She grew up in a house with twelve brothers and sisters, snuck into her uncle's library to devour books she wasn't supposed to read, and became one of the sharpest political writers of the American Revolution — armed with nothing but wit, satire, and a pen.
Mercy Otis Warren doesn't get nearly the attention she deserves, but she's one of the most important Founding Mothers in American history. Born in 1728 in Cape Cod, Massachusetts — just as the ideas of revolution were already brewing in the hearts and minds of colonists a full generation before the Declaration was signed — Mercy was one of thirteen children in a household that broke from the norms of the day. While most families of the era focused their education almost entirely on sons, Mercy's father insisted she be educated right alongside her brothers, encouraging her to form her own opinions and speak her mind at a dinner table where books, law, and politics were fair game for everyone — daughters included.
That upbringing turned into a lifelong love affair with words. Mercy secretly listened in on her brothers' lessons, snuck into her uncle's library, and developed a gift for poetry, drama, and biting political satire. She married James Warren, a merchant and legislator who respected her intellect rather than seeing their marriage as one of mere convenience — a rare thing for the time. And when the fight against the Crown heated up, Mercy didn't sit on the sidelines: she wrote satirical plays mocking Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson, sometimes publishing under a pen name because openly criticizing the Crown was dangerous business.
Her brother, the firebrand James Otis Jr. — the man who coined the phrase "taxation without representation is tyranny" — paid a brutal price for his outspokenness when he was assaulted by British officers, and it only deepened Mercy's resolve. After the Revolution, she kept right on writing and arguing, becoming an outspoken critic of the proposed Constitution and one of the era's notable Anti-Federalists, and eventually publishing one of the first history books about the founding. It's no wonder John Adams himself called her "the most accomplished woman in America."
What You'll Learn in This Episode
- Who Mercy Otis Warren was — born in 1728 in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, one of thirteen children
- Why her father broke from convention and insisted she be educated just as rigorously as her brothers
- How dinner-table debates over books, law, and politics turned her into an active thinker rather than a silent observer
- How she secretly devoured books in her uncle's library and developed her lifelong love of poetry and drama
- Who her brother James Otis Jr. was, and how he coined the phrase "taxation without representation is tyranny"
- Why her marriage to merchant and legislator James Warren was built on mutual respect rather than convenience
- How she balanced raising five children with writing poetry, essays, and political satire
- Why she wrote a satirical play mocking Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson — and sometimes published under a pen name
- How the British assault on her brother James personally deepened her commitment to the cause of liberty
- Why she opposed ratifying the Constitution and became one of the era's notable Anti-Federalists
- How she wrote one of the first history books about the American founding, published in 1805
- Why John Adams called her "the most accomplished woman in America"
Timestamps
0:00 Introduction — A Founding Mother History Forgot
0:52 Two Big Lessons From Mercy Otis Warren's Life
1:53 Born in 1728, as Revolution Was Already Brewing
2:36 Growing Up in Cape Cod, the Cradle of Liberty
3:01 One of Thirteen Children in a Homeschooling Household
4:34 Her Father's Radical Idea: Educating a Daughter Like a Son
6:44 Sneaking Into Her Uncle's Library
7:09 Her Brother James Otis Jr. and "Taxation Without Representation"
8:19 Marrying James Warren: A Marriage of Mutual Respect, Not Convenience
9:51 Writing Poetry, Essays, and Satirical Plays
10:47 Mocking a Tyrant Governor Under a Pen Name
11:23 Her Brother's Assault and the Fight That Followed
12:45 Writing History and Earning John Adams' Highest Praise
👍 Like this video if you love discovering the stories history forgot
🔔 Subscribe for more tales of liberty, courage, and the people who shaped America
💬 Comment below: If you'd lived in a time when women's voices were routinely silenced, what would you have written or said anyway?
