American Women Historical Writers and the Declaration of Independence

“History is not the Province of the Ladies,” wrote John Adams to Elbridge Gerry in 1813 of his friend Mercy Otis Warren’s history of the American Revolution.[1] This was the attitude that Warren and other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American women historical writers were up against. At a time when women were deemed to lack the rational capacities of men and excluded from participation in politics, history—which at that time was seen to be a guide to the conduct of public affairs—was presumed to be outside the purview of women, both as readers and writers. Despite such prohibitions, Warren was just one of a host of American women writers who claimed the province of history for themselves by writing formal histories like Warren’s as well as other types of historical composition such as poetry and travel writing.[2] For these women, simply to write history was an act of independence from the proscriptions on women’s political and intellectual endeavor. Yet these women were only willing to go so far in their quest for independence, and nowhere was that clearer than in what they said about the Declaration of Independence itself in their works.

Warren revealed some of those limits in her three-volume History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution, published in 1805. The wife of James Warren, one of Massachusetts’ leading revolutionaries, Warren had avidly supported the Revolution in her own right through her work as a playwright and propagandist. She carried on her revolutionary activism in her history, using it to exhort her readers to hold fast to the virtue she considered vital to the preservation of the Revolution’s republican ideals.[3] But she did not, unlike her friend Abigail Adams, who famously challenged her husband John to “Remember the Ladies” when making laws for the new nation, call on her readers to extend those ideals to women.[4] Even as she broke from the prohibitions on women’s political activity in her writing, she accepted the legal and political strictures on women that had been left intact by the Revolution—namely, the legal system of coverture under which married women possessed no legal identity independent of their husband’s, which precluded them from owning property, testifying in court, or voting and holding political office.[5] Women had a role to play in the polity, for Warren, but it was in the guise of what historian Linda Kerber has termed the “republican mother.” As republican mothers, women were not supposed to participate directly in politics but instead would help sustain republican ideals by teaching and encouraging men to be virtuous citizens, as Warren sought to do through her history.[6] Warren did not treat the Declaration of Independence, then, as a call to arms for women to lay claim to the Revolution’s unfulfilled promise of equality but instead celebrated it as an assertion of the United States’ equal standing as a sovereign nation and a “palladium of which” the nation’s youth “should never lose sight, so long as they wish to continue a free and independent people.”[7] The Declaration was for her a statement of principles already achieved by the Revolution that needed to be preserved against erosion, not a statement of ideals yet to be realized.

Warren’s contemporary, Judith Sargent Murray, was a different story, however, as she directly applied the Declaration’s principles to women in her staunch defense of women’s intellectual equality to men. Murray directly tackled the issue of women’s capabilities in a four-part essay, “Observations on Female Abilities,” written for her magazine column, “The Gleaner,” and published as part of her three-volume collection of essays The Gleaner in 1798. Though not a formal history like Warren’s, this essay drew extensively on history, citing a wide range of female historical figures to demonstrate women’s equal mental and moral capacities to men in qualities ranging from ingenuity and eloquence to patriotism and bravery. Yet even Murray would only go so far in invoking the Declaration of Independence on women’s behalf. For her, the Declaration’s promise of the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness meant primarily giving women the opportunity for education and economic independence, not equal political rights as men.[8] Nor did she make direct reference to the Declaration in her essay. Her appeal to its ideals was implicit, for Americans in her time did not for the most part look to the Declaration as a transcendent statement of the nation’s founding principles. It was the act of declaring independence that was important to most Revolutionary-era Americans, not the document that had been written to justify that act. It was only after the War of 1812 that the Declaration would take on its sacred status as a defining statement of the nation’s fundamental principles.[9]

