Mercy Otis Warren didn’t march in the street with a musket, she hosted the room where the marching orders got talked into existence. In Plymouth, she and her husband James Warren welcomed key Patriot leaders to their home, turning a fireside parlor into a kind of soft-lit headquarters: tea on the table, politics in the air, and the future being argued sentence by sentence.
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| Mercy Otis Warren and her husband hosting the Sons of Liberty |
Mercy wrote the Revolution as theatre. She published biting political satires, The Adulateur (1772), The Defeat (1773), The Group (1775), using characters and scenes to make power look ridiculous and resistance look inevitable. And this wasn’t private journaling; The Defeat ran in installments in the Boston Gazette in 1773, meaning her “plays” could travel the city like gossip with ink on it.
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| Mercy Otis Warren encouraging a Saturday afternoon spinning bee |
At the same time, women organized their own visible front of the boycott, what we often call the Daughters of Liberty. When British cloth became politically charged, they answered with homespun: spinning, weaving, and wearing American-made fabric as a public statement. “Spinning bees” weren’t quaint craft circles; they were demonstrations with fiber, groups gathering to spin together, producing thread and cloth while proving (in front of neighbors and newspapers) that the boycott had muscle.
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| Mercy Otis Warren watches a performance of one of her plays backstage |
That’s the Mercy in Broadside: a woman who understands that politics is persuasion, and persuasion is performance. Historically, she used the tools she had; hosting, writing, publishing, to push the Patriot argument into the public bloodstream. At the Green Dragon she turns that truth into stage action: the same playwright’s instincts that could skewer governors on paper become the quick, comic “Three Drunken Maidens” distraction that gets the Needle Guard out of trouble, proof that sometimes the fastest way past a guard isn’t a sword… it’s a scene.
