Elizabeth Willing Powel
The vivid biography of a key political influencer, astute businesswoman, and shaper of elite Philadelphia culture in the founding era
Elizabeth Willing Powel restores this remarkable woman to the social and political center of the American founding era. Powel challenged some of the nation’s leading political figures, famously questioning Benjamin Franklin about the government created by the 1787 Constitutional Convention and eliciting his response, “A republic, if you can keep it.”
Samantha Snyder reconstructs the life of a woman who moved with ease between drawing room and countinghouse, private grief and public influence. After her husband left her the entirety of his large estate, Powel spent thirty-seven years as a widow, managing substantial property while engaging in political debates and public organizations. She leveraged that political influence at key moments, including a fiery letter to George Washington successfully urging him to serve a second term as president.
Elizabeth Willing Powel’s story reframes the founding as forged not only by famous statesmen but also by women whose intelligence, business acumen, social connections, and political ambitions were essential to the republic’s creation and survival.
- Lorri Glover, Saint Louis University, author of Eliza Lucas Pinckney: An Independent Woman in the Age of RevolutionAn important, much-needed, deeply researched, innovative, and elegantly crafted book. The writing is vivid and immersive. Philadelphia’s social scenes, the grand tours of Europe, the fitfulness and hopefulness of the early Federal era—it all comes to life. We can see Elizabeth in her blue satin dress with the squirrel fur trim, feel her devastation at the deaths of her children, hear the endless tolling of church bells during the yellow fever epidemic, admire Elizabeth’s pride in her financial and business successes, and hope for the upstart country to live up to its ideals.
- Zara Anishanslin, University of Delaware, author of The Painter's Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists who Championed the American RevolutionAt last, in Samantha Snyder's biography of Elizabeth Willing Powel, we have a work that gives this extraordinary woman, whose life spanned the great events of colonial, revolutionary, and early republican America, her historical due. This meticulously researched biography is a must read. Reading Snyder's book will leave you convinced that the name 'Elizabeth Willing Powel' should be as well known as that of her contemporary Abigail Adams.
Samantha Snyder is the Research Librarian at the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon.
