Main Point Books and Radnor Memorial Library are happy to welcome author Nancy Rubin Stuart and her new book “Poor Richard’s Women: Deborah Read Franklin and the Other Women Behind the Founding Father.”

This event will take place online. Registration is free and required through Eventbrite. Books are for sale in advance through Eventbrite or the Main Point Books website.

About The Author

Nancy Rubin Stuart is an award-winning writer whose books focus upon women and social history. Her latest book is POOR RICHARD’S WOMEN just published in this month. Among her earlier work is the acclaimed DEFIANT BRIDES and THE MUSE OF THE REVOLUTION. Nancy’s journalistic work has appeared in the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Huffington Post, the New England Quarterly, and national magazines. She often speaks to book clubs, women’s groups and other organizations and has been a guest speaker on national television and radio shows, including NPR. She is the Executive Director of the Cape Cod Writers Center.

About the Book

A vivid portrait of the women who loved, nurtured, and defended America’s famous scientist and founding father.

Everyone knows Benjamin Franklin—the thrifty inventor-statesman of the Revolutionary era—but not about his love life. Poor Richard’s Women reveals the long-neglected voices of the women Ben loved and lost during his lifelong struggle between passion and prudence. The most prominent among them was Deborah Read Franklin, his common-law wife and partner for 44 years. Long dismissed by historians, she was an independent, politically savvy woman and devoted wife who raised their children, managed his finances, and fought off angry mobs at gunpoint while he traipsed about England.

Weaving detailed historical research with emotional intensity and personal testimony, Nancy Rubin Stuart traces Deborah’s life and those of Ben’s other romantic attachments through their personal correspondence. We are introduced to Margaret Stevenson, the widowed landlady who managed Ben’s life in London; Catherine Ray, the 23-year-old New Englander with whom he traveled overnight and later exchanged passionate letters; Madame Brillon, the beautiful French musician who flirted shamelessly with him, and the witty Madame Helvetius, who befriended the philosophes of pre-Revolutionary France and brought Ben to his knees.

What emerges from Stuart’s pen is a colorful and poignant portrait of women in the age of revolution. Set two centuries before the rise of feminism, Poor Richard’s Women depicts the feisty, often-forgotten women dear to Ben’s heart who, despite obstacles, achieved an independence rarely enjoyed by their peers in that era.