done phenomenal work looking at a woman who I was only introduced to by a Brady Bunch episode in the early 70s. But there are still shipments all over Philadelphia, of course. And the narrative Charlene came up with of this woman who may have really played George Washington, you know, she may have, she may have been the one who really pulled the wool over his eyes, which we don't like to think of that happening to George Washington. He's like everyone's favorite uncle, but she beat him at that moment. I think Charlene is arguing. My own path to my essay came very late when I wanted to do a piece on the women of the president's household, the two women who Martha Washington brought to Philadelphia in slavery. And why and how the city of Philadelphia might have affected their lives, including Ona Judge's decision to walk out the door of the president's mansion at sixth and market and never go back. And George and Martha Washington did perhaps the most unethical thing he did in his career in trying to use the power of the presidency for his own personal financial gain, which is. But I decided to write this essay right as COVID hit. My plan was to go back to Mount Vernon from March and April of 2020. And we can all remember we didn't go anywhere in March and April of 2020. But I was incredibly lucky that the National Park Service that has amassed a very large archive related to the president's House Historic Site, which is their latest well developed interpretation, allowed me to use that. And because I'm a registered volunteer with the Park Service, Chief Curator Kerry Dethorn allowed me to go in and sit in the closed library by myself in a mask, reading the paper's collection amassed by a historian who's just retired named Anna Cox, too good. And I was incredibly lucky in that regard. And as Charlene knew, she made me tone down my footnotes, which ran for pages. There's been a lot of great scholarship in recent decades. And I don't know when we were students, I know a bit older than the rest of the panel. But that scholarship wasn't there. We were told, you won't find much, don't go look it. And it's really incredible. I think only judge now is that should be a household name. Well, that's what a lot, you know, myself included in a lot of the other authors in the volume, you know, we're already familiar with how difficult it is to do women's history and how you have to sift through as much as you can to find women's voices. So those, all those thousands and thousands of letters by men aren't useless when you're doing women's history, you just have to read them really carefully. And you have to find the sentence or two that references their wife or their daughter or an enslaved woman who's causing them problems. It's often near their signature where they'll add something about a woman in their family. Or you have to look at account books differently, right? And you can find women there. Sydney Kerner did a wonderful job of analyzing Currier and Ives images of Washington's visit to Trenton to talk about the women in Trenton and how in the Currier and Ives images they're faceless, they're nameless, what does that mean, right? And it's a real kind of symbol of women's history that they're mainly nameless and faceless and we have to go digging for them. But all of our contributors were very sophisticated at doing that. And also knew how to, you know, how do you flip sources? How do you read between the lines? I think Jim Basker, looking at Phyllis Wheatley's poetry for both, what does this tell us more about what this young enslaved woman was thinking about the person who was fighting the Revolutionary War and her influence on him? You know, you could lose Phyllis Wheatley in all of the George Washington stuff and yet he pulls her out. Similarly, Kate Hollman did the same thing with Mary Ball Washington, right? She doesn't really tell the biography of her. Instead, she looks at how the 19th century remembered her and we learn a lot about women and we learn a lot about Mary Ball Washington and how these men and women in Frederickburg, Virginia, wanted to remember the mother of the father. So it requires creativity, material culture helps, right? And just learning how to sift, how to read between the lines, how to look at things differently. It's the joys and the difficulties of doing women's history. So, Charlene, I think one of the best examples of sifting and flipping comes in your piece on Peggy Schiff and Arnold. So can you just briefly tell viewers like what people thought they knew about the Arnold episode and what they can learn if they're willing to read more carefully and think more critically from Peggy's point of view? Right. Well, much of what we know about Benedict Arnold's treason focuses on Benedict Arnold and I decided to bring her in, bring Peggy Arnold's wife in more into the center of the story. And there's lots of discussion about how involved she was. Some historians say, you know, it was all her fault. She was the one that lured Benedict. Others say, no, no, she's completely innocent. She had nothing to do with it. And there they agree with Alexander Hamilton and George Washington that she has nothing to do with it. And I thought, okay, let's actually go back and look at the sources from the time, what remains, what's there? And one thing I learned is that most historians who write about this just rely on historians from the 19th century who didn't have