Reassessing the Impact of the “Republican Virago”

Abstract

According to Edmund Burke, Catharine Macaulay was “the greatest champion” among a group of contemporary agitators for a Bill of Rights, whom he deemed to be “a rotten subdivision” of the Whig faction. However he did not deign to answer her criticisms of him, thus initiating a tendency among mainstream, male, political philosophers to refuse to seriously engage with her arguments. This tendency continues to this day, despite the increasingly sophisticated discussion of her ideas by female historians and philosophers, published since the appearance of Lucy Donnelly’s pioneering article and Bridget Hill’s biography. This paper builds on these discussions, by adding detail to our understanding o..