American Revolution | Part 6 | Mercy Otis Warren and the female politicians (with Rosemarie Zagarri)

Rosemary Zagari, hello and welcome to Broad History.

Hi, it's great to be here.

Thank you for coming on to talk about Mercy Otis Warren.

And I want to start by talking about sort of her origin story.

I think she stands out as being someone who's unusually educated for a woman of her generation.

And so I want to talk about her formative years and how she got access to that education that so few women of her generation did.

Yes.

Well, she was born in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1728 to a very well-connected family politically.

Her father was a farmer and a merchant, but also was very active in colonial politics.

And as her brother and her father would later on be in revolutionary politics.

But she was educated with a private tutor alongside her brother.

And what we think is that her family recognized from a very early age that she was precocious.

And that even though women didn't tend to get a very highly sophisticated education at this time, they were willing to give her one.

Now, I should say that in Massachusetts, girls were eligible with boys to go to primary school.

And this is one of the only places, if not the only place in the colonies, where there was a free public education available at the primary level.

And I also should say that it was not uncommon for women in New England to read and write.

And so she would have learned that whether or not she received her fancy education.

But again, because she apparently displayed this early precocity and her brother James was being tutored, to prepare to enter Harvard University.

And that was the typical path for young men at this time of the upper classes, to be tutored by an individual.

She and her brother were tutored by a neighboring minister.

And here's where her education differed from that of many other New classics in translation, the ancient Homer and the histories of ancient Rome and Greece.

And so she learned about that.

She also read the greats of English literature, Pope and Dryden, and of course, Shakespeare books.

And so she mastered those and obviously was a very astute student because we know from her later writings that she constantly has references to them.

She also learned to write.