Mercy Otis Warren

I'm Walter Isaacson to the Aspen Institute i'm here with bestselling author Cokie Roberts talking about the women in colonial and revolutionary in early America and let's talk a little bit about mercy Otis Warren tell me about her as a writer and a pamphlet dear and where she's coming from mercy otis wine was a woman in massachusetts she was married to james warren who was a revolutionary of one of the men who was Sons of Liberty they called themselves and they gathered at her heart place and she wrote pamphlets and plays attacking the British particularly the British governor of Massachusetts and the man all asked her to keep doing it they felt that what she wrote was very influential in terms of moving the Americans toward revolution how was she educated she was educated with her brothers by their parents tutored at home at home and all but everybody in the family was so she had the same education as the men in the family until they went to Harvard College and then she was not allowed to go there but she was highly educated and could read you know Greek and Latin and all of that I mean she was classically educated there for her plays were kind of classical plays but she would write to the men meeting in the Continental Congress in Philadelphia and tell them the atrocities the British were perpetrating in Boston and that had the effect of making the men who were from other parts of the country from from Georgia and from South Carolina understand how bad it was in Boston because she was very explicit in her descriptions and it brought them together in the cause and then they would write to her John Adams and John Hancock would write to her and say more more were there many published women writers in colonial America no women would not publish by and large into the degree that they did publish that you did not publish under their own names so what name does she is she used different names she used classical Roman names but the men did some of that too so I've ben franklin wrote under pseudonyms but did everybody but did everybody know it was her and finally she did write later a huge to volume history of the american revolution under own name under her on she went under the name colombian patriot when she does the observations on the new constitution right which she didn't like she was anti the new constitution of the united states because it centralized power ever met from her perspective she called herself an old Republican so she was an anti federalist and let's remember that the men were also writing pamphlets also under a pseudonym do we call the federalism because the Federalist Papers which Madison and Jay and others and she's writing pamphlets opposing them right and that was hard because she had always been on their team and she didn't like not being on it and they knew it was her under the name Colombian Patriot everybody knew who everybody was maybe the man in the street didn't know but all the all the people who knew each other new and they did all know each other these were not strangers to each other now part of it was that she didn't want to be a stranger she wanted to be accepted and admired by these men and so she would write to them and ask them to endorse her writings particularly when she wrote her history she was not kind to her old friend John Adams in her history and why and so this is a two-volume history to fire mission of the american revolutionary period and it's one of our more important documents very important book and walter i found it so interesting because again she wrote about things that men didn't write about in the war for instance rape you know we don't think about rape in the Emir second revolution but it's always been one of the insidious tools of war and mercy Otis Warren wrote about it thank you very much cookie