Catharine Macaulay's Civil War: Gender, History, and Republicanism in Georgian Britain

The eighteenth century marked a watershed in the relationship between women and historical writing in Britain. Previous to this period, D. R. Woolf has demonstrated, women had certainly purchased, read, and discussed works of history, contributing to “the ‘social circulation’ of historical knowledge.” A few, perhaps most notably Lucy Hutchinson, had composed Civil War memoirs. Some women had written genealogical, antiquarian, and biographical works, as well as local and family history, a “feminine past,” according to Woolf, that men often judged unworthy of real history. Only in the eighteenth century, however, did women and men significantly modify a neoclassical paradigm that conceived of history as a strictly male enterprise, the record of political and military deeds written by men and for men. The century also witnessed the appearance of the first female historian in Britain to write in the grand manner, Catharine Macaulay (1731–91). This article examines Macaulay's success in the traditional genre of history, which won her the respect of male peers as well as the applause of a wide readership, and how this success enabled her to challenge the gender assumptions on which republicanism rested.