"Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another's peace or reputation."
--- Benjamin Franklin on Chastity
In this sensationalist social media age, we have elevated to new heights a 1960's advertising adage that Mad Men's Don Draper might have pitched based on his fictional lifestyle: Sex Sells.
In 1990, on the 200th anniversary of Benjamin Franklin's death, a Chicago Tribune article put a "ladies' man" spin on Franklin's life, probably to peddle newspapers. Taking the baton in 2003, Time magazine called Franklin a "babe magnet," presumably to stimulate prurient interest in our Founding Father to hawk printed magazines. This seems like harmless child's play compared to the way historical revisionists in the Twitter Age have trashed Founding Fathers more recently with labels like "racists."
Was Benjamin Franklin like Hugh Hefner without his signature pipe and pajamas?
There's a famous story in most history books about Franklin arriving in Philadelphia. The 17-year-old bought three loaves of bread for the price of what one loaf of bread would have cost in his former hometown Boston. Looking rather ridiculous with one loaf of bread under each arm as he ate the third while walkind down the street, young Ben made a humorous impression on Deborah Read, who become his wife years later.
Debbie's mother did not find this young man suitable. When Franklin traveled to London the next year and never wrote, Debbie married another man of whom her mother approved.
Ben wrote empathetically about women of poor working girls who found themselves pregnant or forced by circumstance to make a living from sex after yielding to temptation.
When Franklin moved back to Philadelphia a couple of years later, his landlady matched him to a potential wife. Despite their mutual attraction, in the end it's believed that her dowry offered was not sufficient, as a young man with the goal of building a printing business. Then again, perhaps something else was at issue.
Ben's son William was born in 1730, when Ben Franklin was an unmarried 24 year-old. Oddly, the William's mother was never revealed, which is something unimaginable in our current day and age, because William grew up to become Governor of New Jersey.
William was something of a public figure years before his election. He assisted his father by holding the string in the rain on his famous kite-flying and key experiment that launched Benjamin into worldwide scientific prominence. William served as an assistant to his father for years. They developed a strong relationship.
Later in life, William remained a loyalist to the British Empire after his father evolved from lauded English loyalist to Amerian patriot, causing a falling out which never healed between the two.
About the time William was born, the stars aligned Ben Franklin and Deborah Read, who had left her first husband four months into the marriage when the "sweet talker" who had fooled her mother turned out to be a cad. That first husband couldn't hold a job and was rumored to have another wife and family in London. Disreputable to the end, he "stole a slave" and fled to the West Indies, where he died.
Possibly because Deborah could never prove she was a widow rather than simply abandoned by her husband, she and Ben never married formally. They just declared themselves spouses and lived as husband and wife in a common law marriage for 44 years. She helped raise William as well as becoming an integral part of running Ben's printing business, which became an empire of its own.
In Poor Richard's Almanack, Poor Richard (a pseudonym for Ben) often praised the virtues of having a good wife. He encouraged other entrepreneurs who followed in his footsteps to enlist the help of their wives. If a husband died, he helped the widow keep the business running, and as he noted, they usually ran the operation with a better eye for profits than their dearly departed husbands.
Deborah and Benjamin also enjoyed intimate relations, presumably to the point of "health and offspring."
Debbie gave birth to a son and daughter. Their son Francis, as you may recall, died at age four from Small Pox.
Though Franklin spent much of his time in England and France, he carried on extensive correspondense with his daughter "Sally" (Sarah) for his entire life. In conjunction with Ben's falling out with her step-brother William, she inherited the bulk of the Franklin estate.
Ben exchanged letters for years with several other women, including younger women with whom some banter was flirtatious. That fits the ladies' man storyline, but Franklin also offered fatherly advice. More likely, in my opinion, any sexual inuendo was just a bit of harmless humor to punch up the prose. All in all, the correspondence seems to show mutual respect similar to Franklin's correspondence with men, including many of the most prominent scientists and philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment.
Franklin also exchanged a great deal of correspondence with his beloved wife Deborah, because she stayed in Philadelphia looking after the business empire and home while he lived in London for much of their marriage. Ben lived almost exclusively in London from 1757 through 1775, serving as a representative of the Pennsylvania Assembly and eventually additional American colonies. Deborah died just before Christmas in 1774, probably disappointed to know she would again be alone for the holidays. Despite this, they seemed to love each other and certainly respected as revealed in their amiable correspondence.
During years away from his wife, did Benjamin Franklin have his sexual needs fulfilled by ladies in England? That's possible. He lived in the same boarding house for most of that particular 17-year span in London with a woman named Margaret Stevenson and her adult daughter Polly.
In letters, Benjamin Franklin made it clear that he wanted Polly to marry his son William, so if that mystery woman was her, then likely this was just silly horseplay.
The greatest fodder for the tabloid Franklin exposés would be found during his time in Paris, when he negotiated first to enlist French assistance to the American colonies and subsequently the peace agreements to end our Revolutionary War, which was tied-in with a larger real-life Risk game board which could have been called a World War.
In Paris, Franklin certainly spent a lot of time with Madame Anne Brillon, a beautiful woman with two beautiful adult daughters. All were all excellent musicians. He spent many happy evenings of chamber music and convivial conversation. Again, he carried on correspondence with Madame Brillon for years. At this point in his life, he was a widower, but she wasn't interested in Ben romantically, calling him “mon cher papa,” which means my dear daddy.
Ben definitely had a flirtation with Madame Helvétius, a 60-year-old widow. Abigail Adams (wife of 2nd US President John Adams) wrote about being outraged to see Madame Helvétius put her arm around Ben's neck at a dinner party. Franklin later propsed to her, but she turned him down.
In a letter to Polly Stevenson, another long-term, warm correspondent --- in fact she was at his death bed in 1790 --- Franklin mentioned that the French were very obliging. The French heard he liked women so they kept presenting him with ladies. In this age of Jeffrey Epstein's fantasy island for the elite or Fang Fang and Representative Eric Swalwell, it isn't hard to imagine why.
Ben wrote that when one of these lovely ladies offered to spend the night with him, he asked that she wait until the nights were longer. It seems based on that joke that he wasn't the ladies' man imagined during those days, but as all of us know, we never get too old to appreciate beauty.
I am fortunate to be married to a beautiful wife myself, and we've been enjoying time in Big Sky, Montana, which we have decided to claim as our home town to a large extent because of its natural beauty, whch you can see throughout this post.
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