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Wednesday, August 3: General Washington and Mrs. French: Widows and Power in 18th Century Virginia
One month after the battle that ended the Revolutionary War, George Washington wrote a neighbor, Benjamin Tasker Dulany, about a tract of land adjacent to his own that he wanted for himself. The land belonged to Dulany’s mother-in-law, widow Penelope Manley French. French, however, did not want to relinquish her land, telling her daughter that a deal “shall never take place while I live.”
The multi-year struggle between Washington and French over her land is documented in letters and diaries in the George Washington Papers at the Library of Congress. None of them, however, were written by French herself, since she delegated her dealings with Washington to her brother and son-in-law. French’s story shows how a widow, empowered by laws that allowed her to control her property, also felt unable to challenge cultural norms that required women to leave business dealings to men. It also demonstrates how Washington’s papers can be a rich and unexpected source of information about the lives of the people who populated his world.
Julie Miller, Library of Congress Staff Fellow at the John W. Kluge Center, and early American specialist in the Manuscript Division, is exploring the story of Penelope French. The Kluge Center’s Andrew Breiner will interview Miller, as well as Martha Saxton, Amherst College historian emerita and author of The Widow Washington: The Life of Mary Washington, and Jennifer Stertzer, director of the Papers of George Washington at the University of Virginia.