and co-editor of Making Women's Histories: Beyond National Perspectives. An active public historian, she has worked on several exhibits at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History.
Haulman applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Mother of Washington in Nineteenth-Century America, and shared the following:
My first thought was, “Page 99 is not even half a page of prose! What does that reveal about the ‘quality of the whole?’” Happily, the 19 lines of text express the book’s main theme and claim. But they certainly don’t tell the whole story. In fact, there’s an important narrative and interpretive element they do not capture. Read on!Learn more about The Mother of Washington in Nineteenth-Century America at the Oxford University Press website.
Page 99 of the Mother of Washington in Nineteenth-Century America is the final page of chapter three and close to the middle of the book, which runs six chapters and 210 pages. Titled “Mother Mary,” the chapter explores antebellum depictions of Mary Ball Washington, George’s mother, in biographies (both of her and of George) as well as images. Biographies like these grew in importance in this period, instructing American readers in morality, virtue, patriotism, and, in the case of Mary, ideal motherhood. Through these works the “Mother of Washington” figure, first sketched in 1826, took shape through a canon of stories that depicted an increasingly domestic, loving, and piously Christian woman, one who bore the lion’s share of responsibility for her son’s greatness. Men and women writers alike fashioned this portrait, some drawing from newly available evidence such as Mary’s Bible and books of devotional literature. In contrast to actual American women who were engaging in public, political discourse, basing claims to engage the state on issues such as abolition in Christian, republican motherhood, the private and retiring Mary served as a counterpoint. She was a true Christian, republican mother (and slaveholder) from the Revolutionary past itself, her son the undeniable proof of her worth.
The page connects the chapter’s argument to the book’s: across the nineteenth century, elite white men and women used Mary (really, the Mother of Washington figure) to lay claim to the founding past, lodging their vision and version ideal motherhood in it. Yet they also did so through attempts to erect a monument to her at the site of her grave in Fredericksburg, Virginia, which the page does not mention. The story of the monument to Mary, Mother of Washington, serves as both a narrative throughline in the book and important feature of Revolutionary commemoration, one that exposes the paradox of a monument to a mother. First proposed and backed by elite men, the monument got off the ground in the early 1830s to great fanfare but languished unfinished for more than six decades. Some made pilgrimages to the site to pay homage to Mary’s memory while others vandalized the incomplete structure and even used it for target practice; such was the range of engagement by the public. There were practical reasons for its status, mainly lack of funding. But the lack of will to complete it and meaning of the monument as it ran to ruin suggests the ambivalence around erecting a monument, a public structure typically reserved for male heroes, to a mother. Mothers were supposed to be private, retiring, domestic figures—in fact, in those very qualities lay Mary’s greatness. Her son George was the monument. Only when two elite women’s groups organized in the early 1890s did the Mother of Washington finally get her monument.
--Marshal Zeringue
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