PRESTIGE WITHOUT POWER
had no formal political power, before or after the break with Britain. But Warren could wield a pen, and with the support of encouraging men established herself as a founding mother amid founding fathers. Such paradoxes and reversals of fortune pepper her life. Warren was the anonymous author of persuasive satirical spurs to the Patriot cause; John Adams recruited her for her talent but later castigated her for how she depicted him in her three-volume history of the American Revolution, the first historical account of that event by a woman and the only version to allude to the rape of American women by British soldiers and American loyalists. She encouraged the establishment of an independent
