Word: widowing
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...literary character Franklin invented was a triumph of imagination. Silence Dogood was a slightly prudish widow from a rural area, created by a spunky unmarried Boston 16-year-old who had never spent a night outside of the city. He imbued Mrs. Dogood with that spirited aversion to tyranny that he would help to make part of the American character. "I am," she wrote, "a mortal enemy to arbitrary government and unlimited power. I am naturally very jealous for the rights and liberties of my country; and the least appearance of an encroachment on those invaluable privileges...
When Benjamin Franklin was 24 years old, he was already owner of the Pennsylvania Gazette, and he advertised in its pages the sale of "a likely Negroe Woman" who lived at "Widow Read's in Market Street." That same address is where Franklin found a wife, the daughter of Widow Read, and where he had his first close contact with an enslaved African. Over a long life, Franklin remained engaged with slavery--as a buyer, seller and master of slaves and finally as an abolitionist...
POLLY STEVENSON: A SECOND DAUGHTER When Franklin returns to Britain in 1757 as a political agent of the American colonies, he moves into a four-story town house near London's busy Strand. Its owner: a solicitous widow named Margaret Stevenson, with whom he may have had an affair during his 15 years under her roof. But Franklin's real interest is her brainy daughter Mary, who went by the nickname Polly. Only 18 years old when she first enters his life, she shows such an eagerness to learn that it stirs all his strong mentoring instincts...
Pattie, a wealthy widow from California, can easily afford the best hotels. But she prefers to slum it in a small cottage in Dharamsala because it overlooks the monastery of the Dalai Lama, the exiled political and religious leader of Tibet. "I can just stand there with my arms stretched out," she says, "and feel the aura wafting up." A bright-eyed, diminutive 60-year-old, Pattie is planning to visit Tibet soon. She wants to get there "before all the good energy disappears because of those Chinese people...
...life, first as a sophomore class president and activist at Radcliffe, then as a housewife and mother of two actively involved in community service, and later as a divorcée working her way up the Minneapolis political system’s ladder and currently as a widow dedicated to the education of older Minnesotans...