Women who shaped history with a pen

Many people in the 1600s and 1700s never learned to read or write. Some towns didn't have schools. And there were no laws that said everyone had to attend school. More men than women were educated; women who received an education were mostly wealthy. Less-fortunate women seldom got the opportunity. Women and girls were less likely to be taught to read because they weren't expected to have careers outside the home.

But the Puritans rejected this belief. They were a group that came to the New World from Europe to find freedom of worship. They believed in educating girls and women - rich, poor, and middle-class - so they could read the Bible for themselves.

As an English Puritan, young Anne Bradstreet (who lived from 1612 until 1672) was taught to read and write. Her father was steward of a great English lord's estate, so she had access to a nobleman's grand library. That gave the intelligent young woman an opportunity to keep learning. When she married, her dashing husband, Simon Bradstreet, also encouraged her. She would one day become America's first published poet and its first female writer.

A hundred years later, Mercy Otis Warren (1728-1814) loved to to debate politics with her father and his friends. She became America's first woman playwright. She was also widely known for her skill at raising patriotic fervor for the American colonists before and during the Revolutionary War.

The historic accomplishments of both women have been undervalued. But they still have much to tell us. Each embodied the spirit of her own era - and the new spirit of freedom in early America.

During Women's History Month, let's take a closer look at these two pioneering women.

Anne Bradstreet (ca.1612-72)

Introduction

b. c. 1612, Northampton, Northamptonshire?, Eng.
d. Sept. 16, 1672, Andover, Massachusetts Bay Colony [U.S.]

one of the first poets to write English verse in the American colonies. Long considered
primarily of historical interest, she won critical acceptance in the 20th century as a
writer of enduring verse, particularly for her sequence of religious poems
"Contemplations," written for her family and not published until the mid-19th century.

Her father, Thomas Dudley, was chief steward to the Puritan Earl of Lincoln, and
she grew up in cultured circumstances. She married Simon Bradstreet, another prot?g?
of the earl's, when she was 16, and two years later she, her husband, and her parents
sailed with other Puritans to settle on Massachusetts Bay.

She wrote her poems while rearing eight children, functioning as a hostess, and
performing other domestic duties. The Bradstreets moved frequently in the Massachusetts
colony, first to Cambridge, then to Ipswich, and then to Andover, which became their
permanent home. Bradstreet's brother-in-law, without her knowledge, took her
poems to England, where they were published as
The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650). The first American edition of
The Tenth Muse was published in revised and expanded form as
Several Poems Compiled with Great Variety of Wit and Learning (1678).

Most of the poems in the first edition are long and rather dully imitative works based on
the standard poetic conventions of the time, but the last two poems--"Of the vanity of
all worldly creatures" and "David's Lamentation for Saul and Jonathan"--
are individual and genuine in their recapitulation of her own feelings.

Her later poems, written for her family, show her spiritual growth as she came fully to
accept the Puritan creed. She also wrote more personal poems of considerable beauty,
treating in them such subjects as her thoughts before childbirth and her response to
the death of a grandchild. These shorter poems benefit from their lack of imitation and
didacticism. Her prose works include "Meditations," a collection of succinct and pithy
aphorisms. A scholarly edition of her work was edited by John Harvard Ellis in 1867.
In 1956 the poet John Berryman paid tribute to her in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet,
a long poem which incorporates many phrases from her writings.

(Source: Encyclopedia Britannica)

Mercy Otis Warren
(1728-1814)

from Doris Weatherford, American Women's History: An A to Z of People, Organizations, Issues, and Events [New York: Prentise Hall, 1994] pp. 364-365

Warren, Mercy Otis (1728-1814) Born on Cape Cod, Mercy Otis moved a few miles north to Plymouth when she married; she never saw anything beyond eastern Massachusetts -- but the life of her mind was so rich that she was respected by the most cosmopolitan and politically important men of her era.

Though her brothers attended Harvard, she (like most girls in her era) got only the education that she picked up for herself. Naturally political, she involved herself from girlhood in the conversations of her father and her older brother James, a well-connected lawyer. That she waited to wed until age twenty-six showed something of her independent nature, but she married James Warren in 1754. While he developed a career in the colonial legislature, she went on to bear five sons.

When the colonies increasingly rebelled against English rule, Mercy Otis Warren became perhaps the most important of Revolutionary War women. Like the men of her family, she was among those ready to throw out the colonial governor. In 1772 -- four years before the Declaration of independence -- she anonymously published The Adulateur, a satire that cast the governor as "Rapatio," a villain intent on raping the colony. Rapatio appeared again in her second play, The Defeat (1773), and she published her third, The Group (a title she used two centuries before Mary McCarthy), in 1775, just as the rebellion began to be violent. All were thinly disguised attacks on specific public officials, for she unhesitatingly urged the taking of risks to achieve American independence.

