The Muse of the Revolution: The Secret Pen of Mercy Otis Warren and the Foundingof a Nation | 
 enlarge | Author: Nancy Rubin Stuart
Publisher: Beacon Press
Category: Book
List Price: $28.95
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Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 349274
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.4
ISBN: 0807055166
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.3092
EAN: 9780807055168
ASIN: 0807055166
Publication Date: July 15, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Just arrived! This is a brand new, unopened copy in printer-fresh mint condition. NOT remainder marked, used, or ex-library.
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Product Description
In their landmark book on extraordinary women, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony hailed Founding Mother Mercy Otis Warren (1728–1814) for advocating not only "the freedom of man alone, but . . . that of her own sex also." In this meticulously researched biography of the first female historian of the American Revolution and our first woman playwright, Nancy Rubin Stuart depicts Mrs. Warren's life and patriotic achievements.
The sister of firebrand James "the Patriot" Otis, who first declared that "taxation without representation is tyranny," the highly educated Mercy Otis Warren was the mother of five sons and the wife of James Warren, Speaker of the Massachusetts House and paymaster general of the Continental Army. In 1775 patriotic Mrs. Warren served as her husband's private secretary at the headquarters of the Massachusetts Committee of Safety and the Provincial Congress, where she heard news about the Revolution that few men?and virtually no women?enjoyed.
Mercy Otis Warren was a close friend of both John and Abigail Adams; she and Abigail shared their fears, comforted each other in their husbands' absences, exchanged theories about child-rearing, and even ran a small importing business together. John Adams, who was impressed with Mrs. Warren's acumen and literary abilities, praised her "real genius" and encouraged her to write satirical plays, poems, and a history of the American Revolution. After reading her three-volume History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution (1805), however, Adams exploded. In one of ten blistering letters, he accused her of having a "determined resolution" to denigrate his role in the Revolution. This eye-opening biography reveals their complex relationship?and why it unraveled.
The Muse of the Revolution captures Mrs. Warren's bold interactions with other notables of American history, among them Sam Adams, Henry Knox, Benjamin Lincoln, Hannah Winthrop, Elbridge Gerry, and George and Martha Washington.
Mrs. Warren satirized both British and American Loyalists in her popular plays and poems and authored an influential critique of the U.S. Constitution whose principles were later incorporated into the Bill of Rights. Nancy Rubin Stuart reveals how Mrs. Warren's provocative writing made her an exception among the largely voiceless women of the eighteenth century, and she persuasively argues for Mercy's legacy to be appreciated by a new generation.
"When John Adams observed that 'History is not the province of the ladies,' he had in mind his former protege, the accomplished and prolific Mercy Otis Warren. Here Nancy Rubin Stuart restores Mrs.Warren to vibrant life, offering up a vivid picture of colonial America, and incidentally proving John Adams twice wrong."
?Pulitzer Prize winner Stacy Schiff and author of A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America
"At last! A full biography of Mercy Otis Warren?poet, playwright, pamphleteer, scholar, agitator for liberty! Nancy Rubin Stuart's feminist re-telling of America's 'founding fathers' in revolution and nation-building is a wonderful corrective. This deeply researched, vigorously written portrait of the woman who chronicled the Revolution, improved the US constitution, campaigned for the Bill of Rights, and confronted her competitive, even malicious, male-controlled world with frequent success is stunning. Filled with surprises and important insights, both historical and contemporary, everybody concerned about our past, and our future, will want to read and gift this book."
?Blanche Weisen Cook, University Distinguished Professor, CUNY, and author of Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume 1 and 11
"A fascinating reminder that the Founding Fathers did not birth the Revolution by themselves, and that the ideals of independence resonated as strongly with American women as they did with American men. As Americans confront the issue of ever-increasing executive privilege, we would do well to remember that the individual freedoms we prize so highly were secured by patriots like Mercy Otis Warren."
?Christine Kreiser, Managing Editor, American History Magazine
"Playwright, poet, and historian, Mercy Otis Warren was both a witness to and chronicler of some of the most important events of the American Revolution. Nancy Rubin Stuart restores Warren to her proper place as one of the 'founding mothers' of American independence."
