Throughout this project, I’ve realized that I’ve developed something like a parasocial relationship with Catharine Macaulay. Though we have (obviously) never met, I have never completed a history project so closely focused on a single historical figure and her life. After spending so much time reading her works and tracing her intellectual networks, I sometimes feel as if I’ve come to know Macaulay as a person.
That realization has also made me reflect on something I used to judge in other historians: their sympathies toward the historical actors they study. Last year, for example, I read The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (2008) by Annette Gordon-Reed. I found the book striking for several reasons: that Gordon-Reed came from a legal background yet produced such a compelling work of cultural and social history, and that I sometimes felt she portrayed Thomas Jefferson in a surprisingly generous light.
This feeling became especially complicated when thinking about Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings, the young enslaved woman he inherited, who cared for his daughters and was roughly their age. While she was still a teenager, Jefferson began an intimate relationship with her that resulted in several children. At the time I read Gordon-Reed’s book, I remember struggling to understand how a historian could write about Jefferson with any degree of sympathy given those realities.
And yet here I am, studying Macaulay, and finding myself doing something similar. I sometimes feel sympathy for her controversial marriage to a man nearly twenty years younger than she was, or for the public backlash that followed. I even find myself accepting certain views she held, such as her hostility toward Catholics, even though I myself am Catholic. Studying her closely has forced me to confront the complicated emotional dynamics that can arise when historians spend years thinking about the same individual.
Because of that, when I introduce my project to people outside the field of history, I try to explain why Macaulay matters in ways that are somewhat separate from my own personal attachment to her work:
- First, Macaulay was the first British woman to publish a major work of history, and her writing was influential enough to rival contemporaries like David Hume.
- Second, she was a passionate advocate for liberty and representative government. Her political views were radical for her time: she openly criticized monarchy and supported the American Revolution, an extraordinary stance for a British writer of the eighteenth century.
- Finally, Macaulay can also be understood as an early feminist thinker. Her work helped inspire Mary Wollstonecraft, whose A Vindication of the Rights of Woman would later become one of the foundational texts of modern feminist thought.
These points largely align with the kinds of descriptions one might find in a quick online search. For example, the entry on Wikipedia describes Macaulay as follows:
Catharine Macaulay (née Sawbridge, later Graham; 23 March 1731 – 22 June 1791) was a famed English Whig historian. She is the first Englishwoman to become a published historian and during her lifetime the world’s only published female historian. She was the first English radical to visit America after independence from 15 July 1784 to 17 July 1785. Her visit included a visit to George and Martha Washington’s Mount Vernon where she met with George Washington. Her most prominent work was an eight-volume history of England in which she argued that the people have the right to overthrow their monarch for their own natural rights
Still, I sometimes hesitate to emphasize Macaulay’s connection to the American Revolution quite so strongly, partly because I am trying to decenter my own American perspective. Instead, I often find myself placing slightly more weight on her feminism (which Wikipedia does address, albeit later).
All of this brings me back to a question that feels especially appropriate on her birthday: why study Macaulay at all? And perhaps even more importantly, what might we learn from her today?
One answer lies in the broader value of studying figures who were historically pushed to the margins of historical narratives. By examining the lives of women like Macaulay, we gain a clearer understanding of the societies they inhabited. We see that women were not merely passive observers of eighteenth-century political culture; they actively wrote histories, engaged in philosophical debates, and participated in intellectual communities that had long been assumed to belong primarily to men.
At the same time, Macaulay’s world was far more interconnected than traditional narratives of the Enlightenment sometimes suggest. Her intellectual networks extended beyond elite British circles to include individuals across the Atlantic world, including Black and brown writers and thinkers whose contributions shaped the broader fabric of eighteenth-century intellectual life.
In that sense, Macaulay may also offer forms of inspiration. Her writings encourage us to think about feminism, class consciousness, and the pursuit of liberty, justice, and equality. She reminds us that history does not have a single dominant narrative; rather, it can be written from many perspectives. Her work often challenged the male-centered histories of her time, demonstrating that alternative interpretations of the past were, and are, possible.
Perhaps she also teaches something about persistence. Even when she was mocked or dismissed, sometimes described as an “Amazon” or treated as a scandalous public figure, she continued to write and to assert her intellectual voice. Even after periods of social ostracism, she did not stop producing historical work. That determination feels especially meaningful today.
One of the themes that strikes me most strongly in Macaulay’s writing is her deep resistance to tyranny and arbitrary political power. Reading her now inevitably raises uncomfortable parallels with the present. As an American citizen, and simply as someone living in the world today, I find myself increasingly alarmed by the ways governments across the globe are drifting toward fascism and authoritarianism. We see growing attempts to censor books, restrict education, suppress protest, and reshape historical narratives in ways that erase uncomfortable truths about slavery, colonialism, and inequality.
In the United States, especially, these developments feel deeply unsettling. In recent years, lawmakers in several states have introduced or passed legislation restricting how topics like slavery, race, and systemic inequality can be taught in schools, often under the language of banning so-called “divisive concepts.” In my home state, for example, Ohio attempted to pass House Bill 327, which sought to prohibit the teaching, advocacy, or promotion of such ideas in K–12 schools, higher education, and state agencies. At the same time, efforts to remove books from school libraries, challenges to university curricula, and public attacks on scholars examining racism, colonialism, or gender inequality have become increasingly common. For historians, this trend is particularly troubling: when governments attempt to control which histories can be told, they are ultimately attempting to shape how citizens understand the past, and therefore how they imagine the future.
These anxieties make Macaulay’s work feel unexpectedly urgent. She wrote at a time when challenging monarchy and entrenched political authority could carry serious social and professional consequences. Yet she insisted that historical writing had a moral purpose: to expose tyranny, to defend liberty, and to remind readers that political power should always remain accountable to the people.
On her birthday, then, perhaps the most meaningful reflection is not simply about her life, but about what we might do with the example she left behind. Most of us will never write an eight-volume history of civil wars, but we can still make our voices heard: by organizing in our communities, supporting local initiatives like food banks, participating in protests, or simply writing and sharing our ideas publicly. Macaulay believed that ordinary people had the right to challenge power, and that belief remains just as relevant today.