all the evidence. The British side of the correspondence wasn't revealed until the late 1930s, wasn't published until the 1940s. That British correspondence makes it abundantly clear that Peggy's ship and Arnold was very much involved in it. And for some reason, a lot of historians haven't looked, they just don't look at those documents. Similarly, when you go back and you look at how Hamilton remembered the episode, how Lafayette remembered the episode, there's nothing left from Peggy's ship and Arnold from this time period. All of her letters, all, and she wrote a lot of letters at the end of her life. So something tells me she wrote a lot of letters during this, but they're all gone. I think purposely disposed of by her family. But when you look at what's there, and you think about, if you come at it as I did that women are strong actors, women make choices, women make decisions, women are passive, you get a whole different picture of Peggy's ship and Arnold involved in the treason. She was certainly a part of it. She certainly helped it along. Lots of people will say to me, well, she was only 18 or 19. Well, very 18 and 19 year olds aren't our 18 and 19 year olds, and we need to remember that. And so there's, to me, just a logic to it, as well as evidence to it that Peggy was very much involved in this treason. And when we bring her in, it tells us so much more about how even these men acted during the revolution and during the treason. We learn a lot more about how Washington wanted to be considered a gentleman officer when we bring Peggy into the story of the treason. We learn a lot more about how Hamilton wanted to appear, the devoted admirer of his fiance when we bring Peggy into the middle of it. So it's just, and plus it's a great story, right? It's a really good story. And to put her in the center to make this a story about Benedict and Peggy, I'll go back to my earlier point, gives us a much truer picture of what happened, a much more accurate picture of what happened, and teaches us a lot more about the revolution. So both of you are very experienced, sort of seasoned and prolific historians of the 18th century. And yet you can't edit a collection of this breath without just being shocked by something that you've learned. So as you like thinking about all of the stories that get told and reimagined by your authors, what's the sort of single most surprising thing that you learned in the process of working on the collection? What about you, George? Gosh, coming up with one, I mean, I would almost echo what Charlene was just saying. I remember when she presented her paper at the Mount Vernon symposium, but of course I've edited it. I don't know how many times I've read your chapter now, but a bunch, it sort of turns into a haul after you've edited something. But this idea that this construction of masculinity and femininity, and oh, she's just such a pretty little 19-year-old, oops, she committed treason too, but she's from such a nice family. You know, you can almost hear that conversation going on now, you know. Oh, they didn't mean to attempt to assassinate the vice president. They were from such nice families. What the heck is a nice family? You know, I have to say one of the things that continues to shock me is Jim Basker's complicated work on Phyllis Wheatley. You know, I think I was in graduate school at least before I heard of Phyllis Wheatley, and I went to a very liberal liberal arts college where her name was just not part of the canon, and it very much is now. We've seen the story was much more complicated, you know. As one person joked a long time ago, we've discovered there used to be women in the 18th century, and there were black people too. When my first book came out, I had someone approach me and say, gosh, for a history of early Philadelphia, there's a lot of black people in this book. Why is that? And I said, because indeed there were a lot of black people in 18th century Philadelphia, and their stories count too. And so I think each of our authors, you know, based on their own steam, their own intelligence, really dug in and came up with things that complement the story we all know. George Washington throwing his false teeth across the Potomac, or whatever is your favorite George Washington myth, but complicated and add more voices to the story. As I said to Charlene a few days ago, I tend these days of continuing Twitter, or continuing COVID lockdown to look at what historic sites are posting about their site and respond to it when people attack them for it, if it's well done. And Mount Vernon has done a phenomenal job of interpreting the history of the Washington's and the hundreds of other people who lived on that plantation to the general public. It's as good as you can get. And someone was, I'll use the Philadelphia word, I'll use the Yiddish and say, it was Kvetching, saying, oh, one more posting about slavery. And I said, well, slavery was very important to George Washington's plantation. What do you want them to talk about? And he said, I want to know stories about the general. And I said, there are thousands of books. Why don't you go to your local library and read a biography? We've never been at a loss for books about George Washington. There's in fact a beautiful library in Virginia now full of books about him. I do want to talk about George Washington, but before we pave it there, I want to know from Charlene what what