America’s Forgotten Patriot: Mercy Otis Warren and the Writings that Fanned the Flames of Revolution

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lew Taylor
Keyword(s):  



1990 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 17-31
Author(s):  
Larry Lane ◽  
Judith Lane
Keyword(s):  




2005 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
CAROLINE WINTERER

What did early national Americans mean when they articulated fears of “luxury and effeminacy,” those twin sins of a republic that idolized the classical virtues of manly self-restraint? This essay argues that the fear of luxury and effeminacy circulated not just as airy metaphor but as palpable reality, specifically in the figure of the female recumbent on the sofa. The article traces separately the careers of Enlightenment Venus, who especially in her recumbent form embodied fears of passion in a republic built on reasoned consent, and the sofa, a piece of neoclassical furniture that rose to great popularity at this time and was envisioned as both effeminate and luxurious in fictional and nonfiction writing. The essay then joins the two figures of recumbent Venus and the sofa, showing how they were mutually enabling, and how they entered into early national conversations about labor and race. It concludes by examining how two educated American women, the self-described Roman matrons Mercy Otis Warren and Martha Bayard Smith, incorporated the image of the supine woman and her implied sofa into fictional writings about classical polities in danger. By knitting political ideologies, imaginative worlds, and neoclassical objects, the essay suggests a way for historians to flesh out the intellectual history of early national women, showing how they could participate in a conversation about modern politics and classical antiquity from which we have assumed they were largely disbarred.



1989 ◽  
Vol 30 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 85-92
Author(s):  
Krystan V. Douglas

Mercy Otis Warren, wife of General James Warren and sister of James Otis, was one of the most vocal supporters of the patriot cause during the American Revolution. Called “a definite stimulator of the Revolutionary leaders” (Christ 7), she wrote extensively: poems, sketches, letters, and plays, and was praised by John Adams as a “political pen which has no equal that I know of in this country” (Quinn 34). Of her plays, The Adulateur (1773), The Defeat (1773), The Group (1775), The Blockheads (1776), and The Motley Assembly (1779), she claimed only one, The Group, and that long after publication; all of her work was published anonymously. This anonymity poses no real problem for authorship for most of the plays, for there is reasonably strong documentary or internal evidence indicating that she wrote The Adulateur, The Defeat, and The Motley Assembly, as well as The Group, and there is general agreement that she wrote these plays.



1983 ◽  
Vol 35 (5) ◽  
pp. 481 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lester H. Cohen


1976 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 440 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edmund M. Hayes
Keyword(s):  


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