With
"computerized age-regression portrait," from the WaPo: "We always see Martha with a withered face in her old age. But she was quite a beautiful woman in her younger years, and Washington loved her deeply," said Edward Lengel, senior editor at the Papers of George Washington project at the University of Virginia. "What’s happening now is revisionist. But I think it’s a whole lot closer to the reality of what she was." And the article is not just about her looks or her Sarah Palin-style shoes (click on the photo box).
Ken, you beat me to this post! No matter. I was going to say that the author of the article got it exactly right in noting the significance of those shoes. No woman who wears shoes like that can be as frumpy as the historians have succeeded in painting Martha Washington to have been. I don't know how true to life this "regression" is . . . but I do know that those shoes scream that it ought to have been true.
Behind every good man there is a woman, and that woman was Martha Washington man, and everyday George would come home, she would have a big fat bowl waiting for him, man when he come in the door, man she was a hip, hip, hip lady, man.
WHY? In another post the discussion is to look cooler to the youth. Washington was not a republican, but I guess conservatism could claim him as part of the past even though he was a liberal in his own time. Strange, if pandering to the youth is that important why not render Mrs. Washington in a skimpy cocktail dress carrying a martini, smoking a cig and falling into a limo. I don't get this, is the assumption that people think she was born a frumpy grandmother and that if we teach them that she was not then they will embrace the past?