Ben Franklin

Reflections on history while writing my book, American Hero.

Ben Franklin,

Founding Trannie

Pimp My Founding Fathers

Hold on to your wigs, ladies and gentlemen. I want to introduce you to Ben Franklin. You may know him from one of the hundred dollar bills you have stuffed in your pockets. Or from his famous experiment with that kite and capturing lightning in a bottle. Or from his inventions, writings, and his involvement in a little thing called the founding of the United States of America. He is one of the OG American Idols, no doubt.

         But his Wikipedia vitals just skim the surface of Ben Franklin’s Awesomeness.

         You might know that he had a reputation as a Ladies’ Man (Madame du Pompadour eat your heart out), but he was also a bit of a Lady Man, as well.

         Identity was always a fluid thing with Franklin. At various times in his life he posed as an English fop, a country bumpkin, a freed slave, an Islamic slave trader, the King of Prussia, and several very outspoken women.

         In my book, American Hero, the narrator meets Ben at a mass execution of slaves in New York. He is dressed as a she, Silence Dogood, because “woman are taken for granted,” he/she says, “being unnoticed, they notice more.”

         This is as radical in the 18^th century world as saying that maybe blacks are human. Maybe more so because it would be a while until black men recognized the equality of black women.

         “If you go among women,” Silence writes in one of Franklin’s newspapers, “you will learn that they have always more work upon their hands than they are able to do.”

         But Franklin as Madame Dogood goes further than whining about the workload. “I have often thought it one of the most barbarous customs of the world that we deny advantages of learning to women.”

         Remember, at this time, women were not allowed to vote, own property, go to college, practice medicine or law, have any profession, etc. All virtue was seated with men, and a woman could only be respected in direct relation to her obedience to a man. Franklin, who might have had as many as a dozen female personalities, including Martha Careful, Martha Aftercast, Caelia Shortface, Busy Body, and Alice Addertongue, fought against that oppression.

         In his Polly Baker he found a champion for women’s sexual liberation. She laments in a letter to Franklin’s paper that she had gotten knocked up by a man and society was punishing her and not him. Citing the Bible’s commandment to increase and multiply, she defends having children out of wedlock and insists that the father be compelled to support her and their child. The court, she claims, “ought, in my humble opinion, instead of whipping me, have a statue erected in my memory.”

         As another woman, known simply but tellingly as Patience, Franklin laments that he/she is “so busy with the pesterment of children that there is a handsome gentleman that has a mind, I don’t question, to make love to me, but he can’t get the least opportunity to.” Not only does Franklin note the burdensome and unfair work put on women, he also acknowledges that women, like men, are sexual beings whether married or not. This was in 1742, hello.

Franklin’s views on marriage and most societal morays were complicated, but he could be hard on himself as a man when he was a woman.

         In one exchange of angry letters in Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette, he created Anthony Afterwit to complain about his wife’s extravagant spending. Franklin’s Celia Single immediately fired an angry letter back complaining about men who promised the world to women to get them to marry them—or have sex with them—only to come up woefully shorthanded afterward. She not only attacks men as being useless in the upkeep of homes and the raising of children, she calls them, “pool shooters, dice players, dandies, checker-board enthusiasts, tavern haunters, everlasting readers, and mighty diligent at anything besides their business.” She even goes on to attack Franklin himself for publishing the belly aching complaints of “idiot” husbands.

         As a rich, white man, Franklin often attacked rich, white men. He not only became a woman to criticize his own kind, he also became a mulatto (mixed race) freed slave who decried that people “of color” like him could not “take a walk, drink a glass of beer, or converse freely with honest men [without being hassled].” In his last published work in 1790, at age 84, Franklin became an Arab slave trader writing to justify the enslavement of white Christians using the exact logic of American Southerners to excuse their slavery. “If we do not make slaves of the Christians, who will perform our labors? Must we be our own slaves? Must we maintain them as beggars? White men are too ignorant to establish government and too accustomed to slavery to work. They are happy as slaves. We provide everything and treat them humanely. Let us hear no more about freeing the white men.”

         You could replace “white men” and “Christian” with women and make a powerful satirical point to support sexual equality.

         Of all the Founding Fathers, perhaps of all everybody, when Franklin talked about freedom, he meant it. Freedom for all people of all ethnicities, religions, and sexes.

         That’s the kind of Awesomeness that comes from walking a mile in another man’s moccasins, or, occasionally, in another woman’s pumps.