The American Revolution From The Female Perspective

With the Fourth of July coming up, you'll hear a great deal of talk about the Founding Fathers, those men who gave birth to a nation conceived in liberty. What about the women?

Colonial America was not united in a desire to be free of England, but that level of conflict is often forgotten when speakers make grand pronouncements about the bravery of the men who fought and died so that their descendants could be self-governing and independent. What of the women living in a divided society, where friendship and family were strong bonds put to the test by politics?

Katie Hanrahan has used these questions as inspiration for her latest novel, THE LIBERTY FLOWER, and it is a must-read for all who would like a deeper understanding of how the United States came to be founded and what ordinary people had to give up in order to gain.

The novel is set in Charleston, South Carolina, where the Revolutionary War was focused in 1780. At the time, the northern colonies were largely lost to the rebels and King George III wanted to hold on to the wealth of the southern colonies. Charleston was one of the wealthiest port cities in the colonies, and the men who possessed much of that wealth wavered in their support. Through the character of Sarah Mahon, a sixteen-year-old with all the sense of invincibility of any teenager, the reader is brought into the unrest of the time, when it was not clear that the rebellion would succeed.

The narrative follows Sarah's life through the tumult of war, peace, economic war and political chaos, from the battlefield through the financial panics that followed. Through her eyes the reader will discover the stubborn determination of America's merchants to conduct business in the face of British interference, and find that government policies often did more harm than good. There is a strong link between the past and the present, and Katie Hanrahan does a superb job in showing the commonalities that any American can relate to in the current political climate.

With a love story playing out through the length of this piece of historical fiction, the novel has a heart as well as intelligence. Why not download a copy and re-discover American history from the view of an ordinary woman trying to survive trying times. You'll gain a better appreciation for those who fought with their wits and hoped for greater freedom at the end, only to find that their fight had to go on as the ladies were forgotten in the struggle to mold a country governed by its citizens instead of a distant king.