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Martha Saxton

Martha Saxton is a professor of history and women's and gender studies at Amherst College. She has written biographies for actress Jayne Mansfield and author Louisa May Alcott, and is also the author of Being Good: Women's Moral Values in Early America. Her most recent book, The Widow Washington: The Life of Mary Washington, was a finalist for the 2020 George Washington Book Prize. 

Articles by this Author

Denigrated as "crude," "illiterate," "self-centered," and "slovenly," Mary Washington had the singular destiny to have a son whose potential for being idealized seems to have been even greater than that for motherhood.
How Juliette “Daisy” Low, an unwanted child, a miserable wife, a lonely widow, finally found happiness as the founder of the Girl Scouts of America
Institutionalizing the American Honeymoon