story shocked you the most or surprised you the most. How did I not know that? Two things. Samantha Snyders, we've already brought this up, Elizabeth Willing Powell. I knew of her. I had no idea how incredibly influential she was on George Washington. Basically, right, we have her to thank for him being president for a second time. Phenomenal. I loved reading about that. The other thing that surprised me was the end of Jim Basker's essay where he says, you know, we can't count out the influence of Phyllis Wheatley on George Washington in his decision to free his enslaved people. I thought that was amazing. To think about that, that this young black poet may have been the reason why George Washington wanted to free his enslaved people was phenomenal. So, you know, this incredibly elite white woman I found a new thing about, I'm surprised about, and then a surprise about an enslaved woman, it was, to me, that was the best part of the volume, right, is that even I, who knows a lot about women's history in this time period, could still find and be surprised by things. So I kind of cut George off, so I apologize about that, but I did want to return to that. You know, and I'm Lori Glover, and I'm talking with Charlene Boyer-Lewis and George Boudreau, who are the editors of a fantastic new collection of essays called The Women of George Washington's World. And so far, we've spent our time talking about the important, fascinating range of women that your authors wrote about. But the title is The Women of George Washington's World. And so the collection coheres around connections to, you know, the first president and the father of the country. So what do we learn about George Washington, you know, George, to your excellent point, there are thousands and thousands of biographies of George Washington and tens of thousands of his letters, if you want to go straight to the sources. But what do we learn about George Washington by shifting our focus to look at the diversity of women who influenced his life? Well, I will be maybe joking a little bit, but you know, there's, I always say that a lot of scholarship in the past has been about the lonely founding fathers. They lived in those houses all alone. They sat at dinner every night by themselves. Somehow, we don't know how, but food would magically appear on the table like in Harry Potter. And they would die alone and occasionally they'd be buried next to some lady. But I think what our responsibility now in the 21st century is complicating that. And it needs to be break down the walls. One of the things that's been delightful to see at the Monticello historic site in Central Virginia where Thomas Jefferson's plantation is now they finally interpreted the other bedrooms in the house, the bedrooms upstairs, where his adult daughter was forced, was pressured to sleep in a bed she hated because dad thought beds in closets was a great idea. And I can't imagine trying to sleep would be like sleeping in a coffin. And the bedroom downstairs where Sally Hemings raised their children in what, in conditions that Thomas Jefferson's white grandson described as were smoky and kind of dirty. And I was there when the archaeologists were working on the site and it's damp. Sally Hemings lived a life in a damp little room in the basement. If you're in Philadelphia this week, you are sweltering. There's a reason I'm in Maine. But if you contemplate, own a judge and maul and the other seven or eight enslaved persons who lived under the eaves in that house at Sixth and Market now long, long gone. But if you think about their lives and, you know, one of the things that I'll say that kind of bothers me still is, no matter how much information we dug and I worked with other historians and such, we have a lot of information now about own a judge because she left us the first narrative. She, it is in some ways the first president's mansion narrative that my late friend Lily and Rogers Parks continued when she wrote her book about working Hoover through Eisenhower as an African-American made in the White House. But we don't know what happens to Maul or Mammy Molly as the grandchildren called her. I did not allow that term to be used in the book, but we don't know what happens to her. She just vanishes. When Martha Washington dies, she is inherited like a piece of property. The way I inherited my grandmother's silverware, one of the Custis grandkids inherited human beings. And even though she was this beloved member of the family, she just vanishes. And as God is my witness, I'm going to go looking for her when I can go back to Virginia and do research. You know, George, about the loneliness thing, it reminded me of that very poignant letter that George Washington after he's retired from the presidency, he writes to Tobias Lear. And he says, you know, you can come over if no one pops in, then Mrs. Washington and I will do something tonight that we've not done for 20 years, and that is sit down to dinner alone. And that letter is often read as a commentary on Washington's long service to the nation and his endless sacrifices, those sort of decades of sacrifices to building the republic. And that's true. But the other thing that's true in that letter is they're not sitting down to dinner alone. That meal, like every meal that was ever eaten at Mount Vernon was prepared by the table was prepared by the table was cleaned by enslaved people. And so I think that