SOURCE: “Catharine Macaulay: Historian and Political Reformer,” in International Journal of Women's Studies, Vol. 3, No. 1, January/February, 1980, pp. 49-65.

In the following essay, Florence and William Boos discuss Macaulay's History of England, which they call the first and most important Enlightenment history written by a woman, and her Letters on Education, which they regard as one of the earliest feminist attacks on gender inequality, slavery, and the education of England's children and poor.

Biographical Sketch

Catharine Macaulay was a prominent eighteenth-century British defender of Enlightened republican views, the first woman to write an extended history of England, and perhaps the first British woman to spend her adult life in public political controversy. Unusually well-read in history, theology, and philosophy, she was a fervent polemicist on many subjects—taxation, copyright, education, divine benevolence, the French and American Revolutions, constitutional rights, and the subjection of women. Before 1760 few educated women...