Shop Resources
📘 Discover the heroes who stood up for liberty in The Tuttle Twins Guide to Courageous Heroes
https://www.tuttletwins.com/products/the-tuttle-twins-guide-to-courageous-heroes
📘 Learn the ideas Mercy Otis Warren fought over in The Tuttle Twins Guide to the Constitution
https://www.tuttletwins.com/products/the-tuttle-twins-guide-to-the-constitution
📚 Get Tuttle Twins books and homeschool resources: https://tuttletwins.com
#MercyOtisWarren #FoundingMothers #AmericanRevolution #FoundingFathers #JamesOtis #AntiFederalist #WomenInHistory #AmericanHistory #TuttleTwins #Homeschool #ColonialAmerica #Liberty
Read Transcript ▾
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of The Way the World Works. Today, I want to talk about one of our founding mothers, and I love that term. When I was in school, I had a constitutional history professor who was always very respectful, I guess, or very... He had a lot of admiration for not just the founding fathers, but for the women who helped make this country what it is today.
And we don't hear about them as much, but they are no less important. And today, I want to talk about who I think is one of the most important women or founding mothers, and her name was Mercy Otis Warren. What a name, right? I feel like that name, you're just destined for great things. But we can learn, I think, two really important lessons from looking at Mercy Otis Warren's life.
And the first one is the power of parents taking control of their kids' education and not outsourcing it or not following even the norms, just because they're the norms, and I'll get to what I mean by that, obviously, in a minute. But I think we can also learn the power of words. And personally, because I am a writer in real life when I'm not podcasting, words are my trade, right? I'm a wordsmith, I joke.
And so it's always powerful to me to look to examples of people from the past who were just so powerful and so articulate, people like Thomas Payne, or people like even Patrick Henry, who I don't know if he wrote, actually, this would be a good homework assignment for me or you to look up. I don't know if he wrote, give me liberty or give me death, or if he just spoke from the heart.
If he spoke from the heart, I am even more impressed, because that kind of improv is impressive. But Mercy Otis Warren is in a league of her own. She's also incredible. So let's get right down to it. Let's talk about Mercy Otis Warren. So Mercy Otis Warren is born in 1728.
And every time I say these dates for people who are big in founding history, it's important to kind of think, okay, what was going on during this time? And obviously, as John Adams famously said, I'm going to butcher this quote, he said that the revolution started long before the declaration was signed. The revolution started in the hearts and minds of the people, you know, 10, 15, 20 years earlier.
And so 1728, you still have a lot of things going on where the revolution is brewing. It's a very, it's a very interesting time to be alive. And so she is born in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Massachusetts is, of course, like the place to be if you're for liberty, obviously every 13 colony played their role, but Boston particularly is known as the cradle of liberty.
Massachusetts, you know, you have people like John Adams, Sam Adams, you have, you have so many just firecrackers of people coming out of them. Massachusetts and Mercy Otis Warren is one of them. And she is one of 13 children. Can you imagine parents out there? You think, you know, three to three to five or whatever,
however many you have as a lot, imagine 13 children running around. And during this time, homeschool is the norm, right? Obviously it wasn't called homeschool. It was just educating. Parents would either educate children themselves or they would call in tutors. And then, you know, it was, it was less formal, but kind of more effective, right?
I think for a lot of homeschooling parents or unschooling parents or self-directed learning parents, whatever you want to call it, this is more of the model that you guys follow and probably for good reason because it was so, it was so impactful. So most of the time in these days, the emphasis was going to be on the, the boys of the family. That's just the way it is.
I'm not going to, you know, go back into history and pick, you know, nitpick and how bad that was. Obviously, we know now that education is for everybody. But during this time, there was just more emphasis on educating the boys of your family because the boys were going to grow up and, and they needed, you know, careers to provide for their family.
And at this time, obviously, and still today, you know, women, women have kids and, and they, they are the homemakers. But back then, that was like primarily their role. It was abnormal to see, you know, a woman in a profession like law, well, not abnormal unheard of. It wasn't, it wasn't happening in law or politics.
