The Mercy Otis Warren Initiative for Women in Civic Life and Thought aims to promote a fuller appreciation for the rich and diverse contributions of women in civic life, both historically and today, by drawing greater attention to, and supporting, female thinkers who value and work within the expansive canon of Western social and political thought, and particularly the Anglo-American tradition.

The Mercy Otis Warren Initiative publishes the online journal, Fairer Disputations.

Who was Mercy Otis Warren? 

Over the course of the American Revolution and the subsequent founding era, Mercy Otis Warren published all manner of political writings, including poems, plays, and treatises. She was one of the most prominent anti-Federalist voices during the Constitutional Convention, and according to the historian Herbert J. Storing, the most philosophically sophisticated. Her essay “Observations on the New Constitution,” published in 1788, was instrumental in the adoption of the Bill of Rights, and in 1805, in her mid-seventies, Warren wrote one of the first historical accounts of the American Revolution. The future president John Adams once wrote to her: “I have a feeling of inferiority whenever I approach or address you. I feel that your attainments dwarf those of most men.”

In addition to her insightful and prescient political writing, Warren was also a dedicated friend, daughter, sister, wife and mother of five sons. She is a model not only of serious political thought that ought to be recovered and better studied today, but also of civic leadership and virtue, making her the ideal namesake for this initiative.

It is necessary for every American, with becoming energy, to endeavor to stop the dissemination of principles evidently destructive of the cause for which they have bled. It must be the combined virtue of the rulers and of the people to do this, and to rescue and save their civil and religious rights from the outstretched arm of tyranny, which may appear under any mode or form of government.

-Mercy Otis Warren, History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution interspersed with Biographical, Political and Moral Observations (1805)

Kirstin Birkhaug

Rachel Lu