Yet this transformation did as much to limit women’s quest for independence as it did to advance it, as educator and author Emma Willard showed. No one celebrated the transcendent power of the Declaration more fervently than Willard did in her best-selling textbook, the History of the United States, first published in 1828. For the staunchly nationalistic Willard, the Declaration was a watershed in both American and human history as an enunciation of the higher principles that the United States stood for. Far more than just a statement of American independence and freedom, the Declaration in Willard’s eyes possessed broader significance as a revelation of “the universal wrongs of the oppressed” that “sent forth a warning voice to the oppressor; and declared the common rights of all mankind.”[10] The role of women was to preserve and maintain the ideals laid out by the Declaration in their capacity as republican mothers, not claim the rights it enunciated for themselves. That was why education was so important to Willard. The founder of the Troy Female Seminary in New York State, Willard shared Murray’s commitment to women’s education. The purpose of women’s education for Willard, however, was not to give women the capacity for economic independence as it had been for Murray, but to train them to instill virtue and patriotism in their children. Hers was a vision of women’s role that at once gave women great power as crucial adjuncts to the nation’s exceptionalist mission to spread the Declaration’s ideals to the world and further entrenched their subordination by putting that power in service of men and the state.[11]

Yet simply by entering the public sphere and writing about history, women like Warren, Murray, and Willard demonstrated women’s intellectual capacities, while their claims for women’s indirect political role laid the groundwork for the demands for women’s direct political participation made by women’s rights advocates at the famed Seneca Falls Convention of 1848. Their work in this way both formed a counterpoint to the tradition of women’s rights activism embodied by Seneca Falls and fertilized the soil from which it grew, as Willard’s student Elizabeth Cady Stanton—one of the organizers of the Seneca Falls Convention and the lead author of its manifesto, the Declaration of Sentiments—showed. As Murray had, the Declaration of Sentiments staunchly defended women’s equal intellectual capacities to men. But it went further to demand political rights for women—including the right to vote—as well as the economic and intellectual independence that Murray had called for. Stanton and her collaborators used the Declaration of Independence as their template in what was at once an homage to the universal appeal of its ideals and a scathing indictment of the exclusion of women from those ideals. Adding women to the Declaration’s famous words, “all men are created equal,” they substituted men for the king as the oppressor and transformed its list of grievances against King George III into a litany of the abuses men had inflicted on women.[12]

Yet the Declaration of Sentiments’ reimagining of the Declaration of Independence would take on its iconic status as a founding statement of the women’s rights movement only after the Civil War, when Stanton and Susan B. Anthony actively worked to cultivate the myth that the Seneca Falls Convention marked the beginning of the women’s rights movement. By no means the first time that women had pushed for their rights, the Seneca Falls Convention was initially seen as just one of a whole series of women’s rights conventions that occurred in this time. The myth that it began the women’s rights movement emerged in the 1870s, to be given the sanction of history in the first volume of the influential History of Woman Suffrage, edited and authored by Stanton, Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage and published in 1881.[13] The History acknowledged how much the cause of women’s rights owed to women like Warren and Willard, listing their contributions among the “preceding causes” that laid the groundwork for Seneca Falls, and even going so far as to claim that Warren had influenced Thomas Jefferson in the writing of the Declaration of Independence.[14] Women were in this account not just claimants to the rights promised by the Declaration of Independence, but active agents in their formulation. Notwithstanding the importance of these “preceding causes,” the real starting point in the story of women’s rights, according to the History, was the meeting at Seneca Falls. Yet in drawing a direct line from Seneca Falls and the Declaration of Sentiments to the suffrage movement, the History of Woman Suffrage gave primacy to Stanton’s and Anthony’s wing of the suffrage movement at the expense of other strands of women’s rights activism that encompassed a broader range of concerns and constituencies.[15] Its rendering of the Declaration of Independence thus showed how far women had come since Warren’s time—and how far they had yet to go.

From the work of women historical writers, then, we can see the multiple meanings that the Declaration of Independence held for women, and we can also see the power of history to shape those meanings. The sacred status the Declaration would attain made it a powerful weapon for women wishing to challenge their oppression, but its sacred status also stood in the way of women’s fight against that oppression.