But that obviously meant that the concentration of the time was going towards educating the boys. But this is one thing I really love about Mercy Otis Warren's household, her parents, and especially her father. He didn't really subscribe to that. He wanted his kids to be educated equally. He wanted to raise a daughter who not only formed her own opinions,
but spoke her mind. And so one thing that he did is he encouraged, you know, this robust debate at the dinner table. When they sat down, and maybe this is like some of you guys do too, when you're eating dinner, when they sat down as a family, they would discuss what was going on.
They would discuss books. They would discuss, you know, current events, law, politics. The kind of thing that you didn't, you didn't really see happening. And Mercy Otis Warren was not just, you know, a spectator of these conversations. She was an active participant. And she was encouraged to participate by her brothers and her dad.
And, you know, and I'm actually not sure how educated her mother was. I couldn't find that information. But we do know, obviously, that they placed a great deal of importance. Education was very important to this family. And so they encouraged their daughter to be as educated as enlightened at the boys, which was amazing.
And that was going to set her entire career up for success later on. So when they, the boys, the sons would have their lessons or tutors would come in. You know, Mercy was not really supposed to be listening in, but she was, you know, she had a thirst for knowledge, a thirst for education, which, you know, can you imagine growing up in a world where, and I hate to say that school is education. We've talked about this before.
Some schools are, you can't get, you know, they're, they're good schools out there. Usually not public, but you can. But, you know, there's, there's a interesting perspective that when school wasn't available, that thirst for education almost came more powerfully because there was no other way to access it. And that's, I think, kind of the, the spirit behind unschooling or self-directed education, where it's like, we all have this really innate, this, this natural born urge to learn.
But when we're forced to do it, sometimes it's not as exciting as when we're drawn to it organically. And that's what happened with Mercy Otis Warren. So during her upbringing, you know, she's, she's listening in on these, these lessons with philosophy and politics and law and all these things, she sneaks into her uncle's library and she's devouring books and this is where she really developed just an appreciation of love of words. And she started, you know, loving poetry and, and drama like plays and ideas.
And so she's going to take this with her as she grows up. Now you have to think about a family like this. It's not just going to be Mercy that comes out being very, you know, well read and educated. In fact, her brother, his name was James Otis Jr. So James Otis Jr. is going to become a big advocate for liberty. He coined the phrase taxation without representation is tyranny.
This actually always makes me laugh because that is not the phrase that we remember. We all say, you know, no taxation representation. But I guess at the time, uh, represent taxation without representation is tyranny, which doesn't really roll off the tongue. But that's okay. So James Otis Jr.
Obviously he's going to be somebody who's very passionate about independence from, from England and for liberty. He believed in natural law that we were all born free with a right to life, liberty and property. And that, you know, injustice and unlawful government should be challenged. So he is going to be at the forefront of this. So this is the family. And you know, I apologize.
I think earlier in the podcast, I said the Warren family because her name is Mercy Otis Warren for getting her name was Mercy Otis. So it was the Otis family because Mercy Otis is going to grow up and she is going to marry James Warren and become Mercy Otis Warren. And he's a merchant and also a legislator. So he's also very actively involved in politics. And here's one thing I love about this.
You know, marriages and you didn't see this a lot. But back then, marriages weren't always about like love. It was, it was convenience. It was money. Sometimes you married like a woman with a, with a rich family. So you could get that money in here.
Because remember at this time, let's say you were a daughter of a man who owned property. Well, you weren't allowed to inherit that property after your father died. It would go to the husband because it had to be a male. So there was a lot of reasons for men to marry women who maybe had more money. But in this case, her husband James is so respectful and just really loves her intellect. So this was a marriage not of convenience, but a marriage of mutual respect.
And they just, you know, imagine, I just think about the cool conversations they would have at their dinner tables, you know, where they were talking about these ideas that most women just not, it's not that they, they weren't allowed to talk about. They wouldn't get arrested or anything, but they just didn't. It wasn't, it wasn't common for the day. So mercy is going to have five children of her own and she's going to run a household. She's going to be a mother, but that is not going to stop her from also being very actively involved in the things that she's passionate about. So politics, obviously, and writing.
