Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren: The Revolutionary Atlantic and the Politics of Gender

by Kate Davies

Overview

Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren were radical friends in a revolutionary age. They produced definitive histories of the English Civil War and the American Revolution, attacked the British government and the United States federal constitution, and instigated a debate on women's rights which inspired Mary Wollstonecraft, Judith Sargent Murray, and other feminists. Drawing on new research (including recently discovered correspondence) this is the first book to consider Macaulay and Warren in the context of the revolutionary Atlantic. In a series of detailed interdisciplinary studies, Davies suggests the centrality of both women to transatlantic political cultures between the middle of the eighteenth century and the turn of the nineteenth. The experience of Anglo-American conflict formed Macaulay and Warren's friendship and radically changed their writing lives. In showing how it did so, Davies also explains how the revolutionary Atlantic shaped modern ideas of gender difference. Anglo-American separation had a politics of gender which defined Warren and Macaulay's awareness of themselves as women and of which their writing also offered important critiques. Davies's book reveals the political significance of Mercy Otis Warren and Catharine Macaulay to an era when the truths of patriotism, nationhood and empire were never wholly self-evident but were hotly contested.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199281107
Publisher:	Oxford University Press, USA
Publication date:	02/15/2006
Pages:	332
Product dimensions:	8.60(w) x 5.70(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Kate Davies is Lecturer in English Literature at the Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies, University of York.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren: Women, Writing, and the Anglo-American Public Sphere
1. Catharine Macaulay, Thomas Hollis, and the London Opposition
2. 'Out Cornelia-ising Cornelia': Portraits, Profession, and the Gendered Character of Learning
3. Belle Sauvage: Catharine Macaulay and the American War in Britain
4. Mercy Otis Warren's Revolutionary Letters
5. Free and Easy: Boston's Fashionable Dilemma
6. Mercy Otis Warren's Independence
Conclusion: Public Voices

Editorial Reviews

"Davies's work should be essential to any future effort to trace the transatlantic careers of literary and intellectual forms associated with gender, republicanism, and revolution."—Bryan Waterman, American Historical Review

"A splendid book."—Ruth H. Bloch, William and Mary Quarterly

From the Publisher