correction of the loneliness narrative and Charlene's point about like mining things a little more closely, as you all were, as you said that George, it reminded me of that letter and that sort of mythology and that erasure. Charlene, what do you think we learn about George Washington from the collection? I think many of us think of George Washington as not exactly lonely, but maybe, you know, a sole decision maker, or if he's taking advice, he's taking advice from the men, which you would have considered the men in my family, right, meaning his military family like Alexander Hamilton or Lafayette. And we think, you know, that he has, you know, some kind son, nephews and adopted sons, right, who helped him. But what I think we learn about George Washington with this volume is how influential women were on his life, on his decision making. The women who loved him, as I said, or the women who frustrated him and thwarted him, they all influenced him. And I think it's really kind of revelatory to think about George Washington, the father of our country, you know, the general who won the war, being influenced by women and making decisions because of women. And this volume shows that. We can't downplay the economic reality that the only way he got to go off and become the hero of the revolution was because there were women at home, Martha, and the granddaughters, her granddaughters by her first marriage. And as Mary Thompson, who was Mount Vernon's longtime and spectacular, I was going to say, you know, this work in a lot of ways stands on the shoulder of giants, although Mary is a tiny little thing. I hope she's watching and she's giggling at that because she's significantly smaller than I am. But just phenomenal work of getting into the everyday lives. You know, I was involved in a debate over Twitter a few months ago where people were saying, oh, it's, you shouldn't call Mount Vernon a plantation. I'm like, well, what do you think it was? Do you think that was someone's country home on a golf course? Which in some historic sites have been thus interpreted, but, you know, Mount Vernon is a plantation. It's the center of a factory of production going on, of labor, unpaid enslaved labor primarily, that as Mary Thompson takes us into, you know, there are a bunch of women who serve in this role as the plantation mistress, which is something I think if any of us have thought about it, we're watching a rerun of Gone with the Wind and it's, you know, Miss Ellen is charming and she's taking calf's foot jelly to the starving poor near vibe and no one, you know, Martha Washington didn't have to get up in the morning and make her own coffee. Mary Thompson is another perfect example of how you all brought together exactly the right people working on the topics that needed to be uncovered and, you know, people at different stages in their careers doing different kinds of historical work and yet the whole thing sort of coheres very well and is extremely readable. So, you know, I just want to say kudos to you and to Nadine Zimmerly at the University of Virginia Press for honoring the commitment you started with to do good storytelling for a broader audience. We're getting sort of near the end of our time, but I did want to ask, I mean, we talked a lot about what's in the book. When I was writing about Eliza Lucas-Pinkney, I encountered the story of a woman named Dinah, who in December of 1779 is British troops are moving north toward the eventual occupation of South Carolina. Dinah flees the Pinkneys who have enslaved her. She has a 13-year-old daughter, she has a baby in her arms, and she's pregnant, and she runs into a war zone, into the Revolutionary War Zone, because that seems less dangerous to her than remaining with the Pinkneys, and it's her shot at independence. And then that's all I know. All I have of Dinah's life, the logs of the Pinkneys, and the one-way advertisement that Thomas Pinkney took out in the South Carolina Gazette. And so if I could conjure a source from the 18th century, if I could imagine something and make it real that would change the way I write about history, I think it would, I would desperately love to have an account by Dinah of what happened next, and what happened to her daughter, and you know, similar to the Ona Judge interview that was done later in her life. So that's my wish. Having reflected on all that you have learned about the women in George Washington's world, if you could conjure something, if you could imagine a source and make it real, what would it be? Well I can, one of the great joys of working with the curatorial and architecture staff at Mount Vernon, which are among the best in the business, is you get to periodically go into spaces that the general public can't go into, because frankly it could make the house topple. After the general died, Lady Washington moved from their master suite upstairs to be closer to her grandchildren, and there she died. And late in her life she was seen rereading his letters and throwing them into the fireplace. She did not want to be remembered, or she didn't want much to be remembered. She wanted to be a very controlled narrative, which our author Kate Olman has given us. Great, that's like, Lynn Prince Roberts has given us new insight into. I wish I could, I've stood at that fireplace and looked into its very narrow iron depths and thought, oh for God's sake, someone grab Grandma's letters before they burn. Because so often women's voice, sometimes deliberately, I mean Charlene's now, she's always caught to my brain. And now I'm going to be wondering, I wonder if one of the shipments in Philadelphia has a shoebox full of Cousin Peggy's letters years ago. My Judy, my very dear friend Judith Van Busker, was talking to another colleague who was saying, oh I found reference to a woman's diary, but it's lost, it's lost history. And Judy said, oh I know a member of that family, Al Cullen. And she did, he says, oh yeah, it's in my safety deposit box. It's not very valuable, it's just a woman's diary from the 18th century. And Judy, who is a wonderful historian of early America, said, why don't we let an archivist take a look at that? And it's now been published, it's a phenomenal piece of work. But so often people are still hearing what Laurel Ulrich heard is, well you won't find much. And so they're not sharing it. So if there is a shipping on this, and you have a box of Peggy's letters, or if anyone is watching this from Virginia, and you happen to know where Maul the Mammy ended up, call us, wow. What about you Charlene, what would you love to find? A couple decades after the revolution was over, right, lots of soldiers decided to publish memoirs. They knew that they had lived through an important time, and there was a wonderful public desire for those. So lots of publishers published lots of soldiers experiences or, you know, Benjamin Talmad's memoirs. I wish every single woman who was alive during the revolution had published some memoirs. I wish the desire had been for anybody who had experienced the revolution, not just the soldiers, to have been valued and published so that we had this, you know, just a cornucopia of voices about their experiences and what happened. So if I could create that, I would love that to have as many published memoirs from women as we have from men and either in manuscript form or, you know, in published form, but lots of these men knew it was important and have written it down, and I just wish that that had happened as well. You know, that's maybe a watchword for us right now. We're living through a transformational period in world history, and how many of us are writing narratives of our experiences with COVID or preserving materials? I think in a way the documentation on some level will be fulsome, because there's the, you know, digital versions of the New York Times and sort of endless materials from the national, you know, health agencies and such, but the lived experiences, it's so ephemeral. We tweet about it. We write about it on Facebook, but it's not much that is lasting. Our college archivist here at Kalamazoo College, she's having students write and send in memoirs of their experiences, so she's paying attention. That's good. I'm talking to Charlene Boyer-Lewis and George Boudreau, who are the editors of the new collection, Women in George Washington's World. George has held it up the cover. It's with the University of Virginia Press. It's available for purchase through the UVA Press website, through Amazon, or orderable through your local bookseller. UVA Press has done a really good job of getting the book out. It got a glowing review in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week. It's reasonably priced, and it's important. It's a really important book, I think, for anyone who's interested in learning about women's lives in the 18th century, or anyone who's interested in deepening their knowledge of George Washington and of the founding era. It's been a real privilege and a pleasure to talk to George and Charlene. Is there anything we're sort of near the end of our time? Any last thoughts you'd like to share about the experience, about the collection, about the contributors? Just everybody was wonderful. It was just a terrific experience, and thank you, Laurie, and thank you to National Archives. Very much. It's been a great honor to work with each of them. There wasn't a stinker in the bunch, and I've learned a lot. It's a gorgeous book. I was going to say, I always remember the words of Barbara Tuckman, Will the Reader Turn the Page? I've been getting Facebook comments that people are turning pages, and I'll give a plug to our wonderful interviewer and say, I've spent the last two days sitting on a rock in Maine reading her phenomenal book on Eliza Lucas-Pinkney. I'm guessing most of you don't know who she was, but it is an incredible biography of a woman who, and Laurie, you dug into tremendous sources. If you're clicking over to Amazon right now, buy them both. If you're going to your local bookstore? Yes. However you consume books, consume more of them. Every opportunity you get. Again, it's been a great privilege. It was a great privilege to read the book. I think it's fantastic. I highly recommend it, and I've completely enjoyed the conversation, Georgia and Charlene. Thank you. Thank you all, and we'll hope to do an official in-face, face-to-face launch somewhere soon, either in Florida where the Washingtons lived, or about eight years, or they also lived for a time in Virginia. One of those sites will be doing that, hopefully when the weather's a little calmer and everyone's back to work. But meantime, we can always use the materials through the National Archives online, including founders.archive.gov. A tremendous research, resources. Thank you all for listening. Thank you. Great seeing you all.