And so this is something that she is going to take into her adult life and balance it with being a mother and, and, you know, tending to the house. So she's kind of a superhero. So mercy begins writing poetry. She begins writing essays. You know, she has just a wig with words. And she also has a knack for dramas or for plays.
And this is how she's really going to persuade. She persuades through humor. So she would write satirical plays. And what does satire mean? So we're an essay is going to be straight to the point. Think of Thomas painting common sense is going to say, obviously, he was made more eloquent than this that he's going to say, you know, the king is bad.
The crown is bad. We need to rebel in satire. It's going to be a humorous depiction of the king or whoever it is doing terrible things and maybe pretending like he's so great. It's going to poke fun of the hypocrisy or of the, the, the bad side of people. But in a funny way, and people really do learn through humor, or they appreciate humor, just like they appreciate storytelling. And in this case, she, I want to get the name of the playwright.
She wrote a play called. I think it was the home to read this at a later mocking the Massachusetts governor, Thomas Hutchinson, who was a real tyrant. So she puts this on what a bold move right to be doing this in the middle of Massachusetts, which is like ground zero for the revolution. So she becomes a very respected writer. Now she did sometimes write under a pen name because you have to remember at this time it was very dangerous to be that outspoken against the crown. So there was a time when she did that.
But she never really, she never backed down from politics, even if it was under a pseudonym. And it's going to take the revolution, the British rule this, this, you know, fight for liberty is going to take a very personal role in her life because her brother, the one she was very close to whose name was also James. He is going to be brutally assaulted physically by British officers so much so that he has to step away from his public life. And that's going to really impact her. So she's going to continue speaking out continue writing. So after the revolution, she doesn't, she doesn't hold back then either.
This is one thing I find really interesting. So we've talked before about the Articles Confederation and how, you know, there's a lot of things that the Articles Confederation actually maybe didn't get so wrong. You know, there were a lot of people that didn't like it because it didn't give. There was no federal, you know, central authority. And, you know, sometimes I think like that's a feature, not a bug and there were some, some kinks to be worked out, obviously. But there's a lot of, there's a lot of people even today that think that maybe in there some ways that the Articles Confederation got things right and the Constitution maybe didn't.
And one way I think this is, this manifests itself really interesting is looking at how the founding mothers and fathers thought of it. And Mercy Otis Warren actually was not a huge fan of the Constitution. She didn't think it adequately protected individual rights. And so I think that's really interesting that she's actually going to be an outspoken anti-fed. So really interesting, a little tidbit there for after the revolution. She's also going to write one of the first history books about the founding, she earned in 1805.
And she's going to have, you know, a first hand, you know, knowledge of it. She was friends with all the people. She was one of Thomas Jefferson and Sam Adams. Like these were her, these were her buddies. And she was a fan to be so well respected in a world dominated where by men where women weren't allowed to have that much say in things. Mercy Otis Warren was, was she earned her respect and it wasn't, it wasn't, it was through her grit and it was through her talent.
It was through her ability to really speak to people through words. And when a high, high praise that she got, John Adams, and I'm going to quote him here, said that she was the most accomplished woman in America. She says a lot coming from him because I think his own wife Abigail Adams is either tied or second place for that. She had her own role. So Mercy Otis Warren is a powerful lesson to us. First of all, how parents can really change the course of their children's life through taking control of their education and doing what they think is best and not what the norm is of the time.
And second, how words can be powerful, how you can overcome, you know, even, even gender boundaries as far as back in the day when women didn't, didn't have all these abilities. But she broke through that by just being really good at what she did. She wasn't trying to necessarily like compete against the male writers. No, she found her own niche. She found her own way to be to specialize in drama and poetry and essays in a way that was very uniquely hers. And she was able to stand out and get the respect of all these founding fathers and framers.
And I think that's just incredible. If you want to learn more about Mercy Otis Warren and other incredible people, then I highly recommend the Courageous Heroes book. There is a chapter on Mercy Otis Warren that is so great. So we will wrap it up there as always. Don't forget to like and subscribe to the podcast. And until next time, I will talk to you later.