Much later, at the time of the French Revolution, Warren wrote tellingly that revolutions are "permitted by providence, to remind mankind of their natural equality." More than most of the men of her era, she saw the American Revolution as having significance beyond its apparent economic and political warfare; instead, she foresaw a deep and permanent shift of Western ideology. At a time when even most Americans still thought of democracy as an impossible notion tainted by ignorant rabble, Mercy Otis Warren understood that the natural rights philosophy inherent in the Declaration of Independence would inevitably mean democracy and egalitarianism. Indeed, so thorough a radical was Warren that she joined the minority who opposed ratification of the Constitution in the late 1780s.

The Revolution was scarcely begun before Warren began recording the history of it. During the next three decades, she worked steadily on the three volumes that were finally published -- when Warren was seventy-seven-- as History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution (1805). Her work not only provided an insider's view of the Revolution, but also set an important precedent for women authors. Until that time, the few who existed in American did not set out to consciously publish, but instead wrote primarily for themselves (as in the case of Anne Bradstreet and Phyllis Wheatley). Warren thus became the first to publish books that marked her as a professional writer of nonfiction who -- despite her upper class status -- offered her work for sale.

Bitterly resentful; in her old age of the restrictions imposed upon women, Warren focused particularly on educational reform. She chafed at the memory of doing needlework while her brothers were taught Latin and Greek, and she argued that such artificial limits on achievement harmed both men and women and were a violation of the natural rights philosophy espoused in the Revolution. Though it may have appeared that few understood her message at the time, the first serious educational institution for women, Emma Willard's Troy Female Seminary, appeared less than a decade after her death. Warren's thoughts on the subject may have had more influence than she knew.

Mercy Otis Warren had a clear, analytical mind that brought logic even to her poetry. Poems, Dramatic and Miscellaneous (1790), a collection published when she was sixty-two, was the first of her works that bore her name ("Mrs. M. Warren"), but she kept other poetry so personal that it was not published until almost two centuries after her death. Hundreds of Warren's letters to contemporaries (including Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Abigail Adams and her husband John -- with whom Warren quarreled as John Adams grew increasingly conservative) also have been published. They provide historians with interesting details and insightful commentary on the founding of the nation by one whose gender excluded her from the direct participation that she doubtless would have preferred.

Yes she was. Here's another of my favorite women of the revolution...and a Quaker to boot! From Armericanrevolution.org:

Lydia Darrah, sometimes spelled Darrach.

This anecdote is given in the first number of the American Quarterly Review, and is said to be taken from Lydia's own narration. It is mentioned or alluded to by several other authorities, and in letters written at the time. The story is familiar to many persons in Philadelphia, who heard it from their parents; so that there appears no reason to doubt its authenticity.

On the second day of December, 1777, late in the afternoon, an officer in the British uniform ascended the steps of a house in Second street, Philadelphia, immediately opposite the quarters occupied by General Howe, who, at that time, had full possession of the city. The house was plain and neat in its exterior, and well known to be tenanted by William and Lydia Darrah, members of the Society of Friends. It was the place chosen by the superior officers of the army for private conference, whenever it was necessary to hold consultations on subjects of importance; and selected, perhaps, on account of the unobtrusive character of its inmates, whose religion inculcated meekness and forbearance, and forbade them to practice the arts of war.

The officer, who seemed quite familiar with the mansion, knocked at the door. It was opened; and in the neatly furnished parlor he met the mistress, who spoke to him, calling him by name. It was the adjutant-general; and he appeared in haste to give an order. This was to desire that the backroom above stairs might be prepared for the reception that evening of himself and his friends, who were to meet there and remain late. " And be sure, Lydia," he concluded, "that your family are all in bed at an early hour. I shall expect you to attend to this request. When our guests are ready to leave the house, I will myself give you notice, that you may let us out, and extinguish the fire and candles."

Having delivered this order with an emphatic manner which showed that he relied much on the prudence and discretion of the person he addressed, the adjutant-general departed. Lydia betook herself to getting all things in readiness. But the words she had heard, especially the injunction to retire early, rang in her ears; and she could not divest herself of the indefinable feeling that something of importance was in agitation. While her hands were busy in duties that devolved upon her, her mind was no less actively at work. The evening closed in, and the officers came to the place of meeting. Lydia had ordered all her family to bed, and herself admitted the guests, after which she retired to her own apartment, and threw herself, without undressing, upon the bed.

But sleep refused to visit her eyelids. Her vague apprehensions gradually assumed more definite shape. She became more and more uneasy, till her nervous restlessness amounted to absolute terror. Unable longer to resist the impulse - not of curiosity, but surely of a far higher feeling - she slid from the bed, and taking off her shoes, passed noiselessly from her chamber and along the entry. Approaching cautiously the apartment in which the officers were assembled, she applied her ear to the key-hole. For a few moments she could distinguish but a word or two amid the murmur of voices; yet what she did hear but stimulated her eager desire to learn the important secret of the conclave.

At length there was profound silence, and a voice was heard reading a paper aloud. It was an order for the troops to quit the city on the night of the fourth, and march out to a secret attack upon the American army, then encamped at White Marsh.

