Mercy Otis Warren

Mercy Otis Warren 1728-1814, American writer, b. Barnstable, Mass.; sister of James Otis and wife of James Warren, who was speaker of the Massachusetts house of representatives. An ardent patriot, she conducted a political salon during the pre-Revolutionary days and wrote two satirical plays, The Adulateur (1773) and The Group (1775), against the Tories. Well acquainted with many leaders of the Revolution, she urged, unsuccessfully, that equal rights for women be included in the U.S. Constitution, and outlined her objections to that document as originally drafted in Observations on the New Constitution … by a Columbian Patriot (1788). Many of her criticisms were met by the Bill of Rights and later amendments. Her history of the American Revolution (3 vol., 1805) is still important for factual information as well as for its sketches of contemporary figures.

Bibliography: See studies by K. S. Anthony (1958, repr. 1972) and J. Fritz (1972).

Warren, Mercy Otis (1728–1814), playwright. The sister of James Otis and the wife of James Warren, who was president of the Provisional Congress of Massachusetts, she did her share for the Revolution by writing two political satires: The Adulateur (1773) and The Group (1775). Both were printed and widely read, but neither appears to have been performed. In 1790 she published a pair of blank‐verse tragedies, The Sack of Rome and The Ladies of Castile. Other plays, notably The Blockheads (1776), have been attributed to her, though most modern scholarship finds the attributions suspect. Biography: First Lady of the Revolution: The Life of Mercy Otis Warren, K. Anthony, 1958.