Warren, Mercy Otis
(b. September 5, 1728; d. October 19, 1814) Dramatist, Historian, and Poet.
Mercy Otis Warren was the first American woman to publish poems, plays, and nonfiction about politics and war, subjects that had traditionally been considered the exclusive province of men. During the crisis leading up to the American Revolution, her satirical pieces attacked the tyrannical injustice of British government in the colonies. After the war, her scathing critique of the proposed U.S. Constitution and a three-volume history of the Revolution secured her reputation as an astute political commentator. Yet throughout her career, questions about the appropriateness of a woman writing about quintessentially masculine affairs continued to haunt her.
Born in Barnstable, Massachusetts, to a politically active family, Warren received a more sophisticated education than most girls of her day. Tutored along with her brother, James Otis, she not only learned to read and write, but became familiar with the great works of history, literature, and philosophy. James went off to Harvard and then began a career as a lawyer and politician, while she continued to educate herself and started to write poetry, mostly on nonpolitical matters. In 1754 she married James Warren, a wealthy trader and farmer from a nearby town. Over the next twelve years, she gave birth to five sons. During this same period, Mercy's husband, brother, and father all assumed leadership roles in the resistance against Great Britain. By the early 1770s, John Adams, a family friend who knew of Mercy's talent for writing verse, encouraged her to use her pen in support of the patriot cause. She did so with great success.
Warren's earliest political writings assailed royal officials in Massachusetts for their attempts to deprive colonists of their freedom. In 1772 Warren published a political satire, a play called The Adulateur, followed in 1773 by another play, The Defeat and in 1775 by The Group. In each piece she attacked the corruption and cowardice of Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson and his cronies for currying favor with the Crown at the colonists' expense. At the same time, she published poems in Boston newspapers that urged Americans to assert their virtue, resist British taxes, and boycott British tea and other goods. Especially after the closing of the Boston Port in 1774, she warned that stronger measures might be necessary. Reprinted in newspapers in New York and Philadelphia, her works helped prepare Americans to take up arms against British tyranny.
Warren published these works anonymously. Like male political satirists at the time, she sought to elude harsh British libel laws as well as avoid personal retribution from those she had attacked. She may also have feared that people would not take a woman's ideas seriously. Yet a close-knit circle of Massachusetts patriots did know that a woman had authored the works. Although they supported Warren's endeavors, they did so only because she was useful to their cause. They did not believe that women in general should express their political views publicly, much less be able to vote or hold public office. Warren was the exception, not the rule.
During the War for Independence, Warren began to compose another kind of work, a History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution. Drawing on public papers, private correspondence, and her own knowledge, she published the monumental, three-volume work in 1805—this time under her own name. She was well aware that she was making herself vulnerable by writing about traditionally male subjects. Although she noted that she shied away from recounting "the blood-stained field and … the story of slaughtered armies," she believed that women had as much at stake in the country's history and future as did men. "Every domestic enjoyment," she said, "depends on the unimpaired possession of civil and religious liberty" (Warren, p. xlii).
Unlike her Revolutionary era propaganda, however, the History attracted more criticism than praise. Over time, Warren had grown disaffected with the course of American society. She had publicly opposed the ratification of the U.S. Constitution in a tract signed "A Columbian Patriot." Her History lamented America's path after the Revolution: the decline in public virtue, the growing distance between people and their government, and the increasing concentration of power in an aristocratic elite. The presidencies of George Washington and John Adams, she believed, betrayed the Revolutionary cause and put America on a path toward self-destruction. Thus, despite its detailed accounting and factual accuracy, her work did not find a large or receptive audience at the time. In fact, John Adams, stunned by her negative portrayal of him, dismissed the project, saying, "History is not the Province of the Ladies" (Zagarri, p. 159). Only in retrospect does the work's grandeur—and the full scope of Warren's achievements—appear in plain view.
Drinker, Elizabeth; Madison, Dolley; Memory and Early Histories of the Revolution; Republican Womanhood.; Sampson, Deborah.
Bibliography
Anthony, Katharine S. First Lady of the Revolution: The Life of Mercy Otis Warren. New York: Doubleday, 1958.
Franklin, Benjamin, V., ed. The Plays and Poems of Mercy Otis Warren. Delmar, NY: Scholars' Facsimilies and Reprints, 1980.
Richards, Jeffrey H. Mercy Otis Warren. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995.
Warren, Mercy Otis. History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution [1805], 2 vols., edited by Lester Cohen. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Classics, 1988.
Zagarri, Rosemarie. A Woman's Dilemma: Mercy Otis Warren and the American Revolution. Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1995.
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