“Parallel Lives of a Patriotic Heroine and a Spy”
by Nancy Rubin Stuart

Ever wonder why the rights of women are still endangered today? Or how marriage can change the destiny of those who marry powerful men? Award-winning author Nancy Rubin Stuart’s presentation from her double biography, Defiant Brides: The Untold Story of Two Revolutionary-Era Women Who Married Political Radicals illustrates how two teenage brides managed long, happy marriages to famous Revolutionary-era men. Their husbands were the handsome traitor Benedict Arnold and the patriotic General Henry Knox.

Defiant Brides captures how passion and marriage changed the lives of both young women: – Peggy Shippen who assisted Arnold in his betrayal of America, – and Lucy Flucker, who faithfully followed General Henry Knox through the army camps of the Revolution, bearing and losing ten children along the way.

Nancy Rubin Stuart is an award-winning author and journalist whose books include The Muse of the Revolution: The Secret Pen of Mercy Otis Warren and the Founding of a Nation; The Reluctant Spiritualist: the Life of Maggie Fox; American Empress: the Life and Times of Marjorie Meriweather Fox; and Isabella of Castile. She has written for The New York Times and many national magazines. Stuart currently serves as Executive Director of the Cape Cod Writers Center, and is a board member of the Women Writing Women's Lives Seminar of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Stuart received a William Randolph Hearst Creative and Performing Artist and Writers Fellowship from the American Antiquarian Society in 2005 to research The Muse of the Revolution: The Secret Pen of Mercy Otis Warren and the Founding of a Nation.