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Mercy Otis Warren was the wife of Paymaster General John Warren and a close friend of John and Abigail Adams. Warren was an ardent patriot surrounded by political leaders who also embraced the revolution and supported her work (Garbaye 2014). She was a political propagandist whose published works advocated for the patriot cause leading up to and during the war, and then against federalism in the early republic. Through her frequent publications, she “developed a public character for herself, a female counterpart to Cassius that was most fully realized in her history, but that clearly began much earlier” (Sarkela 542).

Warren’s activism required her to be up-to-date on news and politics. She observed and commented on public events like “the Boston Port Bill, the Massachusetts Government Act, the meeting of provincial congress, the Continental Congress, the presence of a standing arming and the events at Lexington and Concord” (Cohen 1983, 488). Her awareness and engagement with individual events expanded to a broader interest “in the larger principles and forces that explained history” making her commentary even more poignant and compelling (Cohen 1983, 488).

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As a patriot, Warren focused her efforts on swaying public opinion in favor of the Revolution. She often commented on the roles of women in the Revolution, saying “that American women must be prepared to give up their very lives” (Hicks 2005, 278). She tended to lean toward the belief that men and women were equal and was “less inclined . . . to accept unquestioningly the belief that females were especially susceptible to flattery” but still “admitted that a woman’s emotional attachment to family hindered her devotion to country” (Norton 1998, 115; Hicks 2005, 78). In a letter to John Adams she “cautioned that the people could not give in to their fears, ‘and I should blush if in any instance the weak passions of my sex, should damp the fortitude, the patriotism, and the manly resolutions of yours'” but also became convinced that “there was an ‘appointed subordination’ of women,” an idea which contradicted any so-called weakness (Cohen 1983, 489, 493).

Warren saw herself, and other women, as having political obligations to the Revolution if they were to be good patriots. As stated before, she encouraged women sacrificing for their country and “argued that women’s hearts and minds responded as accurately and as sensitively to the public challenge as did men’s” (Kerber 1980, 84). She saw her own role as “contributing to her husband’s success in vanquishing King George III” and “setting scores with her family’s long-standing political rival,” preparing for “the emotional, political, and physical challenges” of being a part of the Revolution (Hicks 2005, 277, 288). She was “acutely aware of her participation in” the republican narrative and the role she felt she had to play with it (Cohen 1983, 486).

The role Warren ultimately fulfilled leading up to and during the war was one of influence and persuasion. Her work “helped polarize attitudes toward royal government in Massachusetts and energize support among those who were tired of protest” (Sarkela 541). She primarily relied on drama to get her message across, publishing scenes that would later become The Adulateur which “advanced a radical narrative that mobilized support for” the war (Sarkela 542). Ultimately, “she performed . . . a kind of literary republicanism” during the war, keeping patriots motivated and active for the cause (Cohen 1983, 487).

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Warren had high hopes for the future of America; writing Hannah Winthrop in January of 1774 that “though such an happy state, such an equal government, may be considered by some as an Utopian dream; yet you and I can easily conceive of nations and states rising to the highest consequence under more liberal plans” (Warren 1774). She felt entirely let down by the Constitution and advocated against its ratification in her Observations on the New Constitution and on the Federal and State Conventions. She argued that the federalist position marked “the first approaches of tyranny” and worried that the freedom Americans had paid for “with their blood” was threatened (Warren 1788, 4).

Warren thought some of the founders had been sullied by the surge of power they experienced with the defeat of the British. She thought these men were “endeavoring, by all the arts of insinuation and influence, to betray the people of the United States into an acceptance of a most complicated system of government” by attempting to ratify the Constitution (Warren 1788, 7). She lists her particular grievances with the Constitution later in the pamphlet, citing a lack of judiciary powers, separation of government, army, election terms, or bill of rights, to name a few (Warren 1788).

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Warren, like other politically engaged women of the time, became more and more liberal in her views on gender throughout the Revolutionary era. Prior to the Revolution, Mercy Otis Warren wrote to Hannah Winthrop, stating “I feel myself unequal to the combat yet hope the women will never get the better of that disinterested regard to universal happiness” implying her perceived inferiority to men who could participate in combat (Warren 1774). Warren “questioned her own ability to make republican sacrifices” despite her recommendations for self-sacrificing (Hicks 2005, 278).

Throughout the Revolution, though, her views began to change. Because “her understanding of republicanism was so intimately associated with . . . feminist political consciousness” she started to see the government enforced inferiority of women as anti-republican (Cohen 1983, 484). She “presented herself as an exemplary republican” but saw the conflict between that idea and her lack of power in her new republic (Cohen 1983, 484). Her understanding of republicanism changed as it was enacted and “she gradually became aware of the capacity of republicanism to synthesize her personal and public commitments” (Cohen 1983, 487). A key piece of this was Republican Motherhood.

Warren, like many other Americans, saw “the role of mother with the preservation of republican principles, intending thereby to ennoble the female individually and to demonstrate that she had a significant political function” (Cohen 1983, 495). As her belief in the importance of women increased, she also saw what she perceived as a decline in the American ideals that the war was fought for. She was disappointed in the way “republicanism failed to define women as citizens–civically responsible participants–and thereby failed to include even the possibility for them of concrete political activity” especially after all her political involvement in the war and her embrace of the liberal republican narrative stressing citizen participation (Cohen 1983, 498). Warren had a vision for the future of her republic that wasn’t fulfilled and she ultimately wasn’t satisfied with where her nation ended up, although she did consider it a vast improvement.