"The Women in Ben Franklin's Life Tell a Fuller Story" Topic

… of the Founder

"Benjamin Franklin is widely known as a paragon of reason and restraint, epitomized by the proverbs in the Poor Richard's Almanacks of 1733-1754 and its abbreviated version, The Way to Wealth of 1758. Among the most familiar are "No gains without pains," " One today is worth two tomorrows" and "Better slip with foot than tongue." Ben admitted that many of those maxims were not original to him, but used his pen to adapt them from literary works and folk wisdom. A closer look at Ben life through his relationships to women reveals a different founding father than one found in history books.

Ben deeply admired women but found his attraction to them as powerful and dangerous as electricity itself. In his Autobiography, he confessed that as a youth he visited "low women" to satisfy that "hard-to-be-governed passion of youth." Those encounters, he penned, were "attended with some expense and great inconvenience, besides a continual risk to my health." Among those "inconveniences" was the birth of his illegitimate son William, whom his shocked bride Deborah Read was obliged to raise…"

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Armand

Interesting. I'd thought Franklin more "successful" in his pursuit of French charm.

Ha!…

Armand