Kids Edition: Founding Women

What if the founding of the United States could be heard not only in speeches and volleys but in quilts mended by firelight, farm ledgers balanced in winter, and poems that dared to test the nation’s conscience? We open the door to the women who made those sounds and shaped the structure beneath the stories most of us learned in school.

First, we trace Martha Washington’s steady presence at icy encampments, where morale could make or break a campaign. Then we turn to Abigail Adams, whose letters sharpened political thought while her work on the family farm kept a statesman’s world from collapsing at home. Together they show how leadership is sustained by logistics, trust, and partnership. From there, we step into the writing rooms of Mercy Otis Warren and Judith Sargent Murray. Warren’s essays pushed the young republic toward specific freedoms, helping catalyze the Bill of Rights. Murray advanced a clear claim for women’s equal civic capacity, planting seeds for suffrage and education reform long before law caught up.

We also sit with Phillis Wheatley, enslaved yet unflinching, whose poetry praised virtue and quietly exposed the central contradiction of a revolution for liberty that tolerated bondage. Her words reached George Washington and echo forward to abolitionists who later carried the same torch. Rounding out the hour, we highlight a soldier who fought in disguise, endured battlefield wounds, and earned an honorable discharge—proof that courage often hid in plain sight to be allowed to serve at all.

Across these stories, one theme holds: the founding wasn’t only drafted in halls; it was forged by presence, persuasion, and principle. If you’re ready to hear how women’s labor, letters, and lyrics changed the arc of the American experiment, press play. If this conversation expanded your view of the founding era, follow the show, share with a friend, and leave a review so more listeners can find it. Who’s the founding-era woman you think everyone should know?

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Chapters

• 1:34 Welcome And Today’s Focus
• 2:11 Martha Washington At The Camps
• 3:08 Abigail Adams On Home Front And Policy
• 4:49 Mercy Otis Warren And The Bill Of Rights
• 6:49 Judith Sargent Murray On Equal Rights
• 8:09 Phillis Wheatley’s Poetry And Freedom
• 10:05 The Disguised Soldier’s Grit
• 12:42 Closing Thanks And Next Steps

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:48

Hi friends, welcome to Civic City Year Kids Edition. I am very excited because today it is not just me in kids edition. I have my friend, Dr. Kirsten Burkhov, who knows a lot about the women of the founding. And so today we're going to talk about the women that were important in the founding era. So, Dr. Burhard, we're going to start with Martha Washington. Can you tell me? I know our our young friends probably know Martha and George Washington, but can you tell me about Martha Washington and why she was important to the founding of our nation?

SPEAKER_00: 1:25

So Martha Washington, you guys probably know, is the wife of our first president, George Washington. But what a lot of people don't know about Martha Washington is that while George Washington was a general in the American Revolution, she actually traveled around to all of his different military encampments with him. So you may have heard of Valley Forge, which is this valley that got really cold during the American Revolution in the winter. George Washington was there. They ran out of food. They had to start eating their horses. What a lot of people don't know is that Martha Washington was there with them. So she's really important as a support for someone who was under a great amount of pressure and as a seriously important person in our nation's founding. And because she was able to be this like supportive figure for him, it meant that he was able to be the person that we now know as the father of our country.

SPEAKER_01: 2:22

And on that then, our second president was John Adams, and his wife, Abigail Adams, was also really important in our founding. Can you tell me a little bit about Abigail?

SPEAKER_00: 2:34

Abigail is a little bit different than Martha, if only because they had different marriages that require different things. So John Adams, unlike George Washington, was not a soldier. So during the American Revolution and the founding, he's primarily a lawyer and a politician. Now, that does mean he has to be gone from home a lot. They had a family farm in Braintree, Massachusetts. And Abigail Adams ran the family farm. She took care of all of their children, all of their livestock, all of their crops. She was responsible for firing and hiring farmhands for selling and buying supplies for the farm. And as a result, she is this really interesting model for a kind of different sort of marriage than what we see in George Washington and Martha Washington. She also is this really interestingly politically minded woman. John Adams often writes to Abigail and asks for her opinion on political matters. And when she sends her opinion back, we can see a lot of those conversations getting reflected in the sorts of things John Adams is presenting to other politicians. So early on, she is a woman in American history who is engaged with politics indirectly because she can't have a voice herself, but through her husband is able to influence politics in some pretty important ways.

SPEAKER_01: 4:03

And then John Adams also had a really good friend named Mercy Otis Warren. Can you tell us a little bit about her?

