Reviews

Just got a great review from Middlesex Institute of Lifelong Learning (in Middletown, CT) for a presentation I did there,

"All of us at MILE want to thank you so very much for the outstanding presentation that you gave for us earlier this month. It was fascinating and very inspiring to learn from you about the lives of these amazing Colonial Era women in Connecticut and in Massachusetts ... and just as captivating to hear about how you were able to research their lives, when so few records about women of this time are available. Your presentation was of tremendous interest to all of us in the audience, and during the break, after the program, and at subsequent MILE gatherings, many people told me how much they enjoyed your talk, and how much they learned from you. I'm quite eager myself to read your book, and to find out more about these very courageous and remarkable Colonial women."

Michelle Marchetti Coughlin, author of One Colonial Woman’s World: The Life and Writings of Mehetable Chandler Coit.
“Alice Plouchard Stelzer has done an admirable job of retrieving the seemingly lost details of the lives of some of Connecticut’s first female settlers. Through painstaking effort, she has brought these women’s stories and sacrifices to life, in the process restoring an important aspect of New England’s early history.”


Bonnie Hurd Smith, historian and author of We Believe in You, and several other books.
"With no women’s journals or letters to rely on, Alice Plouchard Stelzer skillfully uses public records and men’s writings to tell the dramatic stories of colonial women who left behind relative ease in England to brave storms, food shortages, and disease crossing the Atlantic only to endure the rigors of carving out new towns and rudimentary homes, a punishing workload, recurring illnesses, the challenges of childbirth and childrearing in the New World, travel by foot and with children in tow to establish more new towns, and limitations set on them by the ever-vigilant Puritan ministers who warned women against their “emotional excess” and “moral errors.”


Review by Florence Bamforth
I highly recommend this book. It is a well-written documentary of twelve courageous women who came to the "New World" in the 1600s.... their struggles and their losses. A great read. If you are looking for a book to give, it also makes a great gift. I have given several to grandchildren. This is a read not to be missed.


Review by Pamela Parker
This work is an exciting, educational and troubling read -- settling communities in the wilderness, subjected to unmanageable hardships, cruel punishments for those who didn't conform to narrow-minded tenets that portrayed women as seducers and tempteresses. It is well researched and gives us an astonishing, if not heroic, portrait of our foremothers and what they endured to bring us to life on this continent.


Review by Dave Martin
"I am really enjoying the reading of your book; the approach of using actual case studies certainly creates a good composite picture of life in the those times for women in the colonies. I think you chose some excellent representative examples to describe. And I also like the way you have been careful not only to document but also to raise as-yet unanswered questions, letting the reader mull it over and perhaps decide for her/himself--that is good genealogy!"


Melanie Lauwers mlauwers@capecodonline.com November 10, 2013"Female Adventurers: The Women Who Helped Colonize Massachusetts and Connecticut," Alice Plouchard Stelzer (Merrimack Media, ISBN 978-1-939166-21-0, 161 pages, $14.95)

Alice Plouchard Stelzer of Brewster has penned a history of early New England, focusing on women who came to the New World in the 1630s to carve out a life far from home. Among them: Margaret Barret Huntington, widowed on the way to what would become Windsor, Conn.; Mary Holt of Windsor, who was banished and disappeared; and Rebecca Elson Mudge Greensmith of Wethersfield, Conn., hanged as a witch. Who were these women? What brought them across the sea? And how did Stelzer find all the details she has uncovered about these women's lives? A professional writer and editor, Stelzer credits libraries in Connecticut and here on the Cape for helping her piece together this unique history.


Internet Radio Interview - cut and paste link
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/the-author-connection/2013/08/30/the-author-connection-with-alice-plouchard-stelzer

New Review
http://dougholder.blogspot.com/2013/10/female-adventurers-women-who-helped.html

Karen Glenn
"I recommend Female Adventurers: The women who helped colonize Massachusetts and Connecticut as an enlightening and informative book portraying the lives of twelve Puritan women who until now no one knew anything about. I had to wonder why we had not heard about these women before. This book is obviously the result of in depth research by this author. This is a recommended read for all ages and genders."