We the Women summary

In the early years of the American republic, words were weapons. Pamphlets started revolutions, and a single argument could shift the course of the nation. The men who wielded words in those decades are celebrated but the women who did the same have been largely erased.

In 1728, Mercy Otis Warren was born into a prominent Massachusetts family and educated far beyond most women of her era. She was deeply embedded in the political life of the revolution, but she could not vote, hold office, or speak in public chambers. So, she wrote. Her satirical plays, published anonymously in newspapers, openly ridiculed British colonial authority and its governors – years before Thomas Jefferson penned a single word of the Declaration of Independence. 

Her pamphlets helped build the revolutionary movement. When the new Constitution was drafted without a Bill of Rights, she published a fierce opposition document under the pseudonym “A Columbian Patriot,” arguing the new nation’s civil liberties were dangerously unprotected. It contributed directly to the addition of the first ten amendments. Historians attributed it to male authors. It was only when one of Warren’s descendants discovered a letter linking the pamphlet to her that credit was finally restored. 

The contrast with the life of poet Phillis Wheatley couldn’t be sharper. Where Warren was born into privilege, Wheatley was kidnapped from West Africa around 1753, transported to Boston as an enslaved child, and named after the ship that carried her. Yet within 18 months she had mastered English, then taught herself Latin and Greek. 

By age 20, she’d become the first African American to publish a full book of poetry – and only the third American woman to do so. When publishers in the colonies refused her, she turned to London, where British aristocrats celebrated her. George Washington invited her to visit him at Cambridge in response to a poem she’d sent him to praise his military appointment. What the official record quietly omits is how her story ended: alone in a boarding house, unable to fund a second collection.

Half a century later, Sarah and Angelina Grimké – daughters of a South Carolina slaveholding family – abandoned their class, home, and social standing to become two of the most powerful voices in the abolitionist movement. What made their words uniquely powerful was what they had witnessed: they’d grown up around slavery and described it in devastating detail. 

In 1838, Angelina became the first woman in American history to address a state legislature. Her sister Sarah, responding to a pastoral letter from Congregationalist ministers condemning women who dared to speak, published what scholars would later call the first feminist manifesto in the United States.

These women were born into a world that made no space for them. So they made a new world, one word at a time.