SPEAKER_00: 4:11

John Adams actually wrote to Mercy Otis Warren that he thought she was definitely smarter than him, at least once or two, once or twice. A little tidbit. Mercy Otis Warren was a great friend of the Adams family. She was both friends with Abigail and John. And she was also married to a general in the American Revolution. She was a mom of five. And during the American Revolution, she started writing. She started writing poems and plays and essays. She had lots of ideas and she was a really good writer. And she kind of got discovered and started publishing a bunch of stuff during the time of the American Revolution and long after the founding. So one of the things that Merci Otis Warren did that was really important is that during the constitutional ratification convention, so we have a document, a proposal for the Constitution. We give it to the states for them to decide if they're going to say they like it or not. She wrote this essay with some arguments about why the Constitution could be improved or how the Constitution could be improved. And one of the things that she said was that this constitution needed a bill of rights. It needed to say what the explicit rights were of Americans, what government was not allowed to do or infringe upon. And this essay was so important and influential that the Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution during the ratification conventions. So this is a really important moment in American history. We don't really know what the Constitution would look like without the Bill of Rights. And in fact, it might not have passed. So she's a really, really important and pivotal figure.

SPEAKER_01: 5:53

Speaking of writers, there's another important writer during this time named Judith Judith Sgt. Murray. Can you tell us a little bit about her and her writings?

SPEAKER_00: 6:03

Judith Sgt. Murray comes a little bit later. So she is after the American Revolution, after the founding, and she starts writing these essays about how she believes men and women should have equal political rights. And those sorts of essays were necessary because at this time, women did not have a right to vote. They didn't have rights to participate in politics in the same way that men did. So Judas Sgt. Murray starts writing arguments about why men and women deserve to have equal political rights. And her main argument is just basically that men and women are equally capable of being good people and good citizens. And because they're equally capable of being good citizens, that means that they should both have a say in politics. So she's writing about this very early. Women wouldn't have the right to vote for at least another hundred years after she started writing. But she's one of the first voices in American history that starts to say that, hey, this all men are created equal thing, this could apply to women too.

SPEAKER_01: 7:15

And another first, we recently learned in our podcast about a poet named Phyllis Wheatley. So Phyllis Wheatley, tell us what is important about her and how she was really influential during this time.

SPEAKER_00: 7:32

So an important thing to remember about Phyllis Wheatley is that unlike all of the other people that we've talked about so far, Phyllis Wheatley was enslaved. She was not a free person. She came to the United States in 1761 when she was just six or seven years old on a slaver ship and was sold into slavery. And throughout the course of her enslavement, it turns out that she demonstrated this really powerful ability to write poetry. So she wrote a ton of poetry, celebrating people's lives and death in the Boston area, and then also dealing with the political complications of the American Revolution. She additionally dealt a little bit and in really subtle and careful ways with these big questions about what it means to be a person who is not free while the American Revolution is all about freedom. So, of course, you guys know that the Civil War eventually would end slavery, but here we have someone writing from the perspective of an enslaved person about how these ideals of American liberty don't exactly jive with what we think of in terms of this, you know, institution of slavery. So down the road later on, you would see people like Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass make really similar arguments that the American founding makes promises of freedom that aren't kept to enslaved people. And we see Phyllis Wheatley making those exact same kind of arguments early on during the very revolution itself.

SPEAKER_01: 9:13

And she wrote a poem about George Washington, right?

SPEAKER_00: 9:17

She did write a poem about George Washington. Phyllis Wheatley deeply admired George Washington. She wrote a poem about him as a military and political leader that he, in fact, read and he had great admiration for. She led a bunch of different raids on British troops. And in order to keep her secret, she got injured several times. In fact, people often got injured during battles. She usually tended to all of her own wounds. And at one point, she took a musket ball to her thigh. She removed it herself to make sure that no one realized that she was, in fact, a woman. So eventually she falls ill and she is discovered to be a woman. But nonetheless, she's honorably discharged from the U.S. military and was is considered an honored veteran of the American Revolution. There would be, in the years after the revolution, there would be retellings and uh panels of Revolutionary War veterans. And she would always show up to them in full uniform, you know, fully ready to just tell all of the most theatrical stories of hers from the revolution. So she's a really fascinating figure. And her husband ended up being the very first person to receive payment from the United States government for being a spouse of a veteran, which is an interesting little side note of history.

SPEAKER_01: 11:54

All of these women sound so cool. And, you know, we've we've only talked about a couple, and I'm sure that in especially in the revolutionary times, there was a lot more women to talk about, but we kind of wanted to start here. Dr. Burhock, thank you so much for sharing these wonderful women with our young viewers. We really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00: 12:15

Thank you.