Alicia on Catherine Macaulay

Catherine Macaulay (Alicia Shupe)

Catharine Macaulay

 by Robert Edge Pine circa 1775 (npg.org.uk)

Lived 1731-1791, and was England’s first female historian. Like many other women in the Enlightenment, Macaulay was educated at home under the tutelage of her governess. However, her curiosity eventually surpassed that abilities of her tutor, and she took to her father’s library to continue her own education. Her father’s volumes on the history of the Greeks and Romans are credited with sparking her interest in history, patriotism, and freedom. Macaulay began writing her histories with the encouragement of her first husband, George Macaulay, in 1760. The first volume of A History of England from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line was published in 1763, and the next three volumes appeared in 1765, ’67, and ’68. Volume five was delayed until 1771 as Macaulay’s publication method changed. Volumes six and seven did not appear until 1781 and 1783 respectively. At that time, they were released under a slightly different title: A History of England from the Accession of James I to the Revolution.

In addition to her historical volumes, Macaulay also published Loose remarks on certain positions to be found in Mr. Hobbes’s Philosophical Rudiments of Government and Society in 1767 as a response to the philosophies of Thomas Hobbes. In 1777, while travelling to France, she wrote A History of England, from the Revolution to the present time, in a series of letters to the Reverend Doctor Wilson. Rev. Wilson had become a close friend of Macaulay’s and had even adopted her daughter after her husband passed away in 1766; however, the friendship ended abruptly in 1778 with Wilson’s disapproval of her second husband, William Graham, who was twenty-six years Macaulay’s junior. Macaulay’s last works to be published were her Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth in 1783, and her Letters on Education and response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France each of which were published in 1790, just one year before her death.

Macaulay’s Letters on Education has been acknowledged as a major influence on Mary Wollstonecraft having been published only five years before Wollstonecraft’s own Vindication on the Rights of Woman. Catherine Gardner writes in her essay “Catharine Macaulay’s Letters on Education: Odd but Equal” that “…although the germ for the radical social reforms of the Vindication can be traced back to [Macaulay’s] Letters…” her feminism is not truly realized without Wollstonecraft’s emphasis as Macaulay was “less radical in her view of the conditions necessary for social reform.” (119). It is, perhaps, the effect of this muted radical feminism which has obscured Macaulay’s contributions behind those of the more famous Wollstonecraft.

Sources:

Britannica.com

Gardner, Catherine. “Catharine Macaulay's ‘Letters on Education’: Odd but Equal.” Hypatia, vol. 13, no. 1, 1998, pp. 118–137. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3810609.

Plato.stanford.edu