Theorizing Women's Political Agency from the Margins of Hannah Mather Crocker's Reminiscences and Traditions of Boston

Abstract

Hannah Mather Crocker (1752-1829) penned her and Traditions of during the last decade of her life. By looking at the poetry woven through the manuscript, we see how Crocker creates a narrative thread on Boston’s eighteenth-century female political poets: Sarah Kemble Knight, Jane Colman Turell, Sarah Parsons Moorhead, and Phillis Wheatley. By studying her marginalia on her own poems in the appendix to the volume, we learn that Crocker identifies herself as a participant in the eighteenth-century tradition of women engaging men as equals in the public sphere via poetry and wit. Through the first study of Crocker’s poetry published in Boston newspapers between 1784 and 1798, this article challenges the long-held scholarly view of Crocker’s public writing career as only commencing in the 1810s, with her prose essays concerning women’s rights, education, and civic participation. Furthermore, this article shows that Crocker used her Reminiscences to develop a feminist theory of the empowerment of women through the witness and practice of political criticism in the public sphere.