?Rosemarie Zagarri, George Mason University and author of A Woman's Dilemma: Mercy Otis Warren and the American Revolution
"'History,' John Adams told Mercy Otis Warren, 'is not the province of the ladies.' Those, as Adams learned quickly, were fighting words. This 'Founding Mother' was ready to take on the 'Founding Father.' Unlike the more diplomatic Abigail, Warren took the direct approach. She relished hurling her verbal darts piercing male pomposity. Adams was her most celebrated target but others, including John Hancock, came to feel the prick of her barbs. No one has ever captured the spirit of this woman better than Stuart."
?Dr. William M. Fowler, Jr., Distinguished Professor of History at Northeastern University and former Director of the Massachusetts Historical Society
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A Forgotten Patriot August 9, 2008
We make much of the Founding Fathers of our nation, with barely a nod to any founding mothers. There is the legendary composition of the American flag by Betsy Ross, but even if Ms Ross did so, no one pays attention to her ideas or opinions. We have Abigail Adams, whose recommendation to history was not just that she was married to John Adams, but also that she was a clear thinker and did not confine her frequent letters to domestic or matrimonial issues. And then we have Mercy Otis Warren. Who? Mrs. Warren is little known to our time, although she was well known in her own (and was known as "Mrs. Warren") for publishing plays and poetry with political and revolutionary themes, even though she had to do so anonymously, and for having close acquaintances among other writers and among the leaders of the age. She also wrote one of the first histories of the American Revolution, which, if it is not regarded as a classic, is still consulted by historians specializing in the era. That a woman of her time could have the confidence, perhaps the presumption, of writing history was a surprise to her contemporaries, and argues that she had some sort of greatness and is worth knowing about. _The Muse of the Revolution: The Secret Pen of Mercy Otis Warren and the Founding of a Nation_ (Beacon Press) by Nancy Rubin Stuart is a fine introduction to Mrs. Warren's life, and to the domestic and civil concerns of Revolutionary patriots.
Warren was born in 1728, and besides getting the domestic education all girls got, she was exposed to the books of her brothers, and succeeded when she begged to accompany them to school. Her love of reading, and her introduction to Pope, Dryden, Shakespeare, and others would affect her eventual writing style, but of course she didn't get to go on to Harvard as her brothers did. She married James Warren in 1754. He was a gentleman farmer and politician who was well known by all the more famous leaders of the Revolution. Mrs. Warren became known in her own way, and chief among her friends was John Adams, who would be a mentor and correspondent to her for decades. Adams introduced his young wife Abigail to Mrs. Warren, and the correspondence between the three forms much of the quoted material within this book. Warren's works included plays, satires of the times lacerating the Britons in authority who were oppressing the citizens. It's not fair to say she was a feminist, or even a proto-feminist. Though she thought a great deal about the news of the day, she was deferential. In a letter to her great friend John Adams, having mentioned the subject of patriots opposing Britain, she wrote, "I ask pardon for touching on war, politicks, or anything relative thereto, as I think you gave me a hint in yours not to approach... anything so far beyond the line of my sex." In writing about Mrs. Warren's reactions through the years, Stuart provides delightful insight to the sorts of day-to-day matters that were on her mind. We get to follow, for instance, her involvement in the daunting inoculation process against smallpox, a cure that had many of the aspects of the fearsome disease itself. Mrs. Warren reminds us that no matter how much we cherish our Revolutionary heroes, she spied during the war "a total change of manners" among the rising materialistic class of her countrymen with a new vogue in "profusion, pride and servility and almost every vice," and she was shocked at the "privateering" by those who made their profits in the war.
It is also refreshing to understand that many of the heroes in our bronze statues were but humans, as Mrs. Warren saw them. She was disgusted, for instance, by the ostentation of John Hancock in 1777, as he made his official travels in his gold coach accompanied by fifty horsemen from his private corps of cadets. This sort of throwback to the trappings of royalty was also to offend her when John Adams took power, and Adams was especially upset with Mrs. Warren's depiction of him in her _History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution interspersed with Biographical, Political and Moral Observations_ (1805). The rift was severe, and Stuart summarizes their sixteen letters back and forth on the issue. Only the year before her death in 1814 did Adams deign to correspond again and the friendship was renewed. Mrs. Warren's story is also a reminder that the Constitution that we take for granted was a controversial document even among American patriots. She did not like it, and although her authorship was not known for 140 years, she wrote a treatise critiquing the document. The treatise played a role in the eventual drafting of the Bill of Rights. Stuart's book shows a woman of her times, but one with self-made erudition and with ambitions and influence outside the domestic sphere. It is an excellent summary of the life of an important patriot who made a difference during the times of the Founding Fathers.
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