Cokie credits the sisters; author of Founding Mothers grew up with strong women

National Catholic Reporter, Feb 4, 2005 by Jeannette Cooperman

Folding chairs filled the atrium of the Missouri Historical Society, and people were still filing in, standing along the sides and back, heavy winter coats clutched in their arms. Women religious, bearded policy wonks, historians and NPR junkies, they'd all come to hear broadcast journalist Cokie Roberts talk about her latest book.

A glowing introduction by Sr. Kathleen Hughes, provincial of the Society of the Sacred Heart, ratcheted the suspense even higher. Awarded two Emmys. Named to the Broadcasting & Cable Hall of Fame. Cited as one of the 50 greatest women in the history of broadcasting by American Women in Radio and Television. Senior policy analyst at NPR for years; political commentator for ABC News.

Roberts stepped to the microphone and announced that she'd written her book, Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation, in large part because of St. Philippine Duchesne. Roberts, who included in the dedication to Founding Mothers the Sacred Heart religious, went to Sacred Heart schools starting at age 5, and she heard the stories of Philippine, "this feisty, independent woman who had to work so hard to make men do what she wanted them to do! And she kept at it and kept at it. I was inspired by her all my life."

Later, in an interview with NCR, she admitted she loved the way St. Philippine "was always pushing at the church. I think it's the stories of her doing it on her own terms that have kept me in the church. I understand that it is my church, not the hierarchy's."

Still, would she make some changes? "Oh, I'd ordain women tomorrow. And it would change everything."

At the Dec. 13 lecture, Roberts noted the short shrift women receive in secular history, where the textbooks read, "'... and then women got the vote.' Overnight, it was easy," she quipped. In Founding Mothers, Roberts explored the contributions of the women who worked behind the scenes from the very beginning, including Martha Washington; plantation manager and inventor Eliza Lucas Pinckney; Deborah Franklin; and Abigail Adams, "whose stint as First Lady makes Hilary Clinton look like a shy, wilting violet."

"Martha, I think, has done herself a disservice in history by wearing that little hat," she said. "She turns out to be an extremely serious woman with a very good sense of humor. She named her tomcat Hamilton, which was most appropriate."

Behind the wit lay long hours of research, piecing together lives their owners never presumed to document. "Deborah Franklin was so ashamed of her letters, she burned them," said Roberts, going on to describe the immense power Ben Franklin's wife wielded and her brilliance at business affairs.

"Eliza Pinckney came to Washington to be treated for breast cancer and she died there," Roberts told the audience, not mentioning her own recent skirmish with breast cancer. "George Washington insisted on being one of her pallbearers for the service she had rendered the country."

Mary Martha Corinne Morrison Claiborne Boggs Roberts grew up watching women working behind the scenes. Daughter of House Majority Leader Hale Boggs (D-La.), she grew up shuttling between New Orleans and Washington, where she noticed that "the women ran everything. The black and white women got together and ran all the social services and basically all the political parties."

After her father died in a plane crash in Alaska, her mother, Lindy Boggs, won her own seat in Congress. At 81, Boggs accepted a new job in a new country, as the U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, "which put her in the extremely interesting position of representing Bill Clinton to the pope," Roberts said dryly. Now 89, Boggs is back in the New Orleans family home. "It's on Bourbon Street, right smack dab in the middle of all the honkytonk," grinned her daughter. "When she moved to the Vatican, I teased her that the costumes didn't change. It was still all guys in dresses!"

At the Q&A after the talk, hands shot up. "We have powerful First Ladies but we don't like them to be powerful until they are dead," one person observed. "There's some truth to that," Roberts agreed cheerfully. Another questioner complained that the founding mothers "seemed to be friends with the men of their era and in this era, women and men seem to be antagonists."

"Oh, you tempt me," she teased. "These women had a healthy sense of humor about the men in their era, and that's basically what we have. You men just have to learn to take a joke!"

Humor threads through Roberts' life, and did from the start. Her family is a glorious combination of propriety and zaniness, and her sister used to say that "being a Sacred Heart girl was like being [political humorist] Mark Russell. You were expected to engage in intellectual fun," Roberts explained in an interview with NCR.

Born into worldly privilege, Roberts had unusual access to power (not everybody has the U.S. president as a wedding guest). Yet she grew up feeling "a sense of obligation. That anything we had, we were given as children of God and everybody was just like us," she said.