Selected Bibliography

Baym, Nina. American Women Writers and the Work of History, 1790–1860. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995.

—————. “Women and the Republic: Emma Willard’s Rhetoric of History.” American Quarterly 43, no. 1 (March 1991): 1–23.

Cohen, Lester H. “Explaining the Revolution: Ideology and Ethics in Mercy Otis Warren’s Historical Theory.” William and Mary Quarterly 37, no. 2 (April 1980): 200–218.

Kerber, Linda K. Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980.

Maier, Pauline. American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.

Messer, Peter C. “Warren, History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution.” In Bloomsbury History: Theory and Method. London: Bloomsbury, 2022. Accessed March 17, 2025. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350892880.206.

Murray, Judith Sargent. “Observations on Female Abilities.” In Women’s Early American Historical Narratives, edited by Sharon M. Harris, 58–90. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Skemp, Sheila L. Judith Sargent Murray: A Brief Biography with Documents. Boston: Bedford Books, 1998.

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage. History of Woman Suffrage. Vol.1. New York: Fowler & Wells, 1881.

Tetrault, Lisa. The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014.

Warren, Mercy Otis. History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution: Interspersed with Biographical, Political and Moral Observations. Edited by Lester Cohen. 1805; 2nd ed. Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1988.

Wellman, Judith. The Road to Seneca Falls: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the First Woman’s Rights Convention. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004.

Willard, Emma. History of the United States, or Republic of America. New York: N. & J. White, 1834.

Zagarri, Rosemarie. A Woman’s Dilemma: Mercy Otis Warren and the American Revolution. Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, Inc., 1995.

Eileen Ka-May Cheng is the Sara Yates Exley Chair in Teaching Excellence in the Department of History at Sarah Lawrence College. She is the author of The Plain and Noble Garb of Truth: Nationalism and Impartiality in American Historical Writing, 1784–1860 (University of Georgia Press, 2008) and Historiography: An Introductory Guide (Continuum, 2012).

[1] John Adams to Elbridge Gerry, April 17, 1813, quoted in Rosemarie Zagarri, A Woman’s Dilemma: Mercy Otis Warren and the American Revolution (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, Inc., 1995), 159.

[2] Nina Baym, American Women Writers and the Work of History, 1790–1860 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995).

[3] Lester H. Cohen, “Explaining the Revolution: Ideology and Ethics in Mercy Otis Warren’s Historical Theory,” William and Mary Quarterly 37, no. 2 (April 1980): 200–218.

[4] Abigail Adams to John Adams, March 31, 1776, in Founders Online, National Archives. founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/04-01-02-0241.

[5] Rosemarie Zagarri, A Woman’s Dilemma: Mercy Otis Warren and the American Revolution (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, Inc., 1995), 70–77, 132–67.

[6] Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 269–288.

[7] Mercy Otis Warren, History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution, ed. Lester Cohen (1805; 2nd ed. Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1988), 1:169–70, 2:631; Peter C. Messer, “Warren, History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution,” in Bloomsbury History: Theory and Method, http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350892880.206 (accessed March 17, 2025).

[8] Sheila L. Skemp, Judith Sargent Murray: A Brief Biography with Documents (Boston: Bedford Books, 1998), 5–6, 17, 55–58, 108–120.

[9] Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 154–208.

[10] Emma Willard, History of the United States, or Republic of America (New York: N. & J. White, 1834), 184.

[11] Nina Baym, “Women and the Republic: Emma Willard’s Rhetoric of History,” American Quarterly 43, no. 1 (March 1991): 1–23.

[12] Judith Wellman, The Road to Seneca Falls: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the First Woman’s Rights Convention (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 183–208.

[13] Lisa Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 14–16, 37–45, 104–144.

[14] Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, History of Woman Suffrage (New York: Fowler & Wells, 1881) 1:31–32, 36–37.

[15] Lisa Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls, 120–125 131–140, 146–180.