Author: Nancy Rubin Stuart

Nancy Rubin Stuart is an award-winning author whose eight nonfiction books focus upon women and social history. In March 2022 Beacon Press published Poor Richard’s Women: Deborah Read Franklin and the Other Women Behind the Founding Fathers. Earlier books include Defiant Brides, named one of the best books on Revolutionary-era women by the Wall Street Journal, the acclaimed The Muse of the Revolution, and the best-selling American Empress. Nancy’s journalistic work has appeared in the New York Times, Huffington Post, the Washington Post, the New England Quarterly, and national magazines.

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Autobiography and Biography Posted on

Benjamin Franklin’s Unconventional Marriage to Deborah Read

She was neither beautiful nor wealthy. Nor was Benjamin Franklin’s wife educated or intellectual. Nevertheless in 1724 he proposed to Deborah Read while renting a room from her father, the carpenter John Read of Philadelphia. Was it simply youthful passion that attracted him or did the eighteen-year-old printer ask for Deborah’s hand because she had […]

by Nancy Rubin Stuart