A Mother for America

Abstract

A Mother for America tells the story of how Betsy Ross, unknown outside her family until 1870, became the most famous woman in American history, despite sustained scholarly skepticism about her role in making the first American flag. Treating Betsy Ross as a case study in American civil religion, the book shows how artists, teachers, marketers, reformers, and politicians repeatedly refashioned Ross to promote competing visions of patriotism, gender roles, citizenship, and national identity—and to sell goods and make money. From schoolrooms and civic pageants to world’s fairs, war-bond drives, thirteen-star flags, and mass advertising, Betsy Ross emerged as a flexible and emotionally powerful symbol. A parallel narrative follows the controversial transformation of a small colonial Philadelphia rowhouse from a beer saloon into a patriotic shrine, tourist destination, and in the twenty-first century into the nation’s first historic house museum devoted to women’s labor during the era of the American Revolution. Drawing on religious and art history, anthropology, memory studies, and quantitative studies of fame, A Mother for America explains not only how the Betsy Ross story spread so quickly, but why it has proved so resilient—and what its popularity reveals about American beliefs, values, and uses of the past. By uncovering the mechanisms through which national myths are made, marketed, contested, and sustained, this book reveals how belief, repetition, and emotional attachment shape Americans’ understanding of their history.