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Portia and Marcia: Female Political Identity and the Historical Imagination,
1770-1800
Philip Hicks
| ON March 6, 1775, moments before delivering his oration commemorating the Boston Massacre, Dr. Joseph Warren changed into a Ciceronian toga, a theatrical gesture designed to reinforce the classical republican ideology underpinning his speech that morning in Boston's Old South Church. In Plymouth, Massachusetts, that same month, in a letter to her husband James Warren, Mercy Otis Warren chose to debut her Roman pseudonym, "Marcia." Just how comparable were these two acts of classical impersonation? At first glance it would appear unlikely that a woman would appropriate a classical republican identity, for republicanism was a severely masculine ideology that viewed women as the font of political corruption. Like the Christian Old Testament, it served as a bulwark of patriarchalism subjecting them to men. Republicanism's emphasis on virtue could supply a role for women as domestic guardians of morality but, with the notable exception of Abigail Adams, women did not exploit its libertarian and communitarian tenets to claim citizenship for themselves.1 If, on the other hand, they looked beyond the theory of republicanism to its practice, women found a ready source of encouragement. The Roman matrons were political heroines who had made key contributions to the Roman republic and had defied the corruption of imperial Rome. In them, American women discovered stirring examples of learning, courage, and patriotism—and a precedent for their own empowerment.2 Indeed, though Warren's pose was verbal rather than sartorial, intimate rather than public, republican history proved instrumental to the formation of her political identity. |
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Nor was she alone. Armed with the examples of the past, many women found direct sanctions for the political roles that became available to them in the ferment of the late eighteenth century and that could be justified by means of the historically demonstrable catchall "female patriotism." In this period women took up the roles of boycotters, soldiers, and political writers. They read about and commented on political affairs more widely than ever before. They participated in civic processions, political salons, and street protests. Many cultural influences helped make this efflorescence of political activity possible: namely, the ideological fusion of classical republicanism and Lockean liberalism, the example of French revolutionary women, the effect of Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), and earlier trends in evangelical Protestantism, moral theory, and literature that challenged the masculine character of republicanism.3 Together with philosophy, religion, and fiction, history also fueled the reassessment of women's relation to the political. Historical accounts imparted the confidence, self-understanding, and inspiration that helped some women to imagine themselves as political beings for the first time and then to act on this revelation. Historical composition became an important vehicle by which they expressed their intellectual parity with men and their competence to contribute to the national good. History was a favorite topic of American women writers, whose historical works included memoirs, textbooks, biographies, journals, and political and religious narratives.4 |
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