Lydia had heard enough. She retreated softly to her own room, and laid herself quietly on the bed. In the deep stillness that reigned through the house, she could hear the beating of her own heart - the heart now throbbing with emotions to which no speech could give utterance. It seemed to her that but a few moments had elapsed, when there was a knocking at her door. She knew well what the signal meant, but took no heed. It was repeated, and more loudly; still she gave no answer. Again, and yet more loudly, the knocks were repeated; and then she rose quickly, and opened the door.

It was the adjutant-general, who came to inform her they were ready to depart. Lydia let them out, fastened the house, and extinguished the lights and fire. Again she returned to her chamber, and to bed; but repose was a stranger for the rest of the night. Her mind was more disquieted than ever. She thought of the danger that threatened the lives of thousands of her countrymen, and of the ruin that impended over the whole land. Something must be done, and that immediately, to avert this wide-spread destruction. Should she awaken her husband and inform him ? That would be to place him in special jeopardy, by rendering him a partaker of her secret; and he might, too, be less wary and prudent than herself. No, come what might, she would encounter the risk alone. After a petition for heavenly guidance, her resolution was formed; and she waited with composure, though sleep was impossible, till the dawn of day. Then she waked her husband, and informed him flour was wanted for the use of the household, and that it was necessary she should go to Frankfort to procure it. This was no uncommon occurrence; and her declining the attendance of the maid-servant excited little surprise. Taking the bag with her, she walked through the snow; having stopped first at head-quarters, obtained access to General Howe, and secured his written permission to pass the British lines.

The feelings of a wife and mother - one whose religion was that of love, and whose life was but a quiet round of domestic duties, bound on an enterprise so hazardous, and uncertain whether her life might not be the forfeit, may be better imagined than described. Lydia reached Frankford, distant four or five miles, and deposited her bag at the mill. Now commenced the dangers of her undertaking; for she pressed forward with all haste towards the outposts of the American army. Her determination was to apprise General Washington of the danger.

She was met on her way by an American officer, who had been selected by General Washington to gain information respecting the movements of the enemy. According to some authorities, this was Lieutenant-Colonel Craig, of the light horse. He immediately recognized her, and inquired whither she was going. In reply, she prayed him to alight and walk with her; which he did, ordering his men to keep in sight. To him she disclosed the secret, after having obtained from him a solemn promise not to betray her individually, since the British might take vengeance on her and her family.

The officer thanked her for her timely warning, and directed her to go to a house near at hand, where she might get something to eat. But Lydia preferred returning at once; and did so, while the officer made all haste to the commander-in-chief. Preparations were immediately made to give the enemy a fitting reception.

With a heart lightened and filled with thankfulness the intrepid woman pursued her way homeward, carrying the bag of flour which had served as the ostensible object of her journey. None suspected the grave, demure Quakeress of having snatched from the English their anticipated victory. Her demeanor was, as usual, quiet, orderly, and subdued, and she attended to the duties of her family with her wonted composure. But her heart beat, as late on the appointed night, she watched from her window the departure of the army - on what secret expedition bound, she knew too well! She listened breathlessly to the sound of their footsteps and the trampling of horses, till it died away in the distance, and silence reigned through the city.

Time never appeared to pass so slowly as during the interval which elapsed between the marching out and the return of the British troops. When at last the distant roll of the drum proclaimed their approach; when the sounds came nearer and nearer, and Lydia, who was watching at the window, saw the troops pass in martial order, the agony of anxiety she felt was too much for her strength, and she retreated from her post, not daring to ask a question, or manifest the least curiosity as to the event.

A sudden and loud knocking at her door was not calculated to lessen her apprehensions. She felt that the safety of her family depended on her self-possession at this critical moment. The visitor was the adjutant-general, who summoned her to his apartment. With a pale cheek, but composed, for she placed her trust in a higher Power, Lydia obeyed the summons.

The officer's face was clouded, and his expression stern. He locked the door with an air of mystery when Lydia entered, and motioned her to a seat. After a moment of silence, he said -

"Were any of your family up, Lydia, on the night when I received company in this house?"

"No," was the unhesitating reply. "They all retired at eight o'clock."

"It is very strange" - said the officer, and mused a few minutes. "You, I know, Lydia, were asleep; for I knocked at your door three times before you heard me - yet it is certain that we were betrayed. I am altogether at a loss to conceive who could have given the information of our intended attack to General Washington! On arriving near his encampment we found his cannon mounted, his troops under arms, and so prepared at every point to receive us, that we have been compelled to march back without injuring our enemy, like a parcel of fools."

It is not known whether the officer ever discovered to whom he was indebted for the disappointment.

But the pious quakeress blessed God for her preservation, and rejoiced that it was not necessary for her to utter an untruth in her own defence. And all who admire examples of courage and patriotism, especially those who enjoy the fruits of them, must honor the name of Lydia Darrah.

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