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

In 1785, a Boston publisher issued Sans Souci, alias, Free and Easy, a three-act satire targeting the weekly assembly of the city's bon ton for tea and cards under the name of Sans Souci. Among the characters in this play, wearing flimsy allegorical disguises as "the republican heroine" and "Mrs. W—n," were two epistolary acquaintances who ranked among the preeminent female intellectuals of the British Atlantic: Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren. Kate Davies's excellent new study of these two authors focuses on their roles as champions of the causes of the commonwealth Whig tradition, classical republicanism, and the American Revolution. Her account also finds room for both their personal friendship and the quarrel between them caused by the publication of Sans Souci, which occurred during a visit that Macaulay paid to Warren and her other American correspondents during the winter of 1784–85.

In the anonymous farce (which a number of Warren's acquaintances attributed to her), Macaulay's and Warren's characters both lambaste the public corruption augured by the resurrection of fashionable society in Boston. In reality, Warren did, in fact, disparage the assembly as a sure sign of America's incipient corruption. Yet, as a London intellectual and "a woman well known for her fashionable tastes," Macaulay attended the Sans Souci, much to her friend Warren's dismay (167). While the club and the debate over it occupy only one chapter of Davies's book, the interactions between femininity and classical republicanism, between the public and private spheres, between sociability and virtue, and between authorial persona and personal identity that color this historical episode also guide this fine and much-needed assessment of Macaulay and Warren as women writers and republican thinkers. Davies challenges not only John Pocock's assertion of "an incongruity between Macaulay and Warren's femininity and their adoption, and articulation, and critique of republican ideals of citizenship," but also the arguments of Rosemarie Zagarri and others that these two authors "were able to separate their gender from their politics" and thus "have little to say about (or to) women" (20, 306). Davies posits a "dynamic relationship" between private (and thus coded female) sentiment and political principle that allowed Macaulay and Warren to position themselves at the intersection of the discourses of femininity and republican patriotism (183).

The relationship between femininity and republicanism was productive for both women. It fueled Macaulay's impressive literary output—Davies focuses mainly on her star-making History of England from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line (1763–1783)—as well as Warren's own catalogue of satirical plays and poems, and her remarkable History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution (1805). Macaulay and Warren's social and ideological positions also yielded a profusion of other texts: both women were immersed in the system of epistolary exchange that bound together the Atlantic radical community during the eighteenth century.

Davies's first three chapters focus on Macaulay, paying particular attention to public representations of her as both the literal embodiment of the spirit of liberty, and later as a monstrous Amazon or belle sauvage as her political reputation declined in England. Davies's fourth chapter brings Warren into the fold, analyzing the voluminous body of Warren's correspondence with her female contemporaries (including Macaulay) as a form of public writing. The fifth chapter chronicles the Sans Souci episode, including the rift between Warren and Macaulay, which was mended before Macaulay left America. The importance of healing this breach becomes plain in Davies's final chapter, where she considers Warren's own decline into political unpopularity, touching on the sustaining power that Macaulay's and Warren's friendship had for both women in politically trying times.

Davies's book is both a thorough study and a pleasure to read. My only quarrel with her argument stems from her reading...