"A member of a distinguished South Carolina family, Martha Laurens Ramsay was one of few eighteenth-century Southern women whose written records provide a window into her life - her experiences, convictions, and ambivalences during the crucial epoch of the nation's founding decades.

Using Martha Laurens Ramsay's spiritual diary and correspondence and investigating contemporary magazines, novels, newspapers, sermons, and memoirs, Joanna Bowen Gillespie has crafted a contextual biography that reconstructs with compelling insights Ramsay's views on patriotism, daughterly duty, household management, wifely affection, motherly aspiration and personal autonomy."--BOOK JACKET.