The Mother of Washington in Nineteenth-Century America

Dr. Kate Haulman

Tuesday, March 11th, 5:30pm

In-Person Event

Join us on March 11 to hear Dr. Kate Haulman talk about her forthcoming book, The Mother of Washington in Nineteenth-Century America, which uses the public memory of Mary Ball Washington to explore the role of motherhood in commemorating the American Revolution Through the creation and evolution of the “Mother of Washington” figure in print, images, and the monument to her, memorializing Mary promoted a vision of founding motherhood based in traditional hierarchies of gender, race, and ancestry. As some women framed their political engagement in maternal terms, other men and women used the Mother of Washington to link the virtues she represented to the nation’s origins. The monument, begun by elite men in 1833, languished incomplete for decades, but white women memorialists who identified with Mary finished it in 1894, enshrining their version of  motherhood on the landscape. Then as now, groups used the past to construct American motherhood and motherhood to engage with the founding past.

Dr. Haulman, Associate Professor of History at American University, researches and teaches the history of early North America and US women’s and gender history. She is the author of The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America (University of North Carolina Press, 2011; paperback 2014), winner of the Berkshire Conference Prize for Best First Book in the History of Women, Gender, and/or Sexuality, and co-editor, with Pamela Nadell, of Making Women’s Histories: Beyond National Perspectives (New York University Press, 2013). She co-curated the exhibit “All Work, No Pay: A History of Women’s Invisible Labor in the Home” at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History

Sponsored by the Davida Tenenbaum Deutsch Program in Women’s History

at the Library Company of Philadelphia

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