“All Men Would be Tyrants if They Could”: Three New England Women’s Perspectives on Political and Domestic Tyranny during the Revolutionary Era
Abstract
This thesis examines female perspectives of tyranny within the political and domestic realms. Combining a close reading of their written works with biographical studies of their lives, this thesis looks specifically at three elite, highly literate New England women: Abigail Adams, Mercy Otis Warren, and Judith Sargent Murray. These women were unable to formally participate in the political sphere, yet through their writing they responded to and offered commentary on the Revolution. Utilizing the same language and arguments they and other male patriots used in the Revolution, these three women innovated, following arguments about tyranny through to their natural conclusion, and applying them to relations within the home, they recognized that husbands and fathers also held the potential for tyranny. For them the domestic realm was not apolitical, but the epicenter of the power imbalances between men and women, and this structural imbalance mirrored the problems of inequality within society.