Mary Ball Washington, George's single mother, often gets overlooked – but she's well worth saluting
On Mother’s Day, it is important and poignant to recall the hard life of Mary Ball Washington, who struggled – mostly alone – to raise our Founding Father. Historians have left us with inaccurate and mostly unpleasant accounts of her long and laborious years. After George Washington’s death, historians canonized him and his mother, too. But unlike George’s enduring sainthood, praise for Mary was short-lived. In the late 19th century, George’s biographers began interpreting the few shreds of evidence about Mary – almost all of it from George – to mean that she was overprote...