ABSTRACT
Ostensibly, Warren admits that writing about war, like war itself, is the province of men. Indeed, she protests that her own “trembling heart has recoiled at the magnitude of the undertaking, and the hand often shrunk back from the task,” describing her conventional authorial modesty in terms that could easily be transplanted to a soldier’s recollection of feelings before a battle. Yet, Warren goes on to present reasons why she undertook the project nevertheless: “recollecting that every domestic enjoyment depends on the unimpaired possession of civil and religious liberty, that a concern for the welfare of society ought equally to glow in every human breast … a detail was preserved with a view of transmitting it to the rising youth of my country” (iv). Warren depicts for her readers a complicated situation of clashing “spheres.” Telling the tale of war belongs, on one hand, to the “peculiar province of masculine strength”; on the other hand, it is the basis for “every domestic enjoyment” and the task was undertaken for the sake of the country’s “rising youth.” These latter concerns, associated with women’s “province,” serve as Warren’s formal justification for her foray into historical writing, figured here as the discursive equivalent of warfare. Warren’s use of ingratio was, by the standards of its day, conventional. Men as well as women often pled inadequacy in their introductory remarks. As did many other women writers, however, Warren acknowledges her sex as a locus for criticism. After conceding that one interpretation of gender boundaries might have prevented her from writing her history, Warren produces two counterarguments. First, she suggests that gender is irrelevant to patriotism, which “ought equally to glow in every human breast.” Here Warren appeals to
notions that underlay much of the thinking around the Revolution itself, and which were based on the Enlightenment belief in universal reason. If the political tenets underlying the Revolution argued that all citizens should be able to govern, civic virtue and patriotism were ideals to which all-even women-could aspire. Combat might be the duty of men only, but patriotism was not. Warren’s second argument for writing, however, implicitly appeals to the role of maternal author, as explored in Chapter 2. The implication seems to be that the demands of a Republic override concerns about the appropriateness of any given activity for women or men. Moreover, Warren’s actual performance as a historian, producing a three-volume detailed history including much material gathered from firsthand sources, proved that, whether her hand trembled or not, she could write the war. As women writers did so often, Warren self-consciously announces the existence of a discursive boundary just before crossing it. This particular instance directs our attention to a boundary women writers often claimed they would not cross, by associating writing with warfare. The acclaim with which many female writers were greeted by their contemporaries in early America suggests that authorship, whether in manuscript or print, was not in itself a necessarily transgressive or feminist act. Nonetheless, the cultural authority that justified women’s public writing could produce unexpected results, as we have seen in the case of maternal authority extending to public critiques of models of manhood. If the authority of the female author extended to moral didactic writings on manhood, how far might she have extended her arguments about the role of women, which more clearly belonged to her province? Those searching early American women’s writings for arguments in favor of women’s political rights have been disappointed, a disappointment that has led critics to refer to many of the writers examined in this study as conservative or “protofeminist”— a gesture that reflects the evolutionary model of literary history’s quest to find in the past the origins of the present. In addition, the putative failure of these women to recognize the potential for women’s enfranchisement inherent in their new Republican form of government has, I would argue, led us to overlook the deep social engagement of many of their writings, particularly those dealing explicitly with gender (aside from, of course, the novel). Examined in the context of their particular historical moment, without reference to the seemingly inevitable movement for women’s suffrage, women’s writings about equality reveal that for many, if not most, of the women writers of this era, a social and civic model of the utility of authorship dominated. Women used writing to enter debates over the appropriate education and conduct of women and at least implicitly but often explicitly, to engage in debates over the “nature” of sex and gender. Despite the conservative cultural position that authorized such discourse, the results could be surprisingly unorthodox. This chapter examines one of those unexpected excesses of the authority of the woman writer: the valorization in women’s writings of the woman warrior.
