Mercy Otis Warren Initiative | School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership

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 (1805)

Mission:

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. The Initiative seeks to draw attention to and support female thinkers who value and work within the expansive canon of Western social and political thought.

Initiative Objectives:

To promote greater study of historic women in political and social life by drawing attention to female thinkers who valued and worked within the riches of the Western tradition, especially as it pertains to ordered liberty, constitutionalism, family policy, and conservatism.
To ensure that students at ASU and the School of Economic Thought and Leadership (SCETL), and beyond, can be taught, mentored, and inspired by intellectually diverse female faculty researching and teaching American ideas, institutions, and civic culture.
To enlist, encourage, and support women called to the intellectual life as scholars and public intellectuals--especially those inspired by the pre-modern, classical liberal, and conservative traditions--by supporting their scholarship as pre-doc, post-doc, or non-residential associate fellows.
To support the online journal, Fairer Disputations, which is publishing an array of thinkers who are articulating a new school of “sex-realist” feminist thought.

Advisory Board:

Erika Bachiochi, Fellow, Ethics and Public Policy Center
Kirstin Birkhaug, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Hope College
Susan Collins, Associate Professor of Politics, University of Notre Dame
Elizabeth Corey, Honors Program Director & Associate Professor of Political Science, Baylor University
Mary Ann Glendon, Learned Hand Professor of Law, emerita, Harvard University
Mary Keys, Professor, University of Notre Dame
Rachel Lu, Associate Editor, Law and Liberty
Arlene Saxonhouse, Emerita, University of Michigan
Jenna Silber Storey, American Enterprise Institute
Colleen Sheehan, Professor, SCETL, Arizona State University
Brianne Wolf, Assistant Professor of Political Theory, James Madison College at Michigan State University

Fairer Disputations brings together an international community of scholars, public intellectuals, and journalists in order to advance a new school of feminist thought, one that is grounded in the basic fact that sex is real. Although FD authors do not agree on every issue, they each make important contributions to the debate over how society should, in justice, accommodate the reality of sexual difference.

Fairer Disputations publishes scholarly and popular content that defends a vision of female and male as embodied expressions of human personhood, affirming that men and women are equal in their dignity and their capacity for human excellence, yet distinct in many significant ways, particularly when it comes to sex, pregnancy, childbirth, and care for children.