Reviewed by Ruth H. Bloch | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.2

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Reviewed by Ruth H. Bloch | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.2 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Ruth H. Bloch, University of California, Los Angeles

Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren: The Revolutionary Atlantic and the Politics of Gender. By Kate Davies. Oxford, Eng.: Oxford University Press, 2005. 331 pages. $95.00 (cloth).
Reading Kate Davies' splendid book on Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren makes one marvel that these two celebrated republican women are so rarely considered in tandem. Their strikingly similar preoccupations and long-lasting epistolary friendship afford a perspective on the representations of gender that pervaded the transatlantic intellectual world of old republicanism during the revolutionary era. At a time when increasing numbers of literary women were publishing works of fiction, religious devotion, and moral prescription, what made Macaulay and Warren so unusual was their driving interest in political issues and their commitment to historical writing. Unlike their more radical successor, Mary Wollstonecraft, neither Macaulay nor Warren wrote extensively about the condition of women, and yet Davies shows how their status as women figured prominently in their engagement in politics. A central argument of the book is that Macaulay's and Warren's feminism—by which Davies means their assertions of women's equal intellectual and moral worth—merged with civic republican arguments that intellectual historians often portray as denigrating to women.	1
By considering Macaulay and Warren sequentially, Davies traverses a long period of revolutionary history, from the publication of Macaulay's renowned History of England from the Ascension of James I to that of the Brunswick Line (1763) to the preparation of Warren's monumental History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution (1805). After brief biographical sketches, Davies turns to the political disaffection of Macaulay and the English Wilkite opposition in the 1760s, proceeds to the high point of the optimism she shared with Warren about the American Revolution (the moment at which their correspondence began), and ends with the disillusionment of the Anti-Federalist Warren in the 1780s and 1790s. Both women consistently sounded the civic republican alarm that liberty was imperiled by corrupt government and almost always sided with the political opposition. Each in certain respects identified with men, both in their personal quests for authorial independence and in their historical idealization of patriot heroes. Embracing the classical ideal of simplicity, they also often borrowed the gender-inflected republican terminology of the masculine to denote courageous disinterestedness and effeminacy to denote self-indulgence and cowardice. But they also, Davies emphasizes, embraced positive sentimental conceptions of women as distinctively virtuous in ways that fit remarkably well into their republican opposition to political power. They extolled the heartfelt natural feelings of their sex above the pretentiousness and artificiality of elite male education. And, as women ostensibly confined to the private domain, they claimed unique qualifications as political critics because they stood outside the corrupt halls of power.	2
In a brilliant analysis of Macaulay's and Warren's differing assessments of a mixed-sex Boston social club in 1784, Davies shows how the latent tensions between these two competing images of women underlay the one instance of serious conflict between them. Warren, the more austere of the two, vehemently disapproved of the club as an example of effeminate decadence, whereas Macaulay saw its polite social intercourse as harmlessly in keeping with the belief that female companionship might improve the manners of men. Pained by the publicity generated by their mutual misunderstanding, the two women rapidly mended their friendship. For Davies the importance of this brief episode is that it cast into unusually sharp relief the dual imagery of feminine corruption and feminine civility that so often punctuated their republican worldviews.	. . .

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