Women and the Republic: Emma Willard's Rhetoric of History

Abstract

ALTHOUGH WE CELEBRATE THE FIRST PUBLISHED WOMAN POET IN America for her personal and confessional lyrics, Anne Bradstreet actually came to public attention in her own day as a writer of history. The Four Monarchies, the lengthy centerpiece of her 1640 Tenth Muse, is a rhymed history of the kingdoms of Assyria, Persia, Greece, and Rome. A century and a half later, when the first generation of national writers began working, most of the literary women of the period including Hannah Adams, Ann Eliza Bleecker, Sarah Wentworth Morton, Judith Sargent Murray, Sarah Pierce, Susanna Rowson, and Mercy Otis Warrenwrote historical poems, plays, fictions, narratives, and textbooks, some to the virtual exclusion of anything else. The history-writing activity of this first group was carried on by numerous literary women throughout the antebellum era. To date, I have identified over one hundred antebellum women who wrote history in various forms. This number makes it clear that such writing comprised an important part of the way women approached and entered the public realms of action and literature, as well as the way in which they configured their own proper sphere of behavior. Nevertheless, although feminist literary scholars and students of women's history have looked at women's domestic novels, personal lyrics, and reform writings, they have all but ignored their history writings.