Reviewed by Ruth Latta
Katy: The Woman Who Signed the Declaration of Independence
by Betty Bolté
Mystic Owl Publishing
January 2026, 288 pages, ISBN-13: 979-8986045078
Betty Bolté’s new novel, set around the time of the American Revolution, is about a real life historical person, Mary Katharine Goddard, who learned a trade, managed a business and supported the movement toward the Thirteen Colonies’ independence from Britain.
“Remember the Ladies” wrote Abigail Adams in March 1776 to her husband, John Adams, a lawyer and political activist, and later, the second U.S. President. At the time of her letter, he was in Philadelphia as one of the delegates from twelve colonies who met to coordinate a united response to British policies, including a boycott of British imports. Mrs. Adams urged him to include women’s rights in the new nation’s laws:
“In the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors…If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion.”
Mrs. Adams wanted to end the legal power that husbands had over their wives but unfortunately, John Adams didn’t take her seriously. In Katy: The Woman Who Signed the Declaration of Independence, author Betty Bolté has created a story about a woman who decided that instead of marrying she would be self-supporting and autonomous.
Goddard’s father was a doctor and postmaster in New London, Connecticut, where Katy spent her first twenty-four years. Her younger brother, William, apprenticed as a printer. As the novel opens, Katy and her widowed mother, Sarah Goddard, are travelling from New London by water to Providence, Rhode Island, to join him and help him run his first print shop.
Bolté has created a work of “informed fiction based on research.” She explains in her historical note, that, while historical records show where Katy lived and worked during her lifetime, there is no information – no letters, no diaries – that show what she was like as a person. As historical novelists do, Bolté invented a personality and a story for her. No one knows, for instance, why Katy decided to stay single and self-supporting in an era when most women married, so Bolté has imagined reasons why she did.
The author found that in the fall of 1784, Katy filed five lawsuits against her brother, William. Considering the number of times William had his sister and mother relocate to help him start new printing businesses, one can believe, as Bolté suggests, that he was a demanding man for whom the grass was always greener on the other side. Politically, though, he and his sister were in accord. The real life William Goddard was a key figure in the establishment of a postal service among the colonies, because the Royal Mail often confiscated letters in order to keep a finger on the pulse of the growing anger among the colonists. He opposed in particular the British-imposed Stamp Tax, which required all legal documents and printed material, including pamphlets and newspapers, to bear a stamp, for which a fee was required. Violators were tried by judge, not by a jury of their peers.
In the novel, Katy’s mother, Sarah, the former postmistress of New London, CT, urges her daughter to learn all aspects of the printing trade. First, Katy learns how to set type. Since printing on a heavy wooden press is physically demanding, she lets the young male apprentices do that work while she edits and manages the business.
When the Goddards publish the first North American edition of the Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montague, Sarah tells Katy: “Women publishing women is the most powerful message we could send to our community. Seeing a woman’s name as publisher on the colophon (the publisher’s emblem or imprint) sends a powerful message.”
In 1768, William brought his mother and sister to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to help him start another print shop. Subsequently, because of a feud with a partner, he lands in debtors’ prison. On his release he goes to try his luck as a printer in Baltimore, Maryland, leaving Katy to run the Philadelphia shop until he is ready to sell it.
As a newspaper publisher, Katy is in tune with the deteriorating relationship between the Thirteen Colonies and the mother country. In Baltimore, in 1774, she published information about the “Intolerable Acts,” four punitive laws passed by the British Parliament against the colonies. One law closed Boston harbour until the city paid for the tea thrown into the harbour a year earlier, to protest a tax on tea. Another act allowed British-appointed colonial governors to house British troops, not in barracks, but in unoccupied buildings in towns and cities where they could be close at hand if violence broke out.
Katy is convinced, as are many other colonists, that the taxes were not only to squeeze money out of the colonies to pay for their earlier war against France, but also to take away the colonies’ freedoms. “No taxation without representation,” was a popular slogan of the day. “It is one thing to live under the rule of a good king and his parliament,” she thinks. “It is an entirely different animal when the king becomes a tyrant, forcing his will, his desires, his demands on the people he governed without them having any recourse, let alone, say.”
As war clouds gather, Katy copes with paper shortages, competing newspapers, men who want to take over her managerial role, and urge her back to domesticity. In 1775 she publishes Patrick Henry’s famous, “Give me Liberty or Give Me Death” speech, delivered at the second Virginia Revolutionary Convention. On April 19,1775, came “the shot heard ’round the world,” the first shot fired at the Battles of Lexington and Concord, in which colonists defeated British soldiers and started the American Revolutionary War.
The Continental Congress of 1775 established the army under General Washington and took over governing the colony. It also officially adopted William Goddard’s postal system, and shortly afterwards, made Katy postmistress of Baltimore, a job she performed while managing the printing shop. In 1776, after writing and signing the Declaration of Independence, Congress decided to publish it, with all the signatures, in Katy’s “Baltimore Journal.” Then came Katy’s big moment in history.
Bolté’s novel excels in showing the gradual intensification of anger toward King George III and his government. Katy starts out a British subject in the province of Connecticut, North America who thinks it’s all right to live under the rule of a good king, and gradually becomes a citizen whose first loyalty is to America. (In two instances, where Bolté refers to “King Charles III” instead of “King George III”, the reader should ignore this slip; it was “mad King George III” and his chief minister, Lord North, who lost the American colonies.)
This review has focused on Katy’s historical context. As well as for the fun of seeing how one person’s life fits into huge historical events, readers will relish this novel for Katy’s personal story; her loves and losses; the warmth of her relationship with her mother; her women friends’ experiences in late 18th century America. The author does a good job of including period details, creating rounded characters and balancing scenes and summary. Since 2026 is the 250th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence, Katy could not be more timely.
About the reviewer: Ruth Latta’s novel, Forty Mermaids, will be published in 2026. Currently, she is reading about the struggles of the “Canadian” British North American colonies, Upper and Lower Canada, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to win democratic self-government in the first half of the 19th century.