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.
His common-law marriage to Deborah was another consequence of Ben’s youthful imprudence. Although betrothed to her before his first trip to England, Ben soon wrote from London that he could not predict when he would return to Philadelphia. Heartbroken, Deborah soon accepted courtship from an English émigré John Rogers, who wed her in August 1725. Within a few months, Deborah discovered he was a bigamist and abruptly ended the marriage. Not only was divorce hard to obtain in colonial Philadelphia, but Rogers had also squandered her dowry, fallen into debt and fled to the West Indies. Rumor had it that he soon died, but since that could not be proven, Deborah was left neither single nor married, her once virbrant spirit broken.
A year later Ben returned to Philadelphia and guiltily observed his former fiancee’s depressed state. During the next four years, he co-founded a printing business and courted several women whose fathers rejected him as a potentially poor provider. Finally Ben proposed again to Deborah. All he disclosed about that decision in his Autobiography was “I took her to wife on September 1, 1730” in a common law marriage, thereby correcting his “errata.” Deborah quickly assumed responsibility for the stationery shop Ben had opened near his print shop, expanded it into a profitable general store, and became an astute saleswoman and bookkeeper. Apparently she was both trustworthy and talented, leading Ben to grant her his power of attorney, a privilege rarely given to colonial women. Simultaneously Deborah raised Ben’s illegitimate son, birthed the Franklin’s own male child and hosted members of his family during their